LCIS Lecture: Dr. Heather Laird

Name: LCIS Lecture: Dr. Heather Laird
Start: 2026-01-29T16:00:00+01:00
Location: Faculteit Letteren - KU Leuven

Schedule

Thu, 29 Jan, 2026 at 04:00 pm

UTC+01:00

Location

Faculteit Letteren - KU Leuven | Leuven, BU

"Leave as little trace as possible": Ethical (Non-)Consumption in Cathy Sweeney’s Breakdown and Sara Baume’s Seven Steeples
Heather Laird, University College Cork
Cathy Sweeney’s acclaimed debut novel, Breakdown (2024), centres on a seemingly ordinary middle-class woman who wakes up one morning in her “comfortable home in the suburbs of Dublin”, walks out the front door of that home and never comes back. The cluttered life she abandons includes a husband, two children, a career and hyper-consumerism. Sara Baume’s Seven Steeples (2022) features a young couple who leave behind family, friends and jobs to embark on an isolated existence in a dilapidated house on a sparsely populated stretch of the Irish coast. While there are notable formal and thematic differences between these literary works, they overlap in key ways. The most obvious connection is that both feature female characters who “opt out”. A less overt link is that both allude to the Leave no Trace movement (LNT) through the pointed inclusion of variations of the phrase “leave no trace”. In Breakdown, the activist posturing of two female eco-warriors is juxtaposed to the unnamed character-narrator’s resigned honesty: “There is not much anyone can do but leave as little trace as possible on the Earth when they die. And tell no more lies.” In Seven Steeples, the third-person narrator tells us that the experience of having been “overlooked” in “their separate large families […] had planted in the couple the amorphous idea that the only appropriate trajectory of a life was to leave as little trace as possible”. In this talk, I will explore the relationship established in Breakdown and Seven Steeples between “leaving no trace” and a rejection of prescribed life pathways, including those conventionally associated with women. With reference to LNT and critiques of it, I will also outline the significance of environmental damage to Breakdown and Seven Steeples, and examine what these Irish texts reveal about the parameters of current prevalent debates concerning this global crisis. In my discussion of the limitations of these parameters, I will draw on Catriona Shine’s Habitat (2024), a lesser-known work of contemporary Irish fiction that in its more decentred approach to environmental catastrophe aligns more closely with decolonial interventions in climate politics.