Historical records are often incomplete. In some cases, they are silent by design.

Ireland’s institutional history—particularly that of the Mother and Baby Homes—exists in fragments: official documents, survivor testimonies, and public inquiries. Yet between these fragments lies a vast space of lived experience that was never formally recorded.

This is where fiction enters.

Fiction does not replace history, but it can engage with its absences. It allows us to explore emotional truths, interior lives, and the psychological consequences of systems that reduce individuals to anonymity.

In The Strand, I wanted to explore not only what happened, but how it was felt—and how those feelings persist across generations.

The act of writing becomes, in this sense, a form of listening.

Not to recreate exact events, but to acknowledge that something was lost, something was silenced, and something remains unresolved.

In Ireland today, as more voices emerge and more histories are revisited, fiction has a role to play—not in closing the past, but in keeping it open long enough to be understood.