Chapters 10: Charleen Hurtubise - Books, Second Chances and the Problem with Bad Coffee

From childhood book clubs in Michigan to writing novels in Ireland, Charleen Hurtubise joins us for our Chapters 10. We talk about her two novels, The Polite Act of Drowning and Saoirse, and discover a writer who believes in reading, writing, reading some more, and never compromising on the quality of her coffee.

There is a very particular sort of childhood heartbreak familiar to anyone who has ever been handed a Scholastic Book Club leaflet with considerably more enthusiasm than pocket money.

You pore over the pages, circle the books you want, carefully consider your choices, and then watch somebody else's order arrive with enough titles to stock a small library.

Charleen Hurtubise remembers that feeling vividly.

Growing up in Michigan, she adored those monthly book club leaflets, as well as libraries and yard sales.

We think this is an excellent beginning to a literary life. At Chapters, we are particularly fond of the idea that books should never be the exclusive preserve of those who can afford to buy them new, and that some of the greatest reading discoveries are made among shelves of secondhand books.

These days Charleen is on the other side of the page, the author of two novels, The Polite Act of Drowning and Saoirse, both published by Ériu, the Dublin-based imprint of Bonnier Books.

Having grown up in the United States, Charleen has made Ireland her home for more than twenty-five years. She is also a teacher and visual artist, and it is interesting how those different creative interests inform the worlds she chooses to explore in her fiction.

Her novels move between America and Ireland, between the lives people inherit and the lives they attempt to make for themselves. They are interested in memory, belonging, family relationships and the consequences of things left unsaid.

And while they are very different stories, there is a fascinating connection between them.

The Polite Act of Drowning - When a Family's Silences Become Its Secrets

Published in 2023, Charleen's debut novel, The Polite Act of Drowning, is set in Michigan in 1985.

Sixteen-year-old Joanne Kennedy lives in the small lakeside town of Kettle Lake, where the drowning of a teenage girl unsettles the community and brings difficult aspects of Joanne's family life into sharper focus.

Her mother's mental health is deteriorating, and Joanne is trying to make sense of the adults around her at precisely the age when she is beginning to question their authority and their version of events.

The arrival of Lucinda, a new girl in town, offers friendship, excitement and the possibility of seeing herself differently.

There is something especially compelling about setting a coming-of-age story against a family history that its youngest members do not fully understand.

Adolescence is difficult enough when you are simply trying to work out who you are. It becomes considerably more complicated when you begin to suspect that the people who have explained the world to you might not have been telling you the whole story.

The novel explores the tension between loyalty to family and the need to develop an independent understanding of yourself. Joanne is navigating friendship, sexuality, grief and the unsettling realisation that adults are neither as dependable nor as comprehensible as children might wish.

The title, The Polite Act of Drowning, is extraordinary. It invites us to think about the social expectations that can make it difficult to admit distress, particularly within families where certain subjects are never openly discussed.

And then there is the setting. Charleen has spoken about the importance of the Michigan landscape to her writing, particularly the lakes, forests and shorelines of her childhood.

It is interesting to consider how much a place can shape our memories, and how the landscapes we know as children become inseparable from our understanding of home.

Saoirse - Can You Really Begin Again?

Charleen's second novel, Saoirse, published in February 2026, brings us to Ireland, although Michigan remains part of the story.

It is 1999, and Saoirse is an artist living in Donegal with her husband, Daithí, and their two daughters.

She has a family she adores, a home she has made her own and work that gives expression to her creative life. But the identity under which she lives is not the one she was born with.

Her childhood in Michigan belongs to an earlier life, when she was known as Sarah. The circumstances that brought her to Ireland, and the identity she assumed along the way, are things she has kept from almost everyone around her.

When her work receives public recognition, the attention that ought to mark an extraordinary professional achievement becomes a source of fear.

For Saoirse, being noticed carries risks.

There is a wonderful contradiction at the centre of that premise. Here is a woman who expresses herself through art, who makes things for other people to look at, and whose success threatens to reveal the very parts of herself she has spent years concealing.

And the choice of her name is important.

The novel raises questions that go well beyond the practical consequences of assuming another identity.

How much of our past do we owe to the people we love? Is withholding the truth always a betrayal, even when the truth concerns experiences we have desperately tried to survive? And can we genuinely begin again, or do we always carry some part of our former lives with us?

These are uncomfortable questions, particularly because we are inclined to believe that honesty is an uncomplicated virtue.

But human lives are rarely so obliging.

Two Novels, Two Women and the Question of Who We Are

What particularly interests us about these two novels is the relationship between their central characters.

In The Polite Act of Drowning, Joanne is a teenager trying to discover who she is while negotiating the expectations, histories and secrets of the people around her.

In Saoirse, we meet a grown woman who has already made an extraordinary decision about who she intends to be, and who now has everything to lose if that decision is challenged.

One is trying to establish her identity. The other is trying to protect hers.

And both are confronting the influence of the past upon the present.

There is a wider question here about the stories we tell ourselves, about our families, our childhoods and the choices we have made. We all arrange our experiences into something that makes sense to us, perhaps emphasising certain things and quietly placing others out of sight.

Most of us are fortunate enough not to have the sort of past that Saoirse is trying to escape, but the desire to draw a line beneath one part of our lives and begin another is hardly unfamiliar.

Perhaps that is why stories about reinvention can be so affecting. They ask whether change is genuinely possible, and whether the people we become can ever be entirely separate from the people we once were.

Charleen's two novels offer different ways of exploring those questions, and make an intriguing pair for readers interested in family, identity and the complicated business of being human.

The Woman Behind the Books

Which brings us to Charleen herself.

One of the reasons we love our Chapters 10 is that authors tend to reveal things about themselves that no amount of conventional biography could possibly tell us.

For example, Charleen's advice to her younger writing self is wonderfully economical:

"Forget the MFA. Read. Write. Read. Write. Read. Write. Edit. Submit."

This is particularly entertaining coming from somebody who actually has an MFA in Creative Writing from UCD, although presumably the experience has given her some authority on the subject.

Charleen, thank you for sharing your answers with us, for two fascinating novels, and for reminding us that a great reading life might begin with a book club leaflet, a library card or a secondhand treasure that somebody else no longer wants.

And should that literary dating app ever become a reality, we would be very happy to provide the books.

Now, over to Charleen Hurtubise and her Chapters 10!

1. What is the first book you bought yourself?
My elementary school was part of the Scholastic Book Club. Every month we were given a leaflet full of age-specific books to order.  I went through the list, reading the blurbs, and circling nearly every book, though I think I was ever only allowed to buy one or possibly two over the course of the years.  There were some families who could afford to order three or four books per month and I was so jealous the day their books were delivered to their desks!  I can’t remember what I bought but it was probably a Judy Bloom book or Beverly Clear’s Ramona the Brave series.   Otherwise, we lived at the library, and yard sales were a great source of used books.

2. If you could tell your younger writing self anything, what would it be?
Forget the MFA. Read. Write. Read. Write. Read. Write. Edit. Submit.

3.Did publishing your first book change your writing process? 
No, I have the same process: Read.  Write.  Read.  Write. Edit.  I’m still fighting for time to write. I’m still fighting for time to read. Now I have more structured deadlines, which I thrive under.

4.What were you most wrong about when you imagined being a writer?  
I am an introvert and it scared me a little to think of anything media related: speaking with journalists, radio folks, or going into bookshops and having to interact with real people, get my photo taken, all of that!  But I am actually finding it a delight: everyone has made it so easy and I’m sure this is because we all have a love of books. (But I still hate having my photo taken.) 

5. Which 3 books do you think everyone should read?
Our tastes, as readers, are so varied and broad, I could never prescribe any 3 books.  I think, though, it would be deadly if someone developed a dating app around book data: matching people around our favourite books, books we loathe, books we want to discuss with someone else.  In this case, you might ask which 3 favourite books I would put on my profile page?  I would answer: Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, Crazy Brave by Joy Harjo and and our faces, my heart, brief as photos by John Berger.  And then I would love to tell you why!

6.  Do you have a favourite book to gift and if so, what is it? 
The Shirley Hughes Collection. Me and my children give this book to every family with a newborn baby since we discovered its simple every-day magic. It is amazing to see how clean and new this book looks to us before we send it out.  Our own copy, loved since 2004,  has been without a dust jacket for years and the blue binding is held together by electric tape. 

7. What song always gets you on the dance floor? 
The Cure – Just Like Heaven

8. Tea or Coffee?  
It depends on the venue (I’m a coffee snob.) It must be strong and rich and taken with a little piece of chocolate, otherwise tea, please!  Most big chains, imo, don’t get it right. I am sure I will love the coffee in the new shop at Chapters upstairs. xx

9. Do you Google yourself?
Of course, but, sadly, no one is gossiping about me!  It’s an echo chamber – my own tweets come back to me, and nowadays a few articles folks have written about my book. I guess you have really only made it when Google shows you someone has written about your preferences for tea or coffee.  Here’s to seeing that day sometime in the near future! 😁

10. Why do you love Chapters?!  
Used books, stationery, classics in fabulous covers, children’s section, and now, meeting and chatting with fabulous booksellers! The coffee remains to be seen – but I have high hopes! x