Review: After a Dance by Bridget O'Connor
Before she was a writer, Bridget O’Connor worked in a building site canteen and, later, a bookshop. Between the cement-dusted chaos and the spines of books, she must have encountered thousands of characters – and that’s without the revelation in the introduction to this collection that some of the stories are based on her own siblings. It’s this combined sense of reality-meets-fiction that forms much of the comic grotesquery here.
O’Connor was born in 1961 to Irish parents. Her summers were spent in Ireland, but life in England pivoted around Irish culture. The setting for the stories is recognisably London, but it’s the city’s grimy, squalid pockets rather than the sleek, white houses of Belgravia. The interiors are grotty flats and a dated neon bar; a gloomy AA hall and a clifftop restaurant beloved of suicidal jumpers.
This collection is introduced by the author’s daughter Constance Straughan, who recalls a quote by her mother: “Selfish people attract me because they’re not soaking u…
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