Everything That is Beautiful

by Louise Nealon

(Harper, August 2026)

Interview by Ellen Birkett Morris

Everything That is Beautiful, Louise Nealon’s follow-up novel to her award-winning book Snowflake, is a story of connection and betrayal, found family and broken relationships. Niamh Ryan, grew up with the Foleys, playing with her best friend Peter and his sister Kate, and being doted on by their mother Helen and coached by their father Liam, a legendary former hurling player. Now grown and estranged, Niamh and the Foley’s grapple with the events of the past and seek reconciliation. Nealon discusses the creation of the novel.

Dealing with the Inner Critic

AUTHORLINK: Tell me about your apprenticeship as a creative writer. Did you have a mentor who offered advice that you can share with us?

NEALON: I used to be very hungry for writing advice. I studied English literature at university and did a masters in creative writing, searching for universal wisdom that would make writing easier, like using cheat codes in video games. When I was eighteen, I read On Writing and took Stephen King’s words as gospel. His recommended a daily word count was 1,500 words. After failing to hit that target again and again, I used that piece of benevolent advice to prove to myself that I wasn’t a writer. Identifying that inner critic was useful. My writer friends and I call it Bad Brain. Bad Brain wants to believe that writing is difficult and useless and ultimately, not worth the hassle. A lot of my job is calming Bad Brain down and opening myself up to the unknown – the place where fiction lives. One of the books on writing I find helpful is Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones. It reintroduced me to writing as an activity that requires both patience and daily practice.

 

Writing as Exercise

AUTHORLINK:This is your second novel. How has the process changed for you? What has gotten easier or harder?

NEALON: My first novel, Snowflake, was told in the first person and used the present tense. Everything That is Beautiful is narrated in the third person and is written in the past tense, so it was a new way of constructing a novel for me. There is a larger cast of characters in my second novel, and I really enjoyed the choreography of moving characters around in scenes.

I have learned that there are no wasted days when writing, even though a bad writing day feels melodramatically bad at the time. I’ve gone months – sometimes years – having nothing but ‘bad’ writing days. I try to rationalise it by thinking of writing sessions as physical exercise. Just because a session feels difficult or doesn’t go ‘well’ doesn’t mean it doesn’t count. The difficult sessions lay the foundations for progress, and the magical good sessions to come. There is no drug in the world that comes close to the feeling of a good writing day.

Finding the Heart of the Story

AUTHORLINK: James Dickey said the idea for Deliverance came to him as a vision of a man standing alone on top of a mountain. His job was to get the man off the mountain. Where did the idea for Everything That is Beautiful come from?

 

NEALON: It took me a long time to figure out the story that became Everything That is Beautiful. There is an incident that takes place in the closing paragraphs of the opening chapter from which the rest of the novel unfolds. As soon as I wrote that chapter, the story felt real. The epigraph that opens the novel is from a poem called ‘Käthe Kollwitz’ by Muriel Rukeyser: “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.” Throughout the writing of the book, I felt a responsibility to show the tremors of this seismic shift in the lives of these characters.

AUTHORLINK:Your story focuses on found family and the bonds we create with those we aren’t related to. What makes the fissure that happens to this kind of family even more complicated than those separations between blood relatives?

NEALON: The two families in the novel – the Foleys and the Ryans – have a shared history. As well as being neighbours, they are both prominent hurling families. Hurling is a national sport of Ireland and a way of life that thrives in rural communities. I grew up playing hurling. It’s difficult to describe the primal sense of loyalty I feel towards my teammates and my club. It’s a primal, tribal kind of love. When the idea for this novel came to me, I was afraid that readers would presume the story was autobiographical. Being a female author in my thirties, it is unusual for the question of autobiography not to come up when discussing my work. My stomach dropped at the thought of people from home reading the book. The fear of exposing this kind of energy – even within the realm of fiction – scared me. That was when I knew that I needed to write it.

Tapping into Character’s Motivation

AUTHORLINK: This is a story of connection and transgressions, about knowing where the boundaries lie. How did these ideas create tension in the story and propel it forward?

NEALON: The three main characters, Niamh, Helen and Kate, deal with the events in the novel in different ways. Niamh is avoidant, preferring to continue with her life as a teacher and withdrawing from friends and family. Helen, a mother and grandmother, spends her time escaping her life by checking into guesthouses under the names of women she used to go to school with. Meanwhile, Kate, Helen’s daughter and Niamh’s best friend, learns the cruellest lesson when she tries to expose a truth that threatens the fabric of their shared reality. When writing the story, I focused on the characters of these women and the things they might say and do. That was how the story played out in my mind. It was my job to transcribe their actions in a way that felt honest.

Carving Your Own Path

AUTHORLINK: Who were your literary role models when writing Everything That is Beautiful?

NEALON: I am not sure if I have role models – literary or otherwise. If I was pushed to answer the question of what this novel is ‘about,’ I would say that it is, among other things, an exploration of the phenomenon of fandom and hero worship.

Having said that, writers I enjoy reading and have learned from include Dermot Healy, Edna O’Brien, Elena Ferrante and Carys Davies.

AUTHORLINK:What was the greatest challenge when writing Everything That is Beautiful?

NEALON: The greatest challenge was to keep showing up, trying my best to do the story I had in my head justice on the page.

AUTHORLINK: What advice do you offer apprentice writers about craft, staying encouraged in the face of rejection, or both? 

 

NEALON: The thing I say to myself when things are not going well is to think less and write more. Learning the basics of writing fiction seems simple, but it’s a wild discovery. I remember the first time I paid attention to a paragraph, and how different writers go about making them. What is dialogue? How does it feel to write an entire scene with just people talking? Is it possible create a kind of dialogue with characters talking over each other in the way that people do? How time moves through prose endlessly fascinates me. Writing and publishing are separate activities, and I know which I prefer.

AUTHORLINK: Discuss what you are working on now.

NEALON: I am working on my third novel and living the dream.

Louise Nealon is a writer from County Kildare, Ireland. Her debut novel, Snowflake, was published in 2021. It won the Newcomer of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards and was chosen for the One Dublin One Book campaign in 2024. Everything that is Beautiful is her second novel.