Book interview with Sue Leonard for the Irish Examiner
"In August 2020, when I was on a retreat in the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Annaghmakerrig, one of the writers, Charleen Hurtubise, read the first chapter of her novel in progress. Hauntingly atmospheric, it had the whole room mesmerised.
The chapter described an afternoon at a beach in Michigan through the eyes of Joanne, an observant 16-year-old who is watching the uneasy dynamic between a group of teenagers. When, later, she hears that one of them has drowned, she wonders, uneasily, if she had watched it happening. I longed to know how the novel panned out.
And with the recent publication of The Polite Act of Drowning, I now know the plot — and it doesn’t disappoint. It follows Joanne’s summer — and that of her troubled family and neighbours in a small lakeside town. And when the foster child, Lucinda, arrives in town, she and Joanne become instant friends, as they break all the rules together. But Lucinda has a mean streak, and it’s hard for Joanne to cope, especially when her mum’s fragility spills over into something worse.
Charleen grew up in Michigan, before moving to Ireland 25 years ago.
“It’s not my story,” she says, when we meet for a late lunch in the Avoca café in Powerscourt, County Wicklow. “I started with this girl in the water. And it wasn’t until I read the science of drowning and realised it’s always a quiet event, that the novel took shape, and I brought in the mum. But I know the novel’s emotional territory. Joanne feels the things I felt when I was younger. I was number six in a family of nine, and I was a little bit lost and was quiet. An observer. And like her, I was not street smart."
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