I Want to Know That I Will Be Okay

Written By Alanna Offield

I Want to Know That I Will Be Okay by Deirdre Sullivan is one of our fiction recommendations for June and is available for purchase on the Seaside Books online shop. Published by Banshee Press, this is Dierdre Sullivan’s first collection for adults. Sullivan is a writer and teacher from Galway. She has written seven acclaimed books for young adults, including Savage Her Reply (Little Island 2020) and Perfectly Preventable Deaths (Hot Key Books 2019). She was the recipient of the CBI Book of the Year Award in 2018 and the An Post Irish Book Award for YA in 2020. Her short fiction has appeared in Banshee, The Irish Times, and The Dublin Review. 


When writing about a book I think it is helpful to include the blurb as this is what folks might first read if they picked up this book in a bookshop. We are told of I Want to Know That I Will Be Okay: 


It had felt a bit like being haunted, being pregnant. Unexpected thumps, and moments when she would be reminded that there was a little person living inside of her. For a while afterwards, sometimes it would feel like she was still inside, and Kate would tap her stomach, or say something to the baby before she remembered that she was alone.


In this dark, glittering collection of short stories, Deirdre Sullivan explores the trauma and power that reside in women’s bodies.


A teenage girl tries to fit in at a party held in a haunted house, with unexpected and disastrous consequences. A mother and daughter run a thriving online business selling antique dolls, while their customers get more than they bargained for. And after a stillbirth, a young woman discovers that there is something bizarre and wondrous growing inside of her.


With empathy and invention, Sullivan effortlessly blends genres in stories that are by turns strange and exquisite. Already established as an award-winning writer for children and young adults, I Want to Know That I Will Be Okay marks her arrival as a captivating new voice in literary fiction.


I continue to be impressed by the amazing short story writing available from Irish authors and publishers. This collection was an instant favourite. I’ve written before about my love of magic realism and surrealist writing, and this book is packed with weird and wonderful stories. The thread within these stories is the experience of being a girl and a woman in the modern world (which can feel pretty surreal as is) and “the power and trauma” that resides in women’s bodies. This theme is expertly explored through stories that have stayed with me since finishing this book. 


I recently listened to a talk with Cathey Sweeney and Jan Carson about magical realism in writing for the Belfast Book Festival. Deirdre Sullivan was scheduled to attend and was unable to do so but it was interesting to hear the other authors discuss I Want to Know That I Will Be Okay and the elements of the book they most enjoyed. They highlighted the way that Sullivan builds each story within the real world. That is something that I loved about this collection; so many of the stories were grounded in settings, situations, and characters that felt familiar and then they slowly spun outward to become more fantastical. During the discussion, Carson discussed how nothing is stranger than the reality that surrounds us and so it is natural that writers would want to explore the borders between the real and unreal. Sullivan explores how this border sits within women’s bodies and lives. 


One of my favorite stories in the collection is All that You Possess. It tells of a mother’s growing concerns about her daughter’s new imaginary friend, a squirrel named Pebbles. The tension is held throughout the story before it spirals into something truly horrifying (in the best way) in the last few paragraphs. This pacing happens in other stories as well. We are drawn in with a sense of uneasiness, that something not quite right is looming on the horizon for our characters. In the title story, I Want to Know That I Will Be Okay we think that this is going to be a story of a young girl drinking too much in an empty house that is rumoured to be haunted. The paranormal and eerie elements sneak up on us and are so subtle they could easily be missed. This story does something so interesting in making the experience of someone being drunk and bullied and embarrassed in front of other people equally as terrible and creepy as an interaction with the paranormal. 


Not every story contains magical realism elements. Some deal with the strange and unsettling occurrences of daily life. In Hen, a woman finds a hair in her bathroom drain that doesn’t belong to her which makes her spiral, questioning her closest relationships. In Missing in the Morning, we follow Leontia who is struggling to fit in and feel comfortable on a weekend getaway with the other members of her student theatre production. This story also has one of my favorite lines describing the play’s second-year Philosophy student director Brian as “He wore black cotton shirts and black trousers and looked like someone who worked at Dunnes only without the nametag.” As someone who went to an art university with many Brians, I immediately understood this character. 


It would be impossible to pick any favourites out of this collection. I loved every story and more uniquely, I found myself loving the collection as a whole. The stories aren’t directly related, but the thread of exploration of the common, uncommon, and surreal experience of being a woman was compelling. We live in a hyperreal time with wars and political disruption and the climate crisis and a global pandemic. I often joke about how I don’t need to watch horror films because life is scary and unsettling enough, and I think this collection played with that idea brilliantly. I will definitely be giving these stories another read during Spooky season. 


Have you read this collection? If you, let us know your thoughts over on our social media pages. 

Alanna Offield
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