Aoife Brennan

Aoife —

Niamh again, on the wall this time. Three years in the flat, four years of knowing you, one record collection — slowly, by a process of small uncontested judgements at the kitchen table — combining. The Annie Ernaux on the side table is, as I write this, still face down, and I have, on this matter, decided not to move it.

We met in October 2022 at a reading at Hodges Figgis. You were standing by the table of new releases looking, I want to say properly, deeply suspicious of the room. I asked you, on instinct, whether you had read the Sally Rooney that had come out that month. You said: "I have, twice. The second time was better." I had, until that sentence, never heard anyone say it about a Rooney. I have, since that sentence, been waiting for you to say things.

Twenty-five, A. The kettle has, on the matter of the second pot of tea, just clicked. The chapter is yours. — N.

My darling girl —

It is your mother, writing from the kitchen in Glanmire on a Wednesday morning. Your father has, as ever, taken the dog out the long way round and will be back by ten. The kettle is on. The radio is on the Marian show. The frost has gone off the back garden by now, the way it does in early December.

Twenty-five years ago on the third of December, at half past four in the morning at the Erinville in Cork, I held you for the first time and you opened your eyes for about eleven seconds and then went, very firmly, back to sleep, and your father said, in the slightly stunned voice he uses, "Síle, she has decided we are not, on this matter, very interesting." You have, in twenty-five years, only mildly revised this position.

I worry, sometimes, about the flat being cold. Niamh assures me, on the phone, that it is not. I worry, also, about the kind of editors who keep girls of twenty-five up late working on manuscripts. Niamh assures me, less convincingly, that this also is fine. I have, on balance, decided to trust her.

We will come up on the weekend of the 12th. I have made the Christmas cake already — yours is in the small tin, plain, the way you like it. There is a parcel for you at the post office in Donnybrook from Aunt Bernie in Boston; she rang me yesterday, very pleased with herself.

Maith thú, mo chroí. Twenty-five looks well on you. Ring me on Sunday. — Mam.

Aoife —

The morning we met was the 14th of November 2025, at the small kitchen at the back of the launch on Grantham Street, and you were standing by the window with a glass of red wine and you said, in the tone you use when you have decided something is fine, "I think I just want to leave by half nine." It was, by my watch, eight thirty-three. I asked if I could walk you out. You said, "Hugh, I have just met you, but yes." We walked to the end of Camden Street and then to the canal and then, by a route I have, since then, not been able to retrace, to the door of your flat at half past eleven.

We have been together a year and three weeks. I have, in those weeks, watched you become — slowly, very carefully — the person who writes the things you have been, for several years, holding in. The piece in the Stinging Fly in March. The piece in the Dublin Review in September. The half-finished Ernaux on the side table is, I notice, on page 84, where it has been since Tuesday — but the notebook beside it has, since Tuesday, doubled.

There is no version of this where I do not say it on the page. I love you. I love you in the kitchen at half past nine on a Thursday and on the walk to Stella Maris on a Saturday and on the morning of the launch in Hodges Figgis when I will, very quietly, be in the back row holding a glass of the bad white wine, watching you stand at the lectern.

Twenty-five, A. The bookshop on Camden Street has the Maeve Brennan in the window again. I noticed. I have, in case Niamh forgets, also bought it. — H.

Aoife —

Mairéad, from the flat in Friedrichshain, on a Tuesday at ten in the evening with the windows open and the cats next door, again, shouting at each other.

We met in the September of the MA at Edinburgh in 2023 in the small seminar room on Buccleuch Place — you sat opposite me with the Maggie Nelson Bluets on the table, which you had clearly already read twice, and you said, in the first thing I ever heard you say, "I think the second-person address in this is doing more work than people credit." I have, since that morning, been measuring sentences against you.

Berlin is, as ever, Berlin. The translation is moving — not quickly, but moving. The Ernaux estate, on the matter of my third query, has gone quiet again. I will, if all goes well, be in Dublin in February for the Hodges Figgis event and we should, on the matter of the kitchen table at Camden Street, allocate a night.

Fröhliche fünfundzwanzig, A. The Annie Ernaux on your side table is — I am willing to bet — Les Années, and you are stuck on the long paragraph at page 84. Don't worry about it. The book opens up at 110. — M.

Aoife, love —

Marguerite from downstairs, writing this at the small table in the front room with the radio on the Marian and the cat, again, on the chair I had wanted to sit in.

Niamh came down on the Sunday and asked me would I write a few lines for the wall, and I said I would, on the condition that the few lines were properly few, because at seventy years of age I have, on the matter of writing things on the internet, very little practice and even less appetite. So. Few lines.

When you moved into the flat above me in October of last year I had, on the matter of you both, a number of small concerns — chiefly that the floorboards in the front room are very thin and that I would be hearing, at all hours of the morning, the kind of music that the previous tenant, Mr. Walsh, had favoured at eighteen. I have not, in fourteen months, heard a single thing I did not like. The Tom Waits, in particular, on Saturday mornings, has been a credit to the building.

You have, twice, fixed the boiler when the man from the agency would not come. You have, on three occasions, brought down a small bowl of the soup that Niamh makes on a Sunday. You have, once, sat in the front room with me for two hours on the afternoon of the day I had been to the doctor at the Mater, and you did not, on that afternoon, say very much, which was the correct thing to do.

Twenty-five years of age, then. There is, in the cupboard in the front room, a small bottle of the good sherry from the Christmas before last, which I had been saving for the right occasion. The right occasion has, on the matter of you, arrived. Come down on the Sunday after the birthday. — M. Lynch.

A —

Eimear, from the writing group at the Lighthouse, on a Wednesday lunchtime at the small café on Aungier Street.

The Tuesday in March when you read the opening of the Maeve Brennan piece to the group — the one you had, you said in the email beforehand, "not really shown anyone yet" — I sat at the small table by the window and listened to you read the first paragraph and decided, very quietly, that I would have to rewrite the entire third section of the thing I had been working on. I did, on the Thursday, rewrite it. It is, on the matter of the third section, now considerably better. You are owed, at minimum, a credit in the acknowledgements; you are owed, more probably, a drink in the back of the Stag's Head, which I will be settling on Friday week.

The writing group resumes on the 8th of January, the way it always does, in the small upstairs room at the Lighthouse at half past six. The new piece, when it is ready, is yours to read first. Twenty-five, A. The chapter is yours. — Eimear.

Aoife — Cillian, on a Sunday afternoon at the kitchen table in Stoke Newington with the dishwasher running and Imogen, miraculously, asleep upstairs. Twenty-five.

I was twenty-five in April 2022. I remember it, mostly, as the year I stopped pretending I knew what I was doing. You will, in the next twelve months, have approximately seven moments in which you suspect, very calmly, that you also do not know what you are doing. These moments are correct. They are also not a problem. The thing that I would have liked someone to say to me, at twenty-five, was: the not-knowing is not the failure state. The not-knowing is, very specifically, the work.

The small flat we lived in on Capel Street in 2009 — you were eight, I was twelve, the kitchen had the brown-orange tiles, Da was reading the Hennessy that summer at the kitchen table — that flat had, on the windowsill above the sink, a small spider plant that nobody watered. It lived for four years. I think about it, on occasion. We were, both of us, alright in that flat.

Happy twenty-five, A. Imogen will be on the call on Sunday. Come over at Christmas — the spare room is yours from the 22nd. — C.

Aoife —

Tomás, on a Tuesday evening at the desk in the Stinging Fly office on Capel Street, with the printer doing the thing it does when there is nothing in the paper tray.

I have, in the eighteen months I have been editing your work, sent you precisely four emails ending with "no notes." I have, in the eighteen months I have been editing anyone else's work, sent that email a total of twice. The piece in the spring issue — the one we kept calling, in our notes, "the Maeve Brennan one" — was, when it landed in my inbox at half-past eleven on a Sunday night in February, the cleanest first draft I had read at the magazine all year. I sat with it for an hour and decided, on the matter of edits, that the only correct response was to make the tea and read it again. I made the tea and read it again. I sent the email at one in the morning. You will, I expect, remember.

The next piece is, by my count, due on the 15th of January. I will, on the morning of the 16th, very gently begin to ask after it. You have, A, the most patient prose at twenty-five I have seen pass through Capel Street in seven years of editing here. Keep going.

Many happy returns. — T.