Irish Author Molly Aitken: How Galway Shaped My Ambitions and Creativity

A city can shape us. It can strengthen our legs – especially if we have a daily cycle from Salthill. Our limbs and mind can be sustained by locally caught fish. But a place can also shape the person we become. Such was the case with me and Galway.

Now I’ve come to see the strength and power in being seen as an independent and free-spirited woman.

I grew up in a village in County Cork and there were whispers that my mother was a witch. At age fifteen, I found this mortifying, but now I’ve come to see the strength and power in being seen as an independent and free-spirited woman – even if that’s not the interpretation the whisperers in the village intended. 

Nearly 20 years later, I wrote a novel, Bright I Burn, about Alice Kyteler, the first person formally accused of witchcraft in Ireland, but it was a long road to becoming brave enough to write the story of such a woman or to become a woman a little like her myself. First, I had to become a woman confident enough to admit my own ambitions, and I could never have done that without my years living, and growing, in Galway.

“I had to become a woman confident enough to admit my own ambitions, and I could never have done that without my years living, and growing, in Galway.”

I arrived fresh out of my Leaving Cert ready to study at NUIG. It was 2011. At school, I was painfully shy; I didn’t know who I was because I was lost in staying quiet, restricted by living somewhere so isolated. In such places some people grow, but I shrank. 

Still, I arrived full of hope I would become ‘that’ woman. You know the one: confident, relaxed, skilled at her craft and intelligent. Not unlike my own wonderful, artistic mother. Of course, other cities may have managed to mould me into ‘that’ woman, but there was something about Galway. I witnessed a freedom of expression: the festivals, the theatre, the conversations I’d have with a woman buying fish from a van, the walks home at dawn with my new friends singing at the top of our lungs (apologies to anyone we woke). There was no obvious, tangible way I changed, it was gradual. 

On the edge of the Corrib, I read JM Synge and The  Odyssey and they lit my mind alight with how to write about Ireland. Later, I wrote my first novel, The Island Child, which is partly a love letter to Galway. 

Looking back now, everything I write is a celebration or acknowledgement of the places that shaped me, but most especially the city where I became a stronger person, a place where I started to find my own voice – or even later the voices of women lost to history. Really I think that’s all we’re all striving for, but not every place can give it to us. Yet some homes, even if we only live there for a time that’s fleeting, can give us far more than we could ever give back. Galway was such a place for me. I will always be grateful to you. 

Molly’s novel, Bright I Burn (Canongate, €18.99) is out now.