BOOK REVIEW: Breakdown by Cathy Sweeney
New writer Cathy Sweeney's book is provocative in its truthfulness and questions what we expect of women.
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A few years ago I worked in the UK head office of a large cruise line corporation. My role was to develop new entertainment concepts for two iconic cruise brands and work with other ‘stakeholders’ (in human language: ‘people’) around the business to develop and deliver my plans. I spent a lot of time working with a seriously clever, focused and organised woman who was bringing up kids, developing brand strategies and refurbishing her house. This woman’s diary was insane with every day plotted out in hour by hour detail. I admired her for her incredible ability to get things done. At the time I never recognised the cracks in this facade which manifested in the form of dangerously fast driving or occasionally bizarre statements about social issues.
One Thursday, shortly after lunch time we had a meeting scheduled for the two of to prepare for a visit to a famous fashion designer the following week during which we would pitch a partnership. My colleague and I worked well together and had built partnerships with several high profile people in fashion and the arts and this meeting was to make sure we were both on the same page for the upcoming presentation.
I walked into the meeting room on the ground floor of our office building and the first thing I noticed was that the lights were off. My colleague, who was always early and prepared for meetings, was sat in the corner of the room seemingly in a trance. I called her name and she said nothing so I sat down next to her and asked if she was alright.
Her crying started immediately. I put my hand on her shoulder as her tears flowed freely and asked her again what had happened. The worst thing about working in a corporate environment is how it dehumanises: my first thought was that she might have lost her job and my second thought was that I could not hug my colleague as would have been a normal human reaction. She was embarrassed to be crying because she had not been upset by one particular event or circumstance as she explained:
“I’ve done everything right. I worked hard at school and went to the right University where I dated the right guys and went to the right events. I married the right man, and got the right job and am bringing up two kids and I work out but it is still not enough”
She opened the taps on a stream of 21st century consciousness, frustration and anger. After living her life the right way and doing all the things that women are expected to do why was she left with nothing for her?
This episode came back to me in exacting detail whilst reading Breakdown, the debut novel from Cathy Sweeney. In the book the lead character is a 52 year old, unnamed Irish woman who has all the outward tags of success and has all the happiness boxes ticked: career, two kids, nice car (an SUV bought for her by her husband for her 50th birthday) and a nice new house in the Dublin suburbs;
“A well-presented family home located just minutes from the motorway, providing easy access to the city and the south. This property boasts many features including an extended kitchen/dining/family room overlooking the private landscaped rear garden plus the additional benefit of extra accommodation on the the top floor”
The description is straight out of an estate agent’s brochure and tells us of the happiness we will achieve by having all of these details present in our own property. How much our lives will be enriched by living in this property.
It is the first hint of the author challenging how we see our lives in today’s world. In Breakdown the woman wakes up one morning (before her family), assesses her life and drives away from it as the sun rises. It feels like the more physical distance she puts between herself and the family, the deeper she is able to question her life and the further we, as readers, are helped to question how one person’s experience reflects society.
The woman drives to her home town which is a crumbling, de-industrialised coastal settlement where working in shops has taken over from having a career. It is in this town that we start to dig deeper into mother-daughter relationships and the woman questions her relationship as a daughter to her mother and her relationship as a mother to her daughter. She asks herself (and us) if it is ok to maybe dislike a child. This leads us into an ongoing debate about parenting and not just her doubts about how children are raised but how they are SEEN to be raised with the pressure of organising, driving and being judged for all of that falling on the mother. As the author herself said in an interview for Irish Times (see link below), it feels like if a man carries out the most basic childcare task he is congratulated. There is a later exchange when the woman laments how much is given to children materially and emotionally but they are not taught any practical skills ‘Like sewing or fishing’. This issue doesn’t resolve, leaving an open question reverberating like the end of Venus The Mystic.
This book has been described in various places as ‘provocative’ and ‘about a woman’s breakdown’. However, I would describe it as a reckoning with or at least a questioning of what we expect women to be and how women are expected to live. As a man I would also describe the book as an illumination and it is the chapters set in the woman’s home town that brought so much home to me.
The woman has long hair and decides to have it cut short in the local hairdresser shop.In some ways it is an act of rebellion because of course we associate successful women with long, lustrous locks. We expect them to take the time to wash, maintain and dry this fabulous Rapunzel mane so that it always looks shiny and has volume like J-Lo or Beyonce.
The haircut also serves another purpose: it removes part of the external and triggers a new line of reflection. The hairdresser asks the woman what she wants ‘done’ which gets the woman thinking :
‘How women love getting things ‘done’. Hair, housework, dinner, ironing, gardens, home extensions, nails, family portraits, attic conversions, sex pregnancy, Christmas shopping’
This pressure is not the same on men who get their hair cut - when did a guy last have a hair do?
After getting her hair ‘done’ the woman does not return home and instead has a few drinks in a pub and decides to leave her car in a car park and get on the train to Rosslare in order to catch a ferry to Wales. Throughout her journey she receives messages from home about getting things done - ‘could you pick up soy milk’ etc Is this normal? The family are not noticing the space left by her absence as much as noticing the space left by the things that are not getting done. This reduces a successful, clever and attractive woman to a mechanical task completer. The woman, meanwhile, is observing those around her on the train in a close style reminiscent of George Smiley, each vignette leading her forward to a point of reflection on her own life.
Breakdown is also a courageous book and it is telling that some critics have called the protagonist unlikeable. She is honest and strips back a veneer that women need to put in place to demonstrate that they are everything that they should be. I disagree because, although she commits a couple of questionable acts, she is responding to a deeper and longer term unhappiness.
There is a scene which takes place several years earlier in which the woman and her husband, Tom, are hosting another couple for dinner. The woman’s daughter is being very difficult and won’t go to bed. Every time the girl appears back in the dining room it is the woman that has to deal with her in a shiny and friendly way. When her husband Tom is flirting with the other woman and she has to continually deal with the daughter and serve dinner she snaps. She takes the daughter upstairs and violently threatens her while holding her down on the bed. The book makes you ask if this is bad parenting or a human response to frustration and lack of support?
The woman makes her way to Wales and reflects on a similar journey she made 33 years earlier when she went to London with her mum to have an abortion which was illegal in Ireland at the time. In the intervening years Ireland has become a more liberal and progressive country - at least externally. This means that Irish society can talk about abortion, contraception and equal marriage rights as they affect people today. What cannot be discussed as easily are the girls who went to England for abortions, or those that ended up in the Magdalene Laundries or mothers who feel jealousy or antipathy towards their own daughters today maybe as a result of this. And this negativity also extends to not being able to discuss her own daughter’s rape. I wondered if this was a particularly Irish challenge after 35 years of huge change and upheaval on the island that have tried to draw a political or legal line under situations but have not dealt with the human memories. After all who wants to talk about abuse by the church and state, and sectarian terrorism when, as Berkoff writes in Greek, “we got wine bars now darling!”
Cathy Sweeney’s writing style is vivd and real. It is literary in that it asks big questions but it is also spare, using lists and short chapters to convey intensity and reflect how we live today. My colleague from the opening paragraphs had a list for every day of every week of everything that she needed to get ‘done’ - everything that she had learnt was expected of her.
Breakdown made me think about how much work there is still to do in creating a fairer society. Women certainly have more professional opportunities in Ireland than 30 years ago but this is only a positive if we are able as a society to recalibrate roles, responsibilities and expectations.
Cathy Sweeney is an exciting new writer and this book is right on the money. In a way the woman in the book has behaved like a man. She has got frustrated, got in a car and driven away leaving the situation behind to sort itself out. She gets drunk, has casual sex along the way and forces herself to ignore the pleas for help from home. Some might suggest that this makes her unsympathetic or unlikeable. What Breakdown seems to be suggesting is that calling a woman unlikeable is the worst possible description.
Author Cathy Sweeney talks about Breakdown in this wonderful interview on the Irish Times Women’s Podcast:
Cathy Sweeney The Women's Podcast
Breakdown is now available in paper back published by Weidenfeld and Nicholson;
The JasonWard Creative Substack is for readers like you. I really appreciate your time spent here and invite you to support my work by taking out a subscription. A paid subscription gives you access to exclusive content plus the entire archive of over 100 articles, reviews, interviews, podcasts and playlists all full of creative insight designed to help you develop your creative projects and practise. Thank you.