Cathy Sweeney’s debut novel, Breakdown, is an unsettling account of motherhood and its claws suffocating women. Written in 210 pages over 10 parts, each section marks the gradual mobility of the protagonist away from the traditional structures defining a woman, starting from the reclamation of her body since childhood. The story begins with ‘Mothers are not supposed to go on road trips’—a rule clear enough to not be questioned, or broken.
The 52-year-old protagonist wakes up to see her husband completing another leg of sleep “deeply satisfied with his life, his great wife and kids, his comfortable home and successful career”. She prepares herself on a Tuesday morning in November while her two children are asleep—Lauren, a rebellious college student, in the attic; Mark, a sportsman at his school, in his room. She ignores her day’s work at the school as an art teacher, and starts her car.
She proceeds beyond the Dublin suburbs, where they stay, and finds herself winding to her natal home. Forty eight hours after her disappearance, she comes face-to-face with her action as she finds herself in a cottage in Wales. A breakdown was inevitable.
Sweeney writes with an ease that sweeps the reader in from the very first page. The sparseness of prose and the sombre atmosphere she paints is akin to Michael Cunningham’s 2023-pandemic novel Day. Like him, she allows the character to reveal the cold, freezing space, how time stops around them, and lives unfold, only to rem.
