Part history, part true crime, Patrick Radden Keefe’s 2018 book “Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland,” opens with the kidnapping of a mother of 10, Jean McConville, at the hands of the IRA.
From there Keefe takes us into an epic account of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the bloody sectarian conflict between Catholics and Protestants that extended from the late 1960s to the Good Friday peace accord of 1998.
Keefe’s bestselling book, which is immensely suspenseful and captivating, has just been adapted for the screen in FX’s new series.
“To be honest, growing up in Boston, I had always thought of the Troubles as a very male story,” confesses the Dorchester native. “But in the early ’70s, you had these young women who kind of self-identified as feminists. But for them, what feminism meant was carrying a gun. They wanted to be out there on the front lines.”
Keefe joined The Culture Show to discuss his process as both an author of the source material and executive producer of the on-screen adaptation.
“For me, this was never a history of the Troubles,” Keefe said. “It was a story of these two very different women — one of them a victim, one of them a perpetrator — and this act of violence that connected them.” The perpetrator Keefe is referring to is Irish Republican Army member Dolours Price. The victim is Jean McConville.
Keefe’s journey as the author of this tale began in 2013, when he read Price’s obituary.
“She had been the first woman to join the IRA as a frontline soldier. She bombed London, she went on a hunger strike … She had a very dramatic life,” Keefe said. “And later in her life, she looked back with some misgivings about the things that she had done as a young woman. And her obituary mentioned the death of another woman, Jean McConville.”
In describing the book and the FX series, Keefe says “It sort of starts as a thriller, and it ends as a tragedy.”
While specific in its context, the lessons embedded in the narrative of “Say Nothing” are as timely as they are timeless.
“In some respects, prior to the Troubles, Northern Irish society bore some resemblance to aspects of our own society. It was a society on edge that had a lot of tribal and ideological divisions. And then quite quickly, between 1969 and 1971, it’s as if the whole society just kind of jumps the rails. And by 1972, people are killing each other in the streets. And part of what I was trying to evoke was the speed with which what had been a sort of tense but controlled environment became just anarchic and dystopian overnight.”
To hear more from Patrick Radden Keefe, listen to the full interview above. Listen to The Culture Show daily at 2 p.m. on 89.7.
Produced with assistance from the Public Media Journalists Association Editor Corps funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private corporation funded by the American people.
