MJ Hyland grew up in chaos - moving from Ballymun to Melbourne, and from alcohol to heroin. Now shortlisted for the Man Booker prize, she tells Louise East about her journey from excess to success
When the Man Booker prize shortlist was announced recently, there was more talk about the omissions than the contenders. No Peter Carey. No Nadine Gordimer. No David Mitchell. Instead the list was top-heavy with writers even the well-read had trouble placing.
Chief among these was MJ Hyland, author of Carry Me Down, a compelling, unsettling tale of a six-foot tall, 11-year- old boy who believes he's a human lie detector. Set in Gorey, Co Wexford and the Ballymun flats of the 1970s, Carry Me Down is simultaneously hyper-real and curiously placeless, and initially at least, there's something similarly enigmatic about the book's author.
Neither the dust jacket of this novel nor a previous work, How The Light Gets In, carries an author photograph. Those initials - MJ - offer no clue as to gender or background. Websites, including those of Hyland's publisher and the Man Booker Prize, are fairly definite about the writer being born in 1968 in London to Irish parents but offer Melbourne, Manchester and London as current cities of residence. When I call to arrange an interview, I am given a number in Rome.
As it turns out, MJ is Maria Joan who lives in Manchester but is currently in Rome on a six-month scholarship from the Australian government. She uses MJ because Maria Hyland "sounds really wet" and steers clear of an author photo because her friends tell her she looks like a terrified rabbit in pictures ("And if even my friends think that . . . ").
But whatever small intrigue is lost in clearing up those small details is richly compensated for by a life story as unlikely as it is baroque. At various times in her life, Maria Joan Hyland has sent death threats, burnt down toilets, presented television programmes, used heroin and taught criminal law.
Given that most Booker nominees have little to reveal except a wicked tendency to eavesdrop and a terrible addiction to filter coffee, Hyland is perfect publicity fodder, not least because she talks about her own crimes and misdemeanours with wry, straightforward insight.
And yet, and yet . . . what a shame it would be if the writing were overshadowed by the life. So here's the deal. The next few paragraphs concern only fiction not biography; if you're prurient, or believe that the two are wholly unrelated, you can skip them.
Carry Me Down's startling voice is that of 11-year-old John Egan, a sincere yet unreliable narrator in the tradition of Francie in Pat McCabe's The Butcher Boy or Christopher in Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. Initially he appears simply to be full of a naïve prescience but gradually, in tiny, acid drops, we begin to wonder whether something darker is going on.
"It was never my intention to have a child narrator, and oddly, I still don't think of him as a child," says Hyland. Six months after embarking on a novel about a 40-year-old man en route to a live television demonstration of his lie-detection abilities, she wrote a flashback scene to his childhood. "It was at that point, 33,000 words in, that the novel started."
So for all its specificity about life seen through a child's eyes, Hyland's interest lay not in childhood but in: "Lying and perversity. The fascism of thought that comes with any absolutism, in this case, John's belief in a perfect ideal of truth. I wanted, too, to write about people's desire to be famous at any cost."
Much of the novel's considerable strength lies in our not knowing exactly what is going on in John's family, but Hyland is well aware she is taking a risk. "That ambiguity is frustrating for many readers but I wanted it to be utterly believable as fiction yet also, like life, utterly confusing."
No surprise then that she lists Kafka, Camus, Dostoevsky and Hesse among her touchstone authors, nor that she did not permit anyone to read a first draft of the novel until she established their opinion of John McGahern's The Dark.
"I don't cry very often, but I cried when I heard McGahern was dead," she says simply.
As far as a writing process goes, she tends to write a long first draft very fast, spending the rest of the three years it usually takes her to write a novel, "methodically, painstakingly and deliberately pruning and re-writing. I don't plan. I have no family trees pinned to the wall above my desk. I'm not interested in geography and I do no research until the very last stages."
Helpfully, she then volunteers: "I've never been to Gorey, so that's all made up, although a cousin who lives there helped me out. And I never lived with my grandmother."
She did, however, live in Ballymun, which leads us neatly back to that life-story. Born in London, to an alcoholic and terminally unemployed father and a mother who "tried her best, to use her own favourite phrase", Maria and her family moved briefly to Australia, then to Dublin, where they lived until she was 11. "My memories of Dublin are reasonably good," she muses of her time in the Ballymun flats and Woodlawn Park, near Tallaght. "I remember one teacher, when I told him I was moving to Australia, said he might as well give me the cane one last time. But he did encourage me to read."
It's one of Hyland's endearing qualities that she is quick to praise anyone who gave her a helping hand despite being what she describes as "a miserable worm of a human being".
Between the ages of 13 and 16, she joined a Melbourne girl gang (the majority of whom are now in prison) who sent death threats to other students (Hyland was caught because she misspelt one of her victims' names in the police hand-writing test), committed arson, stole, drank and took drugs.
"Somehow, during that time, I never let go of the idea that I wanted something better than my father's life," Hyland says. "Given the choice of heroin and speed, some low level of self-preservation would make me take the speed because it was a little safer."
As to why she cut loose so spectacularly, Hyland is precise. "I grew up in chaos, My childhood was unpredictable and full of petty crime, a mad sort of world. It was inevitable I re-enacted it. Sadly, that's what children do."
Co-existing with the chaos was an urge towards self-betterment which saw Hyland enrol in speech and drama classes and spend her afternoons knocking on the doors of good, fee-paying schools until they relented and took her in.
In one, shortly after she was "busted by the police for reasons too long and tedious to go into", a teacher gave her a lift home. "I invited her in for one reason, and that was because I knew what she would see." No food, no parents, no books on the shelves - it was enough to make the teacher offer her a place to live for a year, during which Hyland enjoyed for the first time, "a desk to study at, nutritious food, a night of undisturbed sleep".
With this encouragement, she won herself a place to study law at the University of Melbourne, deferred it and promptly set about "making a nearly irreversible mess of my life. Drugs. Alcohol. Moving jobs. A complete lack of consistency. I guess I wasn't quite ready to join the middle classes," she says dryly.
Getting the sack from a short-lived career as a television presenter ("I was a lot more charismatic back then") coincided with her three-year deferral coming to an end, and finally, Hyland got back on track. She became a "bona fide lawyer in a suit".
Why law? "I wanted to be Atticus Finch."
She kept it up for seven years; practising, teaching criminal law, writing fiction on the side. "There's a few things I regret about my 20s, and chief among them is the lack of respect I showed in the work I took on. I came in late, I left early, I slept in the sick bay during the day. I didn't have a hope in hell of being a good lawyer, not least because I was up all night writing a novel."
When her first novel, How The Light Gets In, was published in 2003, she was "deeply disappointed" with the reception it received, despite several ecstatic reviews and award nominations.
To her annoyance, most readers and reviewers thought the novel was purely autobiographical, an easy assumption given the similarity between her narrator's tangled upbringing and her own.
"Some facts are the same but unlike Lou, I'm in no way gifted and I can't play chess," she says bluntly. "Because it was told in the first person, present tense everyone presumed it was this untutored thing written with no authorial control whatsoever. It floored me."
The publication of Carry Me Down has been a much more pleasant experience, not least because she worked with editors she likes and admires, most notably, her partner, Stewart Muir, an anthropologist engaged in post-doctoral research in Manchester. "He's a brilliant, insightful reader."
When Jamie Byng - from her publishers, Canongate - rang with news of her Booker nomination, she was in the shower and behaved "like a drunk caveman. Nobody was more surprised than myself to be on it. Just like that, so many things have changed about the book's reception."
That's certainly true; even an appearance on the shortlist guarantees a vastly increased audience and financial rewards but for Hyland, who is currently at work on a third novel which she estimates will be finished in June ("unless it's a total dog"), it also means the pressure is on. "I do worry that Carry Me Down is my best, career-defining novel, but there's not much I can do about that. I have to write novels. I have to do it."
She laughs, then says briskly. "Anyway. Enough mooning."
Carry Me Down is published by Canongate priced £9.99 in UK