Donal Ryan, who is from north Tipperary, picks me up in his car outside the bus stop in Nenagh. The plan is that we’ll chat about his work and life while he drives me around Donal Ryan country. He doesn’t actually call it Donal Ryan country — the writer who describes himself as “this weird mix of hubris and timidity” is not quite hubristic enough for that. But there’s no getting away from the fact that this area forms the literary landscape of his novels, which include The Spinning Heart, The Thing About December and All We Shall Know.
The characters in his compelling new novel, The Queen of Dirt Island, are also embedded here. As we drive into the countryside outside Nenagh, he explains how that sense of place is vital to his work. For “years and years”, he says, he had no confidence in his writing because it was not rooted in places known to him. “I was trying to create something that didn’t exist anywhere in my imagination. It felt very fake. It didn’t ring true.” This changed when he began to use “the geography and the language of my own home place”. As he drives us around, his books come to life in the boreens and fields and signposts that we pass. There is the sign that points to the Graves of the Leinstermen, where Lampy, the young bus driver from his fourth novel, A Low and Quiet Sea, liked to have sex with his girlfriend, Chloe. There’s the popular swimming spot Youghal Quay, a scenic location in which his characters often find themselves.
Ryan wrote this new book very quickly, over 12 weeks, last spring and summer. He had spent the previous two years writing a much longer novel, one that “nobody really liked”. He cracks up laughing when he reveals this. “I sent it off and I really thought it was perfect.” Did it feel as though he’d wasted two years? “Not at all. I am glad it exists. I did things with it I’d never done before in fiction. I know if I’d loads of time to fix it, then it would have been very publishable. I still think it’s a great story. But when your editor points something out, suddenly your eyes are opened ... I thought: F*** it, I’ll write something else instead.”
The finished book isn’t too different to the first draft. Everything just went right
— Donal Ryan on The Queen of Dirt Island
The title for that something else, The Queen of Dirt Island, was already in his head along with a hazy idea of an all-female household, four generations of women living in a rural village outside of Nenagh. He had recently read the 1950s novel Mr and Mrs Bridge by Evan S Connell, which is written in a series of more than 100 vignettes. “It was a lovely way to read a novel so I thought it might be a lovely way to write a novel,” he says. Ryan’s vignettes, as he began to write, all came out at about 500 words. “So I decided to make them all exactly 500 words just for the crack, for the first draft anyway. Then I became obsessed with the idea.”
“Nothing went wrong,” he says, as he wrote the book. “I kind of need to be free of stress when I’m writing and that’s how it was for this one.” He mentions how fellow author Kevin Power has a theory that every novelist will have at least one book that will just pour out of them. “That spring and summer, it was just a perfect storm of writing. And it was the strangest thing: every vignette I’d write I’d finish it thinking ‘That’s terrible shit’ but I knew in an hour when I came back to it that it would look better and it always did. The finished book isn’t too different to the first draft. Everything just went right.” What happened when he sent that one off to his editors? “They were far more enthusiastic,” he smiles.
At heart, it’s a novel about family. A young widow called Eileen — the queen of the title — is a foul-mouthed, indomitable woman who fights with and adores her mother-in-law, Nana, with equal passion. Then there is Eileen’s daughter Saoirse and later a little girl called Pearl. Eileen works in a local bookies. Her occupation was inspired by Ryan’s own mother, Ann, who back in the 1980s was a woman “in command” in the bookie shop, shouting the odds to the mostly male customers and calculating everything in her head. “I just thought it was the coolest thing ever,” he marvels.
The voices of Eileen and Nana were the driving force when he started to write. Ryan never knew his own mother’s mother-in-law, who Nana is partly inspired by, but he grew up hearing stories about her. As a young woman May Ryan (nee Barry) had known Edna O’Brien. “When Country Girls was published and then banned, my grandmother got a few copies of the book and would share them around. She started collecting banned books then, running a sort of underground library while living as a caretaker farmer on the side of a hill. Apparently all sorts of local big shots, parish priests and solicitors, would come up to the cottage and borrow books from her.”
Eileen is based a little on his own mother, Ann. “But I have to make sure I say this: Eileen is much more profane, although my own mother wouldn’t be far off,” he laughs. As we drive, he points out landmarks from his youth, such as the home of Donie Nealon, the great Tipperary hurler and also a former principal of Ryan’s primary school. We park up at a housing estate in the village of Newtown, where Ryan lived as a child with his brother and sister. “I just thought this was heaven when I was a kid,” he says looking over at his former home. “It was so safe, we had great neighbours. I still kind of dwell here in my imagination. When things go wrong or I’m stressed out, I still find myself coming back here in my mind”. The Aylward women in The Queen of Dirt Island live in a housing estate exactly like this one.
He says the new novel is “my own take on the women I know”. How much of his wife, Anne Marie, is in the book? “Oh, she’s everywhere,” he says, recalling somebody on Twitter complaining about how often he brings her up in interviews. “This fella said something like, ‘I try to like that Donal Ryan, but he talks too much about his wife’.”
It’s true that he does talk about Anne Marie a lot in interviews, often crediting her with his becoming a writer — his first published novel, The Spinning Heart, came out in 2013, while he was working as a civil servant. “That’s because she is so central to my story. I would not be a writer without her. She made me do it. She knew I had written before we met and that I had an idea of myself as a writer but also that I was ashamed of it. She said, ‘Just do it: it’s foolish to have this knowledge of who you are and what you should be and not do it.’ Well she didn’t put it in those exact words. It was more like ‘Will you f**k off upstairs and write a novel, will you?’ ”
He says when he writes about women, as he does so much in this book, Anne Marie tends to inform a lot of the work. “She’s the woman I know best and she’s also very strong. She’s had cancer twice in the last 10 years, cervical cancer and breast cancer, and she got through it and I’ve just huge admiration for her as a human.”
One of my novels got destroyed in the New York Times but it didn’t matter to me because the person wasn’t sneering. She just genuinely didn’t like the book at all
Each chapter of the new book has a one-word title — Revenant, Fortune, Blackbird, Moonshine — and starts with a short sentence. “How in the f***ing f*** could you have got pregnant?” for one more striking example. Ryan curses a lot in conversation; so do the characters in his books. When I mention something he has said in interviews, that he dislikes people sneering about his work, it prompts an enjoyably ferocious and expletive-ridden anecdote about a time someone casually dissed his writing on social media. A brief excerpt from this anecdote: “A red mist just descended over me. I went f***in’ mad. Like, you f***in’ prick. Who the f*** do you f***in’ think you are?”
He’s keen to clarify that he treats “sneering” differently to a negative review. “I mean, one of my novels got destroyed in the New York Times but it didn’t matter to me because the person wasn’t sneering. She just genuinely didn’t like the book at all.” Overall, the feedback he has had from readers and reviewers has been positive. “Book reviews are a lottery ... and I think out of dozens and dozens of kind letters I’ve only had maybe three shitty ones,” he says. For the past several years, since leaving the civil service, he’s worked as a creative writing lecturer at University of Limerick. “I’ve had so much good fortune. If you’d have told 16-year-old me I’d be writing books, he’d have been thrilled with how things turned out.”
As with all Ryan’s novels, there are a lot of issues woven into the narrative of this new book — from family clashes over land to teenage pregnancy, from classism to mental health. Characters from his previous novels feature, including the family at the centre of his last book, Strange Flowers. There are also two quite violent and shocking suicides. He says being a novelist is like being “a sociopathic God. You are creating people and destroying them ... and these characters take on real forms in people’s imaginations.” He remembers when he wrote his first book, The Thing About December, his family, particularly his mother, fell in love with the character of Johnsey Cunliffe.
“This was back when I had no ambitions or chance of being published. My family loved Johnsey and mourned him. My mother’d nearly set a place for him at the table she loved Johnsey so much.” After 47 rejections, the Donal Ryan fairy tale goes that one day his novel was plucked from a slush pile at the Lilliput Press. It was decided that The Spinning Heart, his second book, would be published first. “My mother said ‘Ah, sure didn’t that happen to Johnsey all his life? He was always pushed aside. Poor aul’ Johnsey will never get published now.’ But of course he did. The Thing About December was another best-seller for Ryan and established him as a big Irish writing talent garlanded with nominations and prizes. Last year he became the first Irish writer awarded the Jean Monnet Prize for European Literature. Two of his books have been turned into plays.
We pull up outside Ryan’s mother’s house close to Nenagh and go inside. Ryan’s father died suddenly five years ago, and this time last year, his mother, after being diagnosed with cancer, was given six months to live. “But they didn’t know me, Róisín. They didn’t know I’m from strong farming stock. I’m still here,” says Ann Ryan, shooing the dog away from the dining-room table as Donal goes off to put the kettle on.
“Have you washed those Castletroy germs off you?” Ann says, teasing her son who lives with Anne Marie and their children, Thomas and Lucy, in Castletroy, Limerick. Ann, an avid reader and brilliant storyteller, a woman who used to buy job-lot boxes of books for her children and who until she became ill loved her part-time job on the tills at Tesco, has made us delicious ham and cheese sandwiches on white bread with the crusts cut off. She’s waiting for the hospice nurse to call, and can’t say enough about how good they are in helping her manage her illness.
There are copies of all Ryan’s books on a shelf behind her. Is she proud of her son? “I would say we are very happy for him,” she says. “Pride comes before a fall,” her son interprets as we tuck in to sandwiches and scones. We talk about cursing in novels and in real life and Ann says “we all swear a lot, but I promised God no more swearing, because I’m dying of cancer”. A moment later, she is plotting how to make The Queen of Dirt Island sell a million copies and get adapted into a film.
Lunch over, we say goodbye to Ann and get back in the car. Earlier, Donal talked about the sequel to The Queen of Dirt Island, which he is writing at the moment. It will be the last novel in his current three-book contract with Doubleday. He’s happy to be at this stage of the publishing process. “It feels like I’ve kept up my side of the bargain.” We are driving across Tountinna — the highest point on the Arra Mountains — as he says this, looking over heart-lifting views of Lough Derg. I would not be a bit surprised if one day there are official guided tours of Donal Ryan country. It’s probably only a matter of time.
