I sat down at my desk in May of 2023 to write a novel. I like to write first drafts quickly. I have, in the past, made way too much of a dragged-out tortuous drama of writing a draft of a novel. Three to four months seems like a load of time, if you can work at it for a good part of every day, and don’t spend too much time changing your mind about things and second-guessing yourself.
My mother had just left us and I wanted to honour her constant exhortation to me to be confident, to stand up for myself and for my work, to always take pride in it. She’d been upset with me for telling an English newspaper that I felt embarrassed sometimes, admitting that I’m a writer. I didn’t mean that I was embarrassed to be a writer, more that the admission can lead to embarrassing conversations, or that I feel embarrassed saying the words. So I often say I’m a lecturer instead, or a truck driver, or a driving instructor, none of which are lies. Mam couldn’t understand it. “Stop apologising for yourself,” is one of the last things she said to me.
When I wrote The Queen of Dirt Island in 2021 I felt, or imagined, that my grandmothers were sending me some kind of help through the aether of the universe. I could hear my maternal grandmother, Norah Sheary, known to us as Nana, clearly, warning me about the bad language, praising me when things were going well. I never met my paternal grandmother, May Ryan, but I imagined I heard her too, her voice chiming in loving concert with Nana’s, telling me to stick at it, that it was a great story, that they were gas women in that book, that they were the very same as women she knew well her whole life.
My mother was sick at the time and a selfish, childish part of me wanted her to see my new book before she left us. I wanted to make her proud of me again. I was attempting vainly to blunt the edge of the pain of her parting, to give her a gift of a book where the main character was composed of her essence, of her heart and spirit and courage. My mother was never quite as profane or pugnacious as my fictive Queen, but she ran her close at times. She was a farmer’s daughter, an only girl with five brothers. I once watched her break the handle of a sweeping brush off the back of a man who’d unlocked our front gate, nearly allowing my baby brother to escape from the garden and on to the road. She’d warned him a few times, in fairness. She had to make sure he wouldn’t do it again.
She couldn’t see herself in the character at all, though. “Where in God’s name did you get that one Eileen from?” she asked, when she read the loose pages of the first draft.
“From you, Mam,” I replied.
‘’Deed and you did not.”
So there I was again, a month after she slipped away from us in Milford Hospice at the age of 71 , trying to honour her. We never stop trying to justify our mothers’ love, it seems, trying to earn it, a thing so pure and perfect, powerful and freely given that there’s no way of balancing the equation, no way of closing the vast deficit between the truth of ourselves and the beings we’d be if we actually deserved that infinite love. What can I write, I asked myself. Can I even write at all? What would Mam like to read now if she were here? And she answered me in my imagination, where she dwells now, just as her mother and mother-in-law had answered a few years before. I heard her say: “Go back to the start.”
[ Getting to the heart of Donal Ryan’s village peopleOpens in new window ]
Mam loved The Spinning Heart. The book itself and the fact that it changed my life. She thought it was great craic. She wasn’t keen on that dirty yoke Seanie Shaper, or that bould 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 of it at her till in Tesco in Nenagh. They sometimes asked her about the characters, especially Bobby Mahon. Where he was, if he was all right. She loved to see it in bookshops, especially in their windows, and she gave out stink when it wasn’t in stock.
When it was made part of the Leaving Certificate prescribed syllabus she rang people she hadn’t spoken to in decades. She wanted everyone she’d ever known to know. “Yes, it’s Donal, Shakespeare, Maeve Binchy, Ibsen, O’Casey and John B Keane – he’s the only living writer on it, you know,” she boasted delightedly in the voice she normally reserved for phone calls with the families of her diasporic siblings. She wasn’t quite as fond of some of my other books, like All We Shall Know. Mary Crothery was lovely but your one Melody Shee was just too much. The cheek of her, going around thinking she could do whatever she liked. But still she framed John Burnside’s beautiful Guardian review.
I loved when Mam spoke about my characters like they were real people. She cried over Johnsey Cunliffe from The Thing About December. “God help us, he had no chance, the poor misfortune.” When the decision was made in 2011 to publish The Spinning Heart before The Thing About December she cried for him again. “Isn’t that the way he was always treated, though? Walked over and made little of. His whole life. Now look what’s happening him again! That other crowd pushing in front of him.” That other crowd were the cast of The Spinning Heart, and when the novel was nominated for the Booker Prize she finally admitted it had been a good idea to let it leapfrog poor old Johnsey. Mam got such a kick out of that book’s success, and such pleasure from the book itself, that I can forgive it nearly all of its many flaws.
So I knew what I had to do. She’d asked me straight out several times over the years to write a follow-up to The Spinning Heart that would let people know how they were all getting on. That way people wouldn’t be bothering her about them. I wish I’d written Heart, Be at Peace in time for her to read it. How did I never learn to just shut up and do what my mother told me? She mightn’t have been too happy with Vasya’s new career, or Pokey’s unrelenting sneakiness, or with the fresh horrors that befall poor Bridie, and Lily. She’d have been delighted for Rory. She’d have shared Bobby’s outrage at the drug dealers flooding the streets of the town and the village with their filth. She’d be thrilled that my wife, Anne Marie, has given beautiful voice to the character of Triona Mahon for the audio edition of both books.
She’d have fattened on the signing of copies from her throne at the end till in Tesco Nenagh, a till vacated now, retired in her memory. She’d have loved that the book is dedicated to my daughter Lucy, who she adored, as she adored all of her grandchildren. She’d have told me to stop being embarrassed about myself, to be proud of what I’d done. And I am. Thanks, Mam.
Heart, Be at Peace by Donal Ryan is published by Doubleday. He will be in conversation with Alex Clark at the Pavilion Theatre in Dún Laoghaire, Co Dublin, on Thursday, August 15th
