I sat down at my desk in May 2023 to write a novel. I like to write first drafts quickly. In the past, I’ve made far too much drawn-out, agonizing drama out of writing a novel draft. Three to four months seems like a lot of time when you can spend a good portion of your day working on it and not spend too much time changing your mind about things and second-guessing yourself.
My mother had just left us and I wanted to heed her constant reminders to be confident, to stand up for myself and my work, and always be proud of it. She had been angry with me for telling an English newspaper that I was sometimes embarrassed to admit that I was a writer. I didn’t mean that I was embarrassed to be a writer, but rather that admitting it can lead to awkward conversations, or that I’m embarrassed to say the words. So I often say that I’m a lecturer instead, or a lorry driver, or a driving instructor, and none of these are lies. Mam couldn’t understand that. “Stop apologising for yourself” was one of the last things she said to me.
When I was writing The Queen of Dirt Island in 2021, I felt, or imagined, that my grandmothers were sending me some kind of help through the ether of the universe. I could clearly hear my maternal grandmother, Norah Sheary, who we know as Nana, warning me about the bad language and praising me when things went well. My paternal grandmother, May Ryan, I never met, but I imagined I heard her too, her voice in loving unison with Nana’s, telling me to hang in there, that it was a great story, that in this book they were gas women, they were the very same women she had known well all her life.
My mother was ill at the time, and a selfish, childish part of me wanted her to see my new book before she left us. I wanted her to be proud of me again. I tried in vain to ease the pain of her departure, to give her a book whose main character was her being, her heart, her mind, her courage. My mother was never quite as ungodly or belligerent as my fictional queen, but sometimes she was hot on her heels. She was a farmer’s daughter, an only girl with five brothers. I once saw her snap the handle of a sweeping brush off the back of a man who had unlocked our front gate, nearly sending my little brother fleeing from the garden into the street. In fairness, she must have warned him a few times. She had to make sure he wouldn’t do it again.
However, she couldn’t recognize herself in the character at all. “Where in God’s name did you get that one Eileen?” she asked as she read the loose pages of the first draft.
“From you, Mom,” I replied.
“Did, and you didn’t do it.”
So here I was again, a month after she passed away at Milford Hospice at the age of 71, trying to honor her. We never seem to stop justifying our mothers’ love, to deserve it, something so pure and perfect and powerful and so freely given that there is no way to balance the equation, no way to fill the enormous gap between our truth and the beings we would be if we actually deserved that limitless love. What can I write, I wondered. Can I even write? What would Mam like to read now, if she were still here? And she answered me in my imagination, where she lives now, just as her mother and mother-in-law had answered a few years earlier. I heard her say, “Go back to the beginning.”
( Getting to the bottom of the people in Donal Ryan’s villageOpens in new window. )
Mam loved The Spinning Heart. The book itself, and the fact that it changed my life. She thought it was super funny. She wasn’t keen on that dirty guy Seanie Shaper, or that cheeky little strap Réaltín, but she was mad about Jim Gildea and Triona Mahon and Bridie Connors and Vasya Afanasiev and Rory Slattery. People often asked her to sign copies at her checkout in Tesco in Nenagh. Sometimes they’d ask her about the characters, particularly Bobby Mahon. Where he was, if he was OK. She loved seeing the book in bookshops, especially in their windows, and she’d make a fuss if it was out of stock.
When it became part of the required curriculum for the Leaving Certificate, she called people she hadn’t spoken to for decades. She wanted everyone she knew to know. “Yes, it’s Donal, Shakespeare, Maeve Binchy, Ibsen, O’Casey and John B. Keane – he’s the only one Life “I’m a writer, you know,” she boasted delightedly, in the voice she usually reserved for telephone conversations with her siblings’ families in the diaspora. She didn’t like some of my other books, like All We Shall Know, quite so much. Mary Crothery was lovely, but your one Melody Shee was just too much. How cheeky of her to go around thinking she could do whatever she wanted. But she still framed John Burnside’s lovely review in the Guardian.
( Short story by Donal Ryan: “He turned away from the animal, but the smell of death remained”Opens in new window. )
I loved it when Mam talked about my characters as if they were real people. She wept for Johnsey Cunliffe in The Thing About December. “God help us, he didn’t stand a chance, the poor unlucky guy.” In 2011, when the decision was made to publish The Spinning Heart before The Thing About December, she wept for him again. “But hasn’t he always been treated like that? He’s just been ignored and belittled. All his life. And now look what’s happening to him again! That other pack, pushing ahead of him.” That other pack was the cast of The Spinning Heart, and when the novel was nominated for the Booker Prize, she finally admitted that it had been a good idea to let him overtake poor old Johnsey. Mam was so thrilled by the book’s success, and so pleased with the book itself, that I can forgive it almost all of its many flaws.
So I knew what I had to do. She had asked me directly several times over the years to write a sequel to The Spinning Heart, where people would find out how they all got on. That way people wouldn’t pester her about it. I wish I had written Heart, Be at Peace in time for her to read it. How could I never learn to just shut up and do what my mother told me? She might not be so happy about Vasya’s new career, or Pokey’s relentless secrecy, or the new horrors befalling poor Bridie and Lily. She would have been happy for Rory. She would have shared Bobby’s outrage at the drug dealers who flood the town and village streets with their filth. She would be thrilled that my wife Anne Marie has provided a beautiful voice for the character Triona Mahon for the audio editions of both books.
She would have gorged herself on signing copies from her throne at the checkout in Tesco Nenagh, a checkout now empty and decommissioned in her memory. She would have loved that the book was dedicated to my daughter Lucy, who adored her as she adored all her grandchildren. She would have told me to stop being ashamed of myself and be proud of what I have done. And I am. Thank you, Mam.
Heart, Be at Peace by Donal Ryan is published by Doubleday. He will be speaking to Alex Clark at the Pavilion Theatre in Dún Laoghaire, Co Dublin on Thursday 15 August.
