Roisín O’Donnell’s novel, Nesting, opens with a happy family scene that includes two little girls at the beach with their mommy (Ciara) and daddy (Ryan). Pretty soon, however, we are in the middle of a very troubling situation. The wind is gusting. The water is cold. The little girls—Sophie and Ella— are upset. They are uncomfortable in that water, but their father won’t listen to them or to Ciara trying to reason with him that it is time to leave. Ryan won’t be moved by their pleading. Instead, he becomes angry.
Ciara has been through this sort of situation before. She’s felt trapped for a long time. Ryan is moody, quick to anger, emotionally abusive. Recently, he’s also become physically aggressive toward Ciara. She realizes that things are getting worse.
Because she has tried to leave him before, she knows that making it on her own is extremely challenging. But she is forced to try again. She makes the difficult decision to leave her very troubled marriage to Ryan.
What she learned about leaving before becomes very apparent to her again. They have no place to live—and the housing situation in Dublin is difficult. She left her career—one she loved—years ago and has very little money. Her mother is ill, and she doesn’t want to keep asking her or her sister, Sinead, for help. So Ciara is isolated with her children. Ryan is relentless in begging her to return—but also in setting up more obstacles for her. For instance, he is able to put a restriction on the passports of his daughters. Ciara will not be able to travel too far. Her car isn’t reliable. The journey is too long for her little girls. They don’t have much money.
Ryan persists in his attempts to track her down, to gaslight her in texts and phone calls, to make her second-guess the decision she has made to leave.
We follow Ciara right out of this impossible situation in her home with Ryan, but we find ourselves following her back to the house, as she needs to retrieve more clothes and toys for her little girls. Ryan does his best to try to make her stay. Then we are back on the road and back in room 124 of a hotel room—emergency accommodations set up by an agency that aids unhoused women and families.
To make matters worse—much worse—Ciara learns that she is pregnant. Now the walls are really closing in on her. Will this discovery make her break her resolve to remove herself from an already dangerous situation back home with Ryan?
Ciara had a career before Ryan. She was a teacher—a good one—and she loved that vocation. She was a woman of other loves and other dimensions. We learn over and again that Ryan wants Ciara to be subservient, quiet—someone who silently gives in to his volatile moods.
It is so easy to turn the pages of this hypnotic novel, to want Ciara to flee that terrible situation and see what happens next. We understand that Ryan is incapable of changing—and things can only get worse for her. She will only be more and more under his thumb—trapped.
And as we move through the novel, we see the ways Ciara must navigate so many obstacles. For her, the motives for escaping a terrible homelife are eclipsed by all the ways she must care for her two daughters.
She is a character we see so fully—richly drawn and multidimensional. She wants more for her daughters and herself, as she tries to shield her ailing mother and sister from the terrible circumstances that surround her. She finds help where she can—and makes the most of it—but these are very difficult battles.
Can she really extricate herself from Ryan?
Roisín O’Donnell’s Nesting is a tense, mesmeric and emotional story—based on research O’Donnell did on intimate partner abuse and the housing crisis. Although her research was based in Ireland, this is—unfortunately—a common story.
Ryan rescues a fledgling crow chick—a baby bird that is somehow younger than fledgling, as they learn. A person who works at the wildlife sanctuary where they take the tiny creature tells them that birds must fledge–or fly away– “If you’re a bird,” he says, “the nest is pretty much the most dangerous place you can be.”
For Ciara, although leaving a house—a home—is scary, finding a safe place to be becomes a choice she has to make.
Roisín O’Donnell is the author of Nesting. It’s published by Algonquin Books.
