There’s an old adage that states if you want to be a writer, you should write what you know.
For former Connecticut Valley native and author Eileen Patricia Curran, drawing on the people and places she loved as a child became the springboard for her debut novel, “Hungry Hill.”
Set in the familiar Springfield, MA., neighborhood where the Irish Catholic side of her paternal family has lived for generations, “Hungry Hill” blends the author’s real-life memories with a tender exploration of the themes of family, love and loss.
Curran was waiting for landscapers to replace some trees at her home in Florida when Prime reached the 64-year-old author to chat about her novel, “Hungry Hill.” The avowed “stay-at-home mom” who parlayed a lifelong love for interior design into a house-flipping real estate business for 25 years explained that writing has always been a hobby, but not something she focused on in a serious way for most of her life.
“I wrote all the time – short stories, poetry, lyrics – as a way to express myself creatively,” but never considered publishing any of those works, Curran said, adding that her initial career path when she entered the University of Texas at Dallas as a freshman, was journalism.
“Then I figured out the only thing I liked in journalism was broadcasting, and I thought that would be a difficult field [for a woman at the time,] she said. Curran subsequently switched majors, graduating with a degree in economics and finance, followed by a master’s degree in marketing and finance from Boston College. Study at the New York School of Interior Design completed her educational pursuits and helped launch her eventual house flipping real estate career. “That’s how I was able to use my education in design and have fun with it,” she shared.
It was “a number of years back,” Curran noted, that she decided to try her hand at something more challenging than the occasional short story or poem. “I started trying to figure out if I were to write novel-length fiction, what would resonate with me and what subject and a setting that would resonate with me; something I could draw on creatively,” she explained. An avid reader as well as a writer, Curran said she had read a number of contemporary novels “to understand what people are reading” as she began to explore the idea of writing her own novel-length fiction.
“I plowed through a lot of novels I didn’t enjoy [where] I couldn’t relate to the characters,” Curran said, mentioning titles such as “Gone Girl.” “I didn’t like [the novels] and they didn’t make me feel good about humanity.
“I wanted to show people in a positive way,” Curran said. “The purpose of my novel was to write a story about people’s potential for kindness,” she said of crafting her debut work, “Hungry Hill”
“For me, the memorable characters and one of the most emotionally appealing settings was where my father’s side of the family grew up,” Curran shared about the inspiration for the story and setting of her novel, explaining that her dad’s side of her family “went back three generations in Hungry Hill.”
In Curran’s “Hungry Hill,” Grace Cavanaugh – the niece of an aging spinster aunt named Maggie Reilly, has just suffered a devastating loss – her husband and love of her life dies suddenly following a romantic Valentine’s Day dinner near their Connecticut home. Bereft and unanchored, Grace accepts her beloved aunt Maggie’s request to come and stay with her in her Hungry Hill home while the octogenarian navigates a terminal cancer diagnosis. The story draws in a variety of characters – including two very different dogs, spunky young neighbors and a quirky hospice nurse – as the two women come to terms with life, loss and aging.
Curran shared that it seemed a natural choice to set her first novel in a place she knew and loved. Born herself in “a hospital attached to a convent” in Holyoke – “My family always joked that I was an angel because I was born in a convent,” Curran said she spent her formative years in the greater Springfield area, including time living in Ludlow and East Longmeadow before her family relocated to Connecticut. Her dad had been raised in the ancestral family home in Hungry Hill – a place she knew well from frequent family visits.
“It was very easy to write about the house in my novel because I drew so heavily from that generational home that I knew so well when I was growing up,” Curran explained, adding her relatives had actually lived on Cleveland Street – the same street name she used in the novel. She “fictionalizes a lot of the neighborhood” but kept the name “to honor my family.”
When it came to crafting the character of Maggie Reilly, Curran said she has a real-life Hungry Hill relative as a role model.
She “drew on my family history and really heavily drew upon the character of my great aunt Catherine – the Maggie Reilly character is really the embodiment of her – there isn’t much, including the use of profanity – that wasn’t spot on for my aunt Cate.”
Curran noted she had first created a Maggie Reilly-like character in a short story called “The Oldest Living Virgin” back in college but developed her more fully for the novel.
Like the Maggie in her story, “Catherine was a heavy drinker – bourbon and seltzer was her drink of choice – she did go to mass every night at Our Lady of Grace, and she did harass the priest,” Curran said. Catherin had also worked at Morse & Haynes shoe store in downtown Springfield – and oversaw the orthotic needs of all her nieces and nephews – like the Maggie character.
The Grace character, Curran said, gave her an opportunity to “put myself into the shoes of someone who was married to [the person] who was her great love, and then lost him young and suddenly – how would you deal with that? For me it was the process of being empathetic.”
Putting Grace in the house with Maggie – someone she cared about but didn’t know that well was something Curran said made good story fodder. “I could work with that as a writer and find a way to bring them close and make the relationship close without anybody pushing anybody to go anywhere emotionally,” she explained.
The character of Matt – Maggie’s 20-something neighbor that the 40-something Grace has a brief fling with was “just my personal fantasy,” Curran shared. “When you can write, why not give yourself a little gift?” she said.
“I thought it would be fun to give [Grace] a young hottie who was the kindest, most decent man imaginable; someone who would be irresistible and who could help her rediscover her great love for men,” Curran added.
The wolfhound, Ellen, was another “writer’s gift” to herself. “I always wanted a wolfhound but realized they are an impractical companion,” Curran said. The two dogs in the book however, were “very intentional in my story. I felt there had to be some mechanism between Maggie and Grace, some buffer zone to become reacquainted with each other because Grace wasn’t up for it for sure.
“I actually had a lot of fun building the characters of the dogs [Ellen and the stout, terrier mix dog, Stogie] and making them feel as real as the other characters in the novel,” Curran admitted.
The hospice nurse, Henry Bujnarowski, is “a character and an oddity,” Curran said, but necessary when Grace realizes she is in over her head taking care of Maggie.
“I thought it would be really funny, knowing my great aunt Catherine, to have her [character in the novel] cared for by an older guy, maybe a foot shorter than her who loved poker,” Curran said. “I created a character I could have fun with.”
Curran said she spent two years “writing and rewriting” the first draft of “Hungry Hill” on her own, and another two years working with an editor – New York Times bestselling author Charlotte Hughes – to polish her dialogue and style.
“She essentially provided me with an education on how to write fiction,” Curran said of Hughes, who she met through a mutual friend. “In particular the mechanics of it. As much as we all write, we don’t exactly know how to structure things when you have multiple characters and dialogue and she helped me with that process.”
Curran wasn’t exactly sure when the writing and editing process ended, but she believed it was 2018.
Even after the manuscript was polished, Curran said she “wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with it. I was moving on to more commercial fiction in my head and on paper.”
Then COVID-19 hit, and like so many of us, she found herself with “extra time on my hands [and] that was when I decided to try and figure out how to self-publish.
“Fortunately, I have an MBA in marketing, and I do have a background in design,” Curran continued. “I did so much research on how a book should look and how it should feel and worked with some very wonderful consultants who helped me with the nuts and bolts of what had to be done.”
Among the things Curran felt “had to be done” was creating her own imprint, Kinsale Press. “It’s a place for me; I’m not sure I’m going to build a business, but I learned the nuts and bolts of self-publishing and if I wanted to, I could help another author,” Curran said.
“Hungry Hill” published as a hardcover book on June 1, 2021, according to Curran.
Curran said she did have a virtual author reading in the area in November 2021, and also did a radio show in the Berkshires. She said she knows “Hungry Hill” has had Western Mass. readers, as she’s had feedback from early fans.
“I love having local people read [my book]. I’ve gotten some really lovely cards and letters and relatives that I didn’t know I had,” Curran joked. “People in Springfield have been wonderful about letting me know they have read “Hungry Hill” and related to it and [it] made them remember things fondly about the neighborhood, and I really enjoyed that.”
Curran is already at work on a second novel, this one more a work of commercial fiction that’s “meant to appeal to a broader audience and not so much to me,” she said. “Hungry Hill,” Curran said, really was “a book that I wrote for myself. I wanted to learn how to write [ and] learn how to publish.
“The novel I’m writing now, I’ve taken everything I learned and put that energy into my second novel, “Gatorland,” she said.
It may be the springboard for a series of novels, she mused.
“I thought for a long time writing a series would be a really interesting challenge and that it might be fun to try to do commercial fiction series, and there have been a few authors over the years whose series I’ve enjoyed,” Curran said. “If you want to be a commercial success – not that this is my primary goal – series novels can be a good platform for that.”
“Hungry Hill” is available on Curran’s website, www.Kinsalepress.com and through Amazon.
