A life badly stitched

“The need to go home … hit me like grief”. Mairéad, the protagonist of Elaine Garvey’s debut novel, is experiencing the feeling of bereavement that often comes when, at the brink of “proper” adulthood, home ceases to be a fixed place. For Mairéad, though, home has never been comfortable. Born to acrimonious parents in sleepy Donegal, she has fled to London, where she works in the costume department of a West End theatre. Bent on creating a life different from the “badly stitched” one she has left behind, Mairéad keeps herself busy, but she is deeply lonely. The ensuing narrative, which unfolds over twelve troubled days, takes us into her mind as she tries to work out what it might mean to “live my life, not someone else’s idea of my life”.

Halfway through The Wardrobe Department, her “grief” finds sudden focus. Her grandmother has died – news that Mairéad receives while herself waiting in A&E, having whacked her head on a cupboard door. She travels back to Ireland for the funeral and is forced to reckon with her origins, confronting her family about the “tension in their house that would burst an appendix”, and learning of her mother’s terrible secret.

This heavy material is leavened by Mairéad’s lively inner monologue. Despite her angst, she’s funny company and prone to slapstick moments: while measuring an actor for his costume, she bends over too quickly and the seam of her trousers breaks, giving her manager “a comprehensive view of my backside”. These continual mishaps are accompanied by the muttered refrain “fuckit all to hell”. Her self-deprecating humour means that, when she stews on the big things, from her relationship with her mother to the “impossibility” of home, we are on her side.

At its heart, this is a straight­forward coming-of-age story, and its tropes – a woman adrift in the big city, an alcoholic father, the grip of a dull home town – are rather predictable. But the conceit of the costume department is clever and original. Mairéad sees her world through fabric and stitches: her parents exist in “the same, depressing pattern they had worn for years … puckered with too much tension, unaltered”. She, meanwhile, “doesn’t fit” in London, physically or socially, and constantly berates herself about her body and her general awkwardness. Her fascination with clothing serves as a fitting metaphor for her wider quest to bring into being the woman she wants to become. This is an engaging debut, carried by the clumsy, endearing protagonist at its centre.

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