Former Cedar Rapids resident making a splash with her debut novel

By Diana Nollen

The Gazette

“All my life I will kick things that find their way into my path: shoes, baskets, toilet paper rolls, money, rocks, tennis balls, rolled-up socks, gym bags, Roxanne once or twice, any kind of circular fruit. It will become an irresistible urge that serves me well. I kick; it moves me, and I feel joy.”

- “Swimming”

Nicola Keegan is living the American dream abroad.

Her first book hooked the first agent she contacted, Bill Clegg from the William Morris Agency. After some retooling at his suggestion, her novel sold in three days to the Alfred A. Knopf publishing house, hit bookstores July 14, has been translated into nine languages and has been reeling in rave reviews from Time magazine, the Washington Post and the New York Times.

And she is still reeling from all that attention.

“Selling to Knopf - that's huge,” she says. “For literary fiction in America, you can't get any better than that. It's a little bit of a dreamy story.”

Keegan, born in Ireland and raised in Cedar Rapids, now splits her time between Ireland and Paris, where she has lived almost 20 years.

“The kids are in school in Paris, so I spend a lot of my time here,” she says by phone from her apartment overlooking the Eiffel Tower.

When asked her age, she replies: “44, but I totally look 43.”

That quick wit and her easy laugh punctuate the interview and weave through her prose. You can hear her laughter jump across the Atlantic and leap off the pages.

That's what she likes best about her book.

“I think it's really funny. I laughed really hard when writing parts of it,” she says. “It has really silly humor and I like the characters a lot. I really grew fond of them. It was very difficult for me to stop when I had to say, goodbye to them. I hated that.”

The book is called “Swimming,” and even though it follows the character Pip from her earliest waterbaby experience to Olympic gold, Keegan was never a competitive swimmer. Her brother Emmett was, swimming on the Cedar Rapids Washington High School team under venerable coach Jim Voss.

“I wanted to write about someone doing something really, really hard, that you have to be really devoted to. For some reason, swimming came to mind. I love to swim - my brother Emmett is just a brilliant swimmer,” she says.

“‘Swimming' really isn't about swimming; my agent picked out the name for the book.”

Instead, she says, “I think the book is about accepting loss, accepting change, bathing in the joy of doing what you love. Swimming to me means trying.”

While many authors stick to the “write what you know” credo, Keegan doesn't.

“If I wrote what I knew, it would be so boring,” she says. “I describe going to a (swim) meet in the 1980s with the Berliners. I don't know anything about that.

“What's so interesting about writing is just researching and letting the imagination take over. I believe in the power of the imagination. I'm not one of those who writes a veiled story about family.”

But she did dedicate her book to her mother, Kay Keegan, and her fathers, Reuben Keegan and Joseph O'Mahoney. And the death of her father, Joseph, when she was just 3 has provided a ripple effect in her life and in her writing.

“I think losing my father influenced my imagination because I always wondered what he was like, what his life had been like and how crazy it seems that he died so young,” she says. “When such an important, epic figure in your life is absent, it does ignite your imagination.

“My father never visited America and I grew up there, which turned me into an American. I often wonder what he would have thought about that.

“Destiny is such an interesting topic and so often, out of our control, and I knew that already as a child.”

As the mother of young children, her writing process didn't come in one fluid movement. She spent about five years writing the hardback's 305 pages.

“Because I have three children and was working at the time, I'd write in spurts,” she says. “If I let it go a couple days, I'd feel a hideous sense of guilt. I kept a notebook by my bed. I researched like a crazy lady.

“I read everything about the Olympics, swimming dynamics, swimming philosophy, swimming manuals now out of print, swimming biographies. I sort of just read everything.

“The process is to try to learn as much as you can about your subject, then let it percolate and then pretend it happened to you. It's kind of like method writing; I had to put myself in her shoes.”

She works at her kitchen table in a sun-filled apartment she shares with her husband, Philippe Behar, a decorator who works in the private sector and in set construction for films, their daughters Margaux, 13, Sasha, 11, and son Roman, 6.

Her upbringing helped her juggle all her tasks.

“Because I grew up with six brothers and sisters, I'm good at doing a lot of things at once,” she says. “I typed with one hand, fried an egg with the other. I can work in the middle of a storm. I don't know how I got this quality.”

Turning to a more serious tone, she says, “I didn't want my writing to affect the children in any kind of negative way. I didn't want to stifle their liveliness. I would say, ‘I'm working on something particularly difficult,' and they would get it, because I had been respectful of them.”

Tackling her first novel taught her many lessons.

“I learned so many things,” she says. “I learned that you make your own reality. I learned that you set your own limits. I learned that you shouldn't let anybody tell you what you can and cannot do. I learned that it's never too late. I learned that creating something is a beautiful thing to do. That sounds cheesy, but it is. Perseverance is something you accept and live with every day. Discipline is part of it.

“I'll never quit again anything I feel burning inside of myself. I learned it's not about me. This project has little to do with me and more to do with a lot of hard work. I'm not the important part of it at all.”

What's next on her agenda “Ireland. I'm writing a book about Ireland.”

Fact or fiction?

“A little of both, she said cryptically. I'm writing about the famine.”

 She's still in the research phase and says the project will probably take 3 1/2 more years.

“Once I started researching the famine, I was flabbergasted. It's an interesting moment in history now to write about what people lack and what's essential.”

PROFILE

Name: Nicola Keegan

Address: Ireland and Paris

Age: 44

Occupation: Writer

Hometown: Cedar Rapids

Family: Husband, Philippe Behar; daughters, Margaux, 13, Sasha, 11; son, Roman, 6; parents, former Cedar Rapidians Dr. Reuben and Kay Keegan, who divide their time between the British West Indies and Ireland

Education: Graduate of Cedar Rapids Washington High School, 1982; University of Iowa, 1989, with majors in English and French