Guest post written by Little Bang author Kelly McCaughrain
Author Kelly McCaughrain is from Belfast, and her debut novel won an unprecedented hat-trick of awards including CBI Book of the Yea, the NI Book Award and a nomination for the Carnegie Medal. She also served as the Queen’s University Belfast Children’s Writing Fellow from 2019-21 and set up The Blank Page, to offer support and resources to schools who want to set up creative writing clubs. She also volunteers with Fighting Words NI as a mentor for their teen writer’s group, Write Club, and is passionate about the benefits of creativity for young people.
Little Bang released on January 4th 2024 and it’s a bittersweet Northern Irish romance that takes a new look at teen pregnancy, the magic and mess of first relationships, and a young woman’s right to choose her own future.
Writers are supposed to write because they have something to say. But I think I write because I have something to process. That’s certainly how my new YA, Little Bang, came about.
In 2018 Ireland announced they were having a referendum on their abortion laws. I live in Northern Ireland, so I wasn’t eligible to vote and I remember feeling slightly relieved about that because I knew so little about abortion I wasn’t sure I’d feel comfortable voting. It’s astonishing to me now to admit that, but it’s the truth. And actually, it wasn’t that astonishing at all because abortion was not something anyone had ever educated me about, and that was the case for most people in NI at that time.
I grew up in Belfast. My childhood and adolescence were dominated by “The Troubles” – a 30 year period of violence and sectarianism that left little room for anything else in our political system, with the result that when we emerged from it in the late 1990s we were somewhat lagging behind the rest of the UK in many ways. We had almost zero diversity in our population (who wants to move to a country at war with itself?), our housing was divided into Catholic and Protestant areas separated by ‘peace walls’, our education system was almost completely segregated, and religion was a huge, contentious subject that saw people retreating to very entrenched and conservative positions.
Can you imagine trying to introduce a progressive Relationship and Sex Education curriculum in an atmosphere like that?
My own memories of RSE are hazy. I think there was one class (which boys and girls were separated for) involving an animated video and something about tampons. Clearly it didn’t make much of an impression, and there definitely wasn’t any information about consent and healthy relationships, sexuality, or abortion. It wasn’t until 2007 that RSE was made a mandatory part of the curriculum, but it was still up to schools how it was delivered, and this could be in line with the school’s own religious and moral principles. This often resulted in RSE lessons being delivered by religious groups with a particular agenda.
It’s hardly surprising that abortion wasn’t on the curriculum as it was still illegal in NI and Ireland. That didn’t stop it happening, of course. It just made it a traumatic, isolating, and stigmatising experience that was never openly talked about. Thousands of women and girls endured the emotional and financial costs of traveling to England for abortions. Everyone knew someone who had had one, and yet it wasn’t talked about anywhere. It certainly wasn’t talked about in my school, despite there being teen pregnancies there, as there are in every high school ever.
It wasn’t until 2019 that the UK government intervened to force a change in the laws in Northern Ireland and decriminalise abortion (very much against the wishes of our leading political party), and it wasn’t until 2023 that they intervened again to put a standardised RSE curriculum in place that would include things like abortion. That was due to begin this year but at the time of writing some schools are still fighting it. Schools fighting education says a lot about where we’re at.
When the Irish referendum was announced, I started to wonder why I knew so little about all this. Surely it was something that, as a young woman, I should have known quite a lot about? I set out to educate myself on the subject and the more I read the angrier I became about how vulnerable I’d been as a teenage girl embarking on her first relationships knowing practically nothing. And I couldn’t believe we were still sending teens into the world so completely unarmed, and at a time in their lives when it could literally shape their entire futures. YA writers often want to write the book they wish had been there for them, but quite often it’s not really needed anymore because things have (thankfully) moved on. In this case, however, it felt like not much had changed.
I didn’t set out to learn about these things in order to write a book, but the more I read, the more the book became inevitable. I wanted to write something that would both recognise Ireland’s invisible history of travelling for abortion and offer something useful to teens today, whether it’s information, validation, solidarity, or just a way to support their friends when something like this happens to them.
But it wasn’t until two completely mismatched teens called Mel and Sid showed up that it became a story. They turned it into a warm and funny romance that I fell in love with and just had to write.
Mel and Sid are from very different backgrounds. Mel is a shy science nerd who’s sick of being the good girl her religious family expect her to be. Sid is the school bad boy, whose outspoken single mother despairs of him ever making anything of himself. They’re complete opposites, which was a lot of fun to write. But they also need each other. Sid gives Mel the courage to be a rebel, and Mel makes Sid wonder if there could be more to him than everyone expects.
But when they get pregnant on their first date everything is thrown into chaos, and everyone they turn to for help has their own agenda and opinions about what they should do. They quickly realise that pregnancy is a very different experience for boys and girls, especially when the rest of the world finds out about it, and they have to find a way to hold onto each other as their relationship starts to crack under the pressure.
Little Bang is the book I wish that my generation had had, and I really wanted it to exist for teens today. I hope the book will start some conversations. I hope it makes people laugh and cry, and I hope it makes them think.
