Shapechangers: 1960s Irish Women Reflect on Their Writing Lives Author: Edited by Nessa O’Mahony ISBN-13: 9781851323777Publisher: Arlen HouseGuideline Price: €25; 271pp“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” Simone de Beauvoir famously wrote. In the opening essay of Shapechangers, Niamh McBranan suggests the same might be said of writers. It is a fitting point of departure for this anthology of more than two dozen Irish women writers, all born during the 1960s, whose essays reveal not simply how books are written but how writers themselves are made through family, education, class, friendship, disappointment, perseverance and the changing social landscape of modern Ireland.One of the greatest educations a writer can receive is reading the lives of other writers. There is something revealing about discovering not simply how books are written, but how writers themselves are formed. Nessa O’Mahony has edited Shapechangers with a sure sense of its literary and historical purpose, bringing together novelists, poets, playwrights, literary critics, filmmakers and writers working across a wide range of genres.What binds these writers together is more than gender. Born during the 1960s, they came of age in an Ireland still shaped by economic hardship, conservative social values, the pervasive influence of Church and State and limited opportunities for women, yet one that would undergo profound social and cultural change. Read together, their essays become a collective portrait of a generation that witnessed and helped shape that transformation.The Ireland recalled throughout these essays is often one of closed doors, but Shapechangers is never defined by grievance. Instead, it reveals how artistic lives are forged in dialogue with history. These women did not become writers despite their lives; their lives became the material from which their writing emerged.Few essays capture this more powerfully than Eleanor Hooker’s. Reflecting on leaving school with sufficient points to study English, psychology and philosophy at University College Cork, only to discover family finances made university impossible, she dismantles one of the most persistent assumptions surrounding women who publish later in life. “The truth is,” she writes, “women of my generation publish later for reasons that include limited opportunities, family responsibilities and motherhood, lack of encouragement or doubt in our artistic worth. We have always had something to say and much to contribute.”Other contributors illuminate different aspects of that journey. Jane Clarke reflects on growing up in a culture where silence and self-censorship shaped lives and language. Her observation that poetry “reveals through what it hides. It says one thing in the shape of another” beautifully captures how indirection became a means of truth-telling in a society where so much remained unspoken. Enda Wyley traces the making of a writer through memory, illness, reading and unexpected acts of generosity. Patricia Gibney reminds us there is no single route into literature, describing years of family life, grief, workshops and quiet persistence that eventually led to a writing career. Emma Donoghue reflects on a country that gradually expanded the possibilities available to women and LGBTQ+ writers, while Deirdre Kinahan argues that the dismantling of independent theatre after the financial crash disproportionately affected women because it was within those companies that woman playwrights, directors and producers had flourished.The anthology’s Irish-language writers add another important dimension. Dairena Ní Chinnéide writes about becoming a bilingual poet, the mentorship of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and the need for Irish-language writers to be embraced as part of the wider literary community. Katie Donovan’s essay moves between personal history and the wider struggle to secure a place for women within Irish literary culture. Meanwhile, Rosemary Jenkinson offers a candid account of growing up in Belfast and negotiating the gendered hierarchies, rejections and occasional absurdities of the literary and theatrical worlds.What finally distinguishes Shapechangers is how it quietly challenges how literary history is written. Too often, that history has been told through the achievements of exceptional individuals whose careers appear to unfold in isolation. O’Mahony’s anthology proposes another narrative. Here, literature grows out of communities, classrooms, small presses, theatres, friendships and mentorship. Writers are not self-created. They are sustained by networks of encouragement, collaboration and belief.For younger writers, these essays offer reassurance that there is no prescribed timetable for finding one’s voice. For readers of Irish literature, they offer something richer still: a reminder that the story of Irish writing is incomplete unless these voices are heard alongside those already enshrined in the canon. Shapechangers is, in the end, much more than a collection of memoirs. It is a generous, illuminating and radical account of how Irish literature, and Ireland itself, was changed, one writer opening the door for another.Adam Wyeth is a poet, playwright and critic. He is the author of five books