Local author Nora Ryan launches her new book, Nell’s Quiet Revolution in a reading at the Squamish Library today May 14, at 7 p.m. The book follows Nell, a mother in 1970’s Ireland, as she takes her future into her own hands amidst a changing world.
Nora Ryan, a pen name of the Squamish author, has never written the same book twice. The one thing that links each of her now six novels, Ryan says, is a focus on ordinary people caught in extraordinary circumstances and the quiet courage that gets them through.
Her latest novel, Nell’s Quiet Revolution, is set in rural southern Ireland in the 1970s and follows Nell, a mother of five (soon six) who decides to take her family’s future into her own hands. She re-enters the workforce. She learns to drive. She seeks out contraception in a country where it is barely legal to sell. And in doing so, she finds herself at the edge of something much larger than her own household.
“It’s about a somewhat chaotic but loving family,” Ryan said. But beneath the warmth, Ryan said, the novel grapples with something serious, the gap between the Ireland Ryan experienced as a privileged university student in the late 1970s and the Ireland that countless other women were living through at exactly the same moment.
Ryan left Ireland in 1981 and didn’t begin writing this book until 2020. After leaving, Ryan learned more about the Magdalene laundries, institutional settings where unmarried pregnant women were confined and their babies adopted away, which forced her and many others to reckon with an uncomfortable history.
“Most people were vaguely aware of these laundries but really it didn’t impact their lives,” Ryan said. “And that’s what I started thinking about. We live within our own reality without necessarily reflecting wider on how the world is impacting on other people.”
The 1970s backdrop Ryan paints is layered with the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the slow creep of modernisation into rural communities, the authority of the Catholic Church, and a government dragging its heels on family planning. Amidst all of this stands Nell, who is not a protestor by nature, but an ordinary woman who nudges history forward in the small increments available to her.
“It’s an ode to women,” Ryan said. “The ordinary women who, for love of their family and their children, are looking for a better future. They were quiet women who didn’t particularly want to get involved in a campaign, but they did anyway and they helped make life better for other people as a result.”
Ryan’s first career was as an agricultural journalist. Later she spent years in health promotion, writing a weekly column for a local newspaper. She turned to novels after witnessing a social injustice around migrant labour that she felt could only be fully told through story. That first book, Across the Great Divide, was followed by five more, each different in genre, setting, and tone. Nell’s Quiet Revolution began about five years ago, and sat half-baked for a while, until Ryan finished it.
Living in Squamish has shaped the writing in ways Ryan didn’t entirely anticipate.
“When I am writing, I often get inspiration while walking my dog in the forest,” Ryan said. “I’ll start internal dialogues between characters or muse about expanding plot lines as I walk along. It’s way better than staring at your computer hoping for inspiration.”
What keeps her writing, more than anything, is the feedback that finds its way back to her. A mother once told her that a book Ryan had written was the first her son had ever finished. “When you get that kind of feedback, it’s neat,” Ryan said.
Ryan hopes readers will understand, through Nell, the importance of women’s agency and the capacity for small contributions to make the world a better place.
“We’re all kind of muddling through. But it’s amazing what we can do when we work together,” Ryan said.
Nora Ryan’s book launch and reading takes place tonight at Squamish Public Library, 7 to 8:30 pm. Copies are available at noraryanbooks.ca, on Amazon, Friesen Books, and Kindle, and will soon be available at local Squamish bookstores.
