The Rachel Incident

“But James did steal me from Jonathan. Over the course of just a month, I would be colonised by James on a molecular level, and my personality would mould around his wherever there was space to do so. The official line is that Jonathan dumped me. The truth is that I left him for another man.”

While Rachel’s boyfriend Jonathan initially dismisses James as a threat because James is gay, it turns out that the threat is not romance but friendship. Her relationship with James takes primacy over her relationship with Jonathan because she and James share real affection.

“I thought of my parents as heads on Easter Island, and it took moving two miles away to realise they had been people all along.”

A piece of Rachel’s coming-of-age narrative is learning to see her parents as human beings—flawed but lovable. The Rachel writing the story in 2022 is becoming a parent herself and looks back with regret at her college self’s inability to understand her parents and their needs.

“We already know that I was something of a misogynist. So was everyone else, I suspect. I also think there’s something in the fact that most English teachers at most secondary schools are women. Having a large man teach you about a book felt exciting, like Dead Poets Society.”

Despite her college career beginning in 2008, Rachel and many of her peers do not understand or commit to feminism. Writing as an adult in her 30s, Rachel sees that Dr. Byrne was favored because of his gender and his novelty, rather than because he was a better lecturer than his female colleagues.

“So we stayed an hour after closing time to invent back-dated pre-orders for Dr. Fred Byrne’s book on Victorian Ireland during the famine. I realised that I had never been in love with Jonathan, after all. I had known the love from my parents and the strange affection of a college relationship that was somehow both stale and naive. But me and James and the pre-orders: that was love.”

Rachel again reflects on her relationship with Jonathan, her first boyfriend, and the lack of true love in their relationship. James staying late at work to help her with her crush is an act of love that reveals the depth of their friendship, and that affection can take many different forms.

“Now that I was his secret keeper, I felt like I had a role in his life. I put this to him once, drunk and years after the fact. He was lightly horrified. He said he loved me always. And despite saying crazy things like this, loved me still.”

Initially, Rachel was insecure about her place in James Devlin’s life, feeling that he could have his choice of friends, but for her, there was only one James. Her role as “secret keeper” gives her reassurance that she is valuable to him. However, she was valuable all along and James himself had insecurities about their friendship that he also hid.

“I have read a lot of books about the lasting trauma of young women and their dastardly, corrupt English professors, and what happens when they fuck you. I have read nothing whatsoever on the trauma of when your English professor decides not to fuck you.”

The novel humorously subverts many of the expectations of a coming-of-age novel set on a college campus. Instead of a love affair between Byrne and Rachel, Rachel acts as the go-between for Byrne and James. The relationship still has a huge impact on her life, but it does not follow the cliche of the student seduced by a professor.

“Why on earth would Dr. Byrne come to my house in the middle of the night to criticise my bookshelves? He had probably already forgotten that I lived there, too. I still thought I was the centre of this story, the main character, just because it had started that way.”

An important part of Rachel’s maturity is learning to see that she is not the center of every story. Initially, she thinks Byrne is attracted to her, but he does not care about her much at all. Her worry over him seeing her bookshelves is a humorous moment where she realizes that she is exaggerating her importance to him.

“I met James Carey in April of 2010, and the moment he told me his name I said: Sorry, I already have one of those. Because I did.”

One of the main conflicts in Rachel and James Carey’s early relationship is her friendship with James Devlin. Carey feels that there is no room for him in her life and this first meeting underscores that idea. By the end of the novel, both men see themselves as part of a confederacy of Jameses that care for Rachel. There is room for different kinds of love in her life.

“The year in Shandon Street did a lot for me, but it did this most of all. It detached me from any kind of inherited moral system. I stopped sizing others up in accordance with the values I had been taught: who was a loser, who was closeted, who was cheating on their wife. I learned the value of context, and of people. It came in handy later on, when I became a journalist.”

As she matures, Rachel learns to be less judgmental of others and to view people as human beings in the context of their lives. This serves her well in her career, but also in her life generally, as she develops her own value system separate from the one her parents imposed on her.

“The cradle of me and Deenie would always be that she was the clueless wife of my best friend’s lover. There was a slice of me that would always condescend to her, no matter how sweet or clever or kind she was.”

Though Rachel likes Deenie and looks up to her, the relationship is tainted by the secret Rachel knows. Rachel feels some condescension toward Deenie because the alternative would be to blame Fred and James for wrongdoing. By seeing Deenie as “clueless,” she avoids seeing her as a real person who is being harmed.

“He was so full of empathy for Dr. Byrne that it made me realise, at last, what went on between them that first day at the bookshop. All that casual chat about Canada and Fermoy and DVD players, the small talk that somehow became the defining passion of my friend’s young life. I realised it was loneliness. They saw it in each other instantly. Both were charismatic, both were well liked, and yet both were litter mates of solitude.”

As a young woman, Rachel tends to see James Devlin as a person without insecurities. She also views Fred Byrne and Deenie as adults who don’t have problems the same way she does. However, she gradually realizes that insecurity and loneliness are something James and Byrne share and that this sadness is one of the reasons they began their affair.

“The problem with genuine memories is that you know too much. It ruins everything. I can love that night for what it was, but I also know this: that I would only step inside that house two more times, and by winter I would never see Deenie Harrington again.”

Younger Rachel loved being able to spend time at Deenie’s house and have an adult friend. The happy memory of the evening when they comforted her over losing the bookstore job takes on a poignant note with hindsight. Adult Rachel, narrating the book, understands that this is the only time they will have this joyful evening together and that the relationship will soon be fractured.

“I’ve noticed, in the years since, that queer men of a certain vintage sometimes do this. They state their age, and they wait. They let you do the math. They look at you with an expression that says: I was born in 1972. I was a teenager in the eighties. Think about the things I’ve seen, the news stories I was terrorised with, the deadly body I was told that I might become.”

The generational difference between Fred Byrne and James Devlin means that Byrne grew up in an environment where queerness was not only demonized but where AIDS was a very real threat. This trauma impacts Fred’s ability to see relationships with men as viable partnerships and is part of why he stays closeted. By contrast, James and Rachel’s younger brother, Kevin, can come out to their friends and families and live their lives openly.

“I understand the instinct to judge me. Extorting Deenie Harrington for the termination of a baby that was not her husband’s is the worst thing I have done, and I sincerely hope it is the worst thing I will do. But while the gift of hindsight has changed much about this story, in my own head at least, it is still difficult to see what else I could have done.”

While hindsight offers Rachel insights into her past, she also exhibits compassion toward her younger self. She does not excuse her wrongdoing, but she understands the trauma of an unwanted pregnancy and the reasons that she acted as she did. Part of true maturity, the novel shows, is being willing to face one’s mistakes and learn from them.

“I was so insecure, then. I never thought that someone could have an insecurity that I myself hadn’t thought of. James was sure he was an unlovable person. Maybe it was why he had decided to accept scraps of it from Dr. Byrne.”

Rachel eventually realizes that James also experiences insecurities behind his charming facade. He is worried that he is “unlovable” and thus is willing to settle for a secret relationship with Byrne rather than a more public one. This first love will continue to negatively impact James’s relationships as an adult.

“I don’t know whether James’s words were a prediction, or a spell, but he was right. It did, and would, mean something. After I moved to London, I found that my accent, my good manners and my vague ability to reference Trollope helped build a picture for my English peers that became more than the sum of its parts. ‘You have one of those nice Irish voices,’ someone once said to me. ‘Soft.’”

James is working class and more conscious of societal divisions than Rachel. Her middle-class upbringing shields her in ways his working-class background does not does not. He must leave Ireland to have a fair shot at a career, whereas her college education and “good manners” smooth the way for her.

“I decided to be an imposing, sexy sort of tall girl. I remembered what Carey said about me having a body like Wonder Woman. We didn’t speak again, after I moved to London. Too much had happened. But the way he saw me left an impression. It changed how I saw myself.”

Carey’s words about Rachel and the way he sees her cause her to change her self-perception. Rather than feeling insecure about her frame, she learns to embrace her physicality and her sense of self-worth.

“This surprised me. I thought it meant Phil knew about Dr. Byrne, but he didn’t. Phil had just witnessed Byrne’s shadow: James’s roaming sense that a boyfriend was supposed to be a big person who lectured you about books.”

“Byrne’s shadow” continues to linger in James’s life long past his physical presence. He was James’s first real relationship and James continues to seek out men like Byrne, even while recognizing that Byrne was unhealthy for him. James’s experience shows one of the negative outcomes of The Intensity of First Love.

“And the kiss was like—what was it like? It was like finding your favourite pair of boots under the bed. It was like finding them on the last day of your lease, the boxes already in the van, having assumed that they must have been left at an ex-lover’s house, or simply vanished by your own carelessness. Oh, these. Oh. Oh. I love these.”

Carey and Rachel reignite their youthful relationship, recognizing that they now have the maturity to be healthy for one another. Rachel compares him to the “favourite boots” that were lost and found again. The new iteration of their love is reliable, worn in, and welcome.

“The impossible adulthood she and Dr. Byrne occupied, the easy sophistication that still feels alien to me but surely must be observed by the younger women at my office. Am I their Deenie? Am I anyone’s?”

Deenie’s effect lingers in Rachel’s life. In many ways, she becomes the blueprint for Rachel’s ideal of adult womanhood. While they left things on a sour note, Rachel still remembers her kindness and her friendship in a positive light.

“For years, there was no one in my circle who was Irish, and I believed this to be appropriate punishment for the way I had acted as a twenty-one-year-old girl in 2010. And now I am an editor at a paper about the Irish in London, and Deenie Byrne wants to talk to me.”

With the hindsight of maturity, Rachel can recognize that what she did was wrong, but also that she was very young and facing a deeply traumatic situation. Here she calls into question whether her self-imposed exile truly was an “appropriate punishment” for her wrongdoings.

“I feel like someone who has been on death row for years, and am experiencing a strange release at finally having my number called.”

The rift with Deenie has lingered in Rachel’s life, and the chance to finally speak to her about what happened is a “strange release.” Like an inmate whose time is up, Rachel is not freed from paying for what she did, but she can rejoice that the waiting is over. Her relief shows her maturity and growth; she faces her mistakes rather than running from them.

“Why can’t anyone love me like this? I had thought. Why are they making it work, when I can’t? But that wasn’t making it work. Whatever came after was. Whatever Deenie and Dr. Byrne did or said or promised in the long marriage that followed me and James. A story I won’t ever know.”

Rachel thought that James and Byrne had an enviable relationship, but as an adult, she sees that the truly enduring affection was between Deenie and her husband. She also accepts that she will never know what happened between them and how they were able to “make it work,” but as a married woman, she respects that they have.