Seesaw

Carmel Doohan was born in Birmingham. She studied Fine Art in Nottingham and has lived in Bristol, London and Glasgow. She has a PhD from the University of Glasgow and teaches creative nonfiction at Bishopsgate Institute. She lives in a village on the edge of the Peak District.

‘Seesaw is a shimmering challenge to certainty.’ – Maria Fusco‘Supple, fearless and poetic.’ – Chloe Aridjis‘How does anyone keep balance while seesawing between the personal and the collective, past and present, brutality and hope, the authentic and the algorithm? Seesaw’s brilliance is its refusal to settle easily on either side, all the while reminding us that the middle ground should be more than just an idea – it should be capable of sustaining life. I know that this novel, and its searching, unafraid narrator, will stay with me for a long time.’ – Daisy Lafarge‘Through the use of metaphors, trivia about pop culture and symbolic encounters, Carmel Doohan has created a complex character who is trying to find their way in the world, and complicated one at that. The mixed-up jigsaw puzzle feel of the book also helps understand the many things that are going on in Siobhan’s mind ... Not to mention that the prose is crisp and highly readable. Without mincing any words, Seesaw is excellent.’ – Robert Pisani, The Bobsphere ‘It becomes clear [Siobhan] is nursing a zero-sum idea of self-preservation, where one rises at the expense of another. This jumbled sense of self, eternally fused with the fortunes of her twin, has made her other relationships dysfunctional. These psychological concerns make an intelligent premise for a novel and Doohan does it justice: Seesaw is an unexpected, novel challenge to binary thinking.’ – Laura Waddell, Scotsman‘Carmel Doohan’s endlessly surprising Seesaw is narrated by Siobhan, a brilliant young Scottish woman who shares a fraught relationship with her twin sister … To escape her self-absorption, Siobhan volunteers at a refugee camp, “hoping to become useful”. The experience is of dubious value, with the ranks of volunteers populated by party people who tout the camp as “a festival for for all those that reject capitalism”. In this “theme park of awfulness”, Doohan strikes at one of the key anxieties of writing about the migrant crisis: how to avoid using it as a background against which the privileged characters resolve their relatively trite problems. Instead of avoiding this pitfall, Doohan plunges Siobhan into it, giving rise to some of her most provocative insights.’  – Michale LaPointe, Times Literary Supplement