I found letters to the editor in the old papers very useful. I read as much as I could, going slow and figuring it out, looking at the period of history, Mary’s backdrop, what matters to the average person like her. ‘I’ve always read history with interest, but I’m not an historian so had no intention of writing a purely historical account of Mary’s life. ‘I didn’t really know what to do with Mary, or how to do it!’ she admits, laughing. Having found an individual whose story she felt compelled to tell in the novel form, Mary Beth admits that she wasn’t entirely sure what to do next. I wanted to give her a voice – a chance to tell her story in a manner in which she was never afforded during her lifetime.’ She was tough and I liked her – I liked her for her flaws. She gets in her own way and I saw why she was like that. She was a very brassy woman, very combative.
‘She emigrated and grew up with a foot in both worlds of Ireland and America, as did my parents. ‘Mary Mallon felt within my wheel-house,’ she explains. Perhaps there was also more than a shade of Irish affinity between these two Marys, as Mary Beth has Irish relatives and is clearly very interested in and drawn to her Irish roots. I recognised that she had an interior life which I wanted to explore.’ She became the synonym for germs and contagion which seemed very unfair and tragic to me, no matter what kind of person she was. Before I knew it, I was writing a novel! From the moment she hit the newspaper headlines, Mary became, in many ways, a one-dimensional character, separated from the real, human, fleshed out self. I wanted to know more and get to know her better. ‘Most people are familiar with the phrase Typhoid Mary, who was once described as the most dangerous woman in America,’ Mary Beth explains, ‘but I’d never really thought about the woman behind the name until I saw a documentary and became interested in her. Hazel Gaynor met Mary Beth Keane while she was in Dublin promoting Fever and spoke to her about this fascinating woman and the unique challenges of writing her story. What happens when you discover a person from history and find them so fascinating that you want to know more and more about them? You write a novel about them, of course! That’s what Mary Beth Keane did after watching a TV documentary about Mary Mallon – ‘Typhoid Mary’ – an Irish cook living in New York who, in the early 1900s, was accused of spreading typhoid and imprisoned in complete isolation on an island off Manhattan, despite being perfectly healthy herself. National Emerging Writer Programme Overview.
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