Lavender Menace volunteer Katie Marson interviews Ordinary Saints author Niamh Ní Mhaoileoin. Thanks to Bonnier Books UK for the review copy and arranging the interview!
Overview
Niamh Ni Mhaoileoin’s Ordinary Saints is a brilliantly written debut novel from an intelligent, and incredibly assured literary voice. The story follows Jay, who lives in London after leaving her devout Irish Catholic family following the sudden death of her older brother, a practicing Catholic priest, thirteen years ago. Jay has left the church behind and maintains minimal contact with her emotionally closed off parents. However, the careful barrier wall she’s built to separate “childhood from adulthood, family from friends, Maynooth from London” begins to crumble at the news that her late brother is being petitioned for sainthood. Jay returns to Ireland for the ceremony and is forced to confront her family, the church, and a version of herself she has attempted to cast away.
Ordinary Saints is in equal measures humorous and devastating, educational and personal, loudly queer and deeply Catholic. It is a story of duality and a life of contradiction; of a queer woman who sees herself as decidedly split in two halves. There was before the death of her brother, before London and before leaving the church, and there is now. It is an exploration of how grief can alter a life irreparably, and how the freshness of trauma ebbs and flows, sometimes laying still and then raging to the surface, no matter how many years and miles are put between it. It is also a thoughtful interrogation of the church’s influence on Irish politics and culture, and the ripple effects that the church’s repressive ideology and abusive tactics have had on generations of Irish individuals and families. In Ni Mhaoileoin’s words, “the almost inevitable product of generations of silence and secret-keeping, of a whole country of us witnessing the meat and bones of human life through cracks in the door, reduced to prying and poking around, pressing our ears to the bedroom floor, scrabbling for some hint of what we’re being told”.
Review
The novel is told in first person and divided into three parts, moving chronologically incorporating flashbacks and memories from Jay’s childhood. Part One finds Jay in London, thirteen years after the passing of her brother and roughly ten since she changed her name and left Ireland decidedly.
We are provided a glimpse into the tapestry of queer relationships and rich life that Jay has built for herself in the city. Ni Mhaoileoin writes of the mundanity of Jay’s day-to-day life with humour and relatability. We see Jay drag her feet to a weeknight gig alongside friends—one loudly announcing he’ll be dipping early to make his 6am spin class tomorrow, and a lesbian couple who clearly wish they’d gone alone so they could snog in peace. We see her visit the hairdresser, who she has a benign yet transparent crush on, and embark with her on a night out, where she plays the token lesbian friend of a straight coworker. We also meet Lindsay, who Jay introduces as “the woman I’m seeing”, a feminist politics academic from an Irish Catholic family in Liverpool. Jay keeps her at arm’s-length; often aware she is unjustly punishing Lindsay for being insensitive of her traumatic past—a past she keeps tightly compartmentalized and refuses to share.
Jay’s world is rocked when she receives a call from her father informing her that, after careful consideration and encouragement from the church, they are officially opening a case to have Jay’s brother, Ferdia, canonised as a Catholic saint. Suddenly, Jay is thrown back into the religious world of her childhood. She is confronted with news articles regarding Ferdia’s case, and finds herself obsessed with the canonisation process and what will soon be asked of her and her family. Jay keeps this revelation from Lindsay and her closest friends but finds insight and support from an old friend of Ferdia’s, with whom she reconnects in London. Here, Ni Mhaoileoin’s intellect and intimate understanding of the Catholic experience is on particular display. Ferdia’s friend connects for Jay that the fundamental difference in belief between her and her devout parents will bring additional tension to the surface during this process. While Jay’s parents believe that Ferdia is an active participant in the campaign, enacting miracles from heaven for the voting board to consider, Jay believes that he is gone, and that dredging up his name, memory, and eventually physical body for public consumption, is a gross display. Ni Mhaoileoin expanded upon this idea at an event promoting the book at Argonauts Books in May 2025. She said that for non-religious people with religious family, the fraction between them is not just a difference in opinion, but a difference in belief; in the fundamental understanding of how they move through the world.
And so, what would Ferdia want? What would he think of this process? Of his name being touted as worthy of sainthood, used to preach traditional Catholic values to a new generation of young people who are steadily moving away from the church? To have people around the world praying not with him but to him? Through memories and flashbacks, Ni Mhaoileoin’s Ferdia gives us only hints to the answers to these questions. Part One of the novel is peppered with stories from Jay’s childhood, in which Ferdia is a relatively elusive figure in her life. Born nearly ten years apart in age (though neither an accident, as “there are no accidents in Catholic families”), Jay and Ferdia’s relationship is complicated and strained. Ferdia feels called from a young age to a life of worship and prayer, taking an extraordinary interest in the church community as a child and dedicating his days to praying at the bedsides of sick and elderly community members. Jay, as a consequence, is left to live in the shadow of his reputation, acutely aware from a young age that Ferdia is their parents’ and community’s favourite. Any moments where Ferdia seems to her like an average teenager—when he sleeps in late, loses his temper, and is suspectedly watching porn on his bedroom computer—are in complete contradiction to his reputation and will not be heard or accepted by their doting parents. After his death, she is left to deal with her grief largely on her own. Her father throws himself into his work and her mother falls deeply into a depressive episode which keeps her in bed for weeks on end. Her grief, this emotional distance to her parents, and the presence of Ferdia’s shadow all follow her into adulthood as she moves first to university and then to London, to start fresh and leave her old life behind.
Part Two of the novel sees Jay return to Ireland for a commemorative mass in Ferdia’s honour, and a celebratory dinner with her parents and extended family of aunts, uncles, and cousins. Where Part One of the novel explores how Jay’s grief and troubled upbringing continue to influence her years down the line, Part Two forces her to return to the source. Ferdia’s presence, through Jay’s memories and flashbacks, is notably absent from this section. Instead, the lingering memories of her Catholic past are brought to the surface for Jay and the reader, to encounter head-on. Upon Jay’s arrival, she immediately falls back into a steady rhythm of passive aggression and loaded silence with her parents. Here Ni Mhaoileoin beautifully captures the complex and heavy experience of visiting estranged older parents. She says, “I’m irritated with him for seeming so much frailer than I expected, for forcing me to think about how he’ll be in five or ten or fifteen years, about what he’ll need from me then”. The exchanges between Jay and her parents feel claustrophobic, tense, and emotionally weighted. The presence of Ferdia and his potential sainthood looms largely in the room, and all three are careful to dance around it. What follows is a commemorative mass in Ferdia’s honour, a family dinner which quickly turns icy, and an emotional conversation between Jay and her father which finally brings some revelations to light.
Click here to read about part three – spoilers for the novel’s ending ahead!
Part Three finds Jay several years after her last visit to Ireland. She has officially removed herself from Ferdia’s petition for sainthood and all it involves, though she remains in more regular contact with her mother after the death of her father. On a trip to England relating to Ferdia’s case, Jay’s mother stops over in London to spend a day with Jay and to finally meet Lindsay—the two have now moved in together, though we never do get an official “girlfriend” title. Jay and her mother are able, perhaps for the first time, to speak openly with one another and see each other outside of context of the church and its influence on their relationship. It’s a touching ending to their dramatic relationship over the course of the novel. After years of being unable to see eye-to-eye, they seem to have reached a state of understanding
Final Thoughts
Niamh Ni Mhaoileoin’s Ordinary Saints is an absolute feat. This tactfully written debut explores the complexities of a religious upbringing with nuance, humour, and intellect. In Jay, Ni Mhaoileoin has written an experience that is incredibly unique, while touching on universal themes of the queer religious experience. Even those without the lived experience of growing up Catholic or religious will find ways to relate to Jay’s attempt to find meaning in her world, make peace with her family, and find home in her found queer community.
