‘Just the Way It Is'

This chapter considers how recent short fiction by women from the North of Ireland engages with austerity. For Louise Kennedy, Lucy Caldwell and Wendy Erskine, austerity is experienced as a shrinkage of possibility, particularly for mothers and young people. While mothers absorb both blame for recession – seen as a male crisis – and the loss of state support in caregiving, the latter are deprived of the ability to imagine – let alone forge – a future for themselves. In examining this realist short fiction, this chapter contends that humanising the subjects of austerity is one necessary step towards debunking it as a neutral, apolitical response to crises of capitalism.