Discover the Magic Behind Billy O’Callaghan’s Writing in His Latest Interview

Billy O’Callaghan was born in Cork, Ireland, in 1974. He is the author of three short story collections: ‘In Exile’ (2008) and ‘In Too Deep’ (2009), both published by Mercier Press, and ‘The Things We Lose, the Things We Leave Behind’ (2013) published by New Island Books. His first novel, The Dead House, was published by Brandon Books in May 2017. ‘My Coney Island Baby’ was published by Jonathan Cape in 2019. ‘The Boatman and Other Stories’, published by Jonathan Cape in 2020, followed by ‘Life Sentences’ published by Jonathan Cape. His latest novel, ‘The Paper Man’, was published by Penguin Books in May 2023.

Tell us about your latest books?

In the spring of 2021, during the height of our lock-downs, Jonathan Cape published my novel, Life Sentences. This is a novel, told in three different first-person sections, based on the lives of my maternal grandmother, her father and his mother, and it’s the book I’ve wanted to write my whole life. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that it’s the reason I am a writer today.

When I was a child, up until the age of seven, I lived with my grandmother. She was only in her early sixties when she died, and by that stage had been widowed almost twenty years, but she could tell stories like no one I’ve ever known, and on rainy days or cold ones, or when I simply didn’t want to go to school (which was often, looking back), she’d keep me at home under the pretext of some cough or sneeze.

I’d sit at the fire and listen, awed, while she told me about ghosts, the fairies and the banshee, about the black and tans and the troubles that plagued the Ireland of her childhood, and about growing up in our village.

And she spoke often and with adoration of her father, who’d been born, she said, without a father, poor as the dirt, who fought with the Munster Fusiliers in the Boer War and then again, having returned home, married and started his family, at the Somme, and who died an old man, with a smile on his face.

Within all of that, a spark was lit in me. I didn’t come up in a home that understood the value of education, but there were always stories, and always encouragement and love. And I was taught, by example, that family is everything.

Years later, when I finally started writing stories of my own, the things my grandmother told me, especially about those who’d gone before her, and later on the things my mother passed along to me, were what most readily came to mind.

All that stopped me then was a lack of skill, and it took me another two decades of intense honing, writing every day, before I’d developed enough as a writer to be able to do them sufficient justice. It proved a tremendous, arduous and at times, during the research, truly shocking undertaking, and there were moments, in the writing when I almost could not go on, but the result tells of three generations of people, of the sort not commonly considered in Irish literature, from the mid 19th century through to the early 1980s, and in the process shines a light of how the country was during that period, and if there’s anything I’ve written that makes me proud, it’s this one.

The response to Life Sentences surprised and thrilled me. I’d seen it as such a personal story, and because of the rawness and unflinching nature of some of the subject matter there were moments ahead of publication when I’d worried that I’d perhaps exposed too much of my heart, so I wasn’t quite prepared for the reaction, and just how many people felt they could relate to what I’d written, how it seemed to mirror so much of their own pasts.

My latest novel, The Paper Man, was published at the beginning of May of this year. This, again, is a story I’ve carried around with me for a long time. I was fifteen when I first read about the Austrian footballer, Matthias Sindelar, one of the game’s early greats. A treasured Christmas present from my mother, a history of the World Cup the perfect gift for me, feeding my twin obsessions for the beautiful game and for books.

The entry on Sindelar was brief: his 1934 Wunderteam denied its destiny, kicked bloody and controversially beaten by a technically inferior Italian side on a San Siro pitch muddied to quagmire, a semi-final remembered now only for its disgracefully corrupt Mussolini-influenced refereeing.

The book made the rest of his intriguing story a footnote – found dead not five years later, with Europe on the brink of war, in suspicious circumstances that offered more questions than answers. And I read and was captivated.

A quarter of a century later, in June 2014, I visited Vienna for a short story conference (I’d recently published my third collection), and was offered a tour of the city by the parents of a local PhD student who was writing about some of my stories as part of her thesis.

Asked what I wanted to see, my mention of Sindelar met with blank looks. Nevertheless, calls were made and details gradually gathered, and that day we visited the Paper Man’s childhood home, his team’s stadium, the cafe he’d owned, even the apartment in which he’d died. And, with the sun setting, somewhere in an impossibly immense cemetery, I got to stand at his graveside.

The initial ideas for this novel date from then, though the daunting scale of it ensured a slow gestation. For me, Sindelar was as much myth as reality. The more I read about him, the more his apparent Jewishness intrigued me. In fact, he was Catholic but had grown up in a Jewish part of Vienna, played for the city’s Jewish club and seemed thoroughly immersed in that culture.

Once the story started taking shape in my head, I understood that for it to have resonance, it needed to connect with my world in some way. Then, while I was struggling with a viable plotline, that heartbreaking photograph of the little Syrian boy’s body washed up on a Turkish beach began to circulate and, thinking about refugees, I began to consider the plight of Sindelar’s closest friends with war imminent. And it was from this consideration that I found the answer I was seeking.

There is a small area of Cork city, just behind the docks, known as Jewtown, a cluster of small homes where Lithuanian Jews had settled after fleeing the Russian pogroms of the 1880s, and while it has long since lost its Jewish population, the place retains a particularly old-world feel. I knew a lot of people from the area and still have relations living there, and it was with this knowledge that I began to build a workable fiction around Sindelar’s facts. Once it occurred to me, the link felt natural.

The novel as it is now was polished during the Covid lock-down. Through much of the final rewriting, my mother, who’d all those years earlier inadvertently put The Paper Man into my hands, was waging a losing war with cancer, and a lot of the intensity of that time, sitting with her and trying to distract her with chat, feeling heartbroken for her but so grateful, too, for what we’d always had, couldn’t but work its way into sections of the book.

The Paper Man is a novel of love, war, exile, faith and even a little bit of football. It’s a mystery, a romance, and a remembrance, a portrait of pre-war Vienna and post-war Cork, and ultimately, more than anything, it’s a book about family and the bonds that hardship, distance and even death can’t break.

How have you evolved as a writer from when you first started to now?

I am getting better, I hope! Certainly, I have more confidence now, and feel more assured with an idea. For the first decade of my writing life, once I’d started to apply myself in a serious way to the work, I felt daunted by the thought of tackling a novel. And looking back, I was, I think, a lot of the time in a hurry, afraid I suppose that I’d lose my grip on the story I was writing if I lingered too long over it. Now I am happy to linger. Stories and novels take as long as they need. I work hard at it and am very disciplined, but I try not to set deadlines.

And with novels, especially, I’ve found that writing them slowly, often while I am also working on other things, is essential. Time is the gift that writing gives itself, because it allows the story to absorb those elements from the life around it that gives it its essential depth.

I don’t usually start writing until I’ve lived with my story for a long time. I like to let them form of their own accord, to the extent that the idea feels solid enough to be questioned and challenged.

Usually they emerge from long-time concerns, themes that I find myself wrestling with. And once I know I am going to want to write this idea to its fullest, I’ll start building the story. Mostly this is done late at night, lying in bed with old songs on the radio and sleep slow in coming. There’s no hurry. I let it show itself to me, until I know the characters and have a sense of the setting. Last to come is usually the point of view. How the story will be told, from what perspective and in what tense.

This last part is a trial and error process, but it’s really just considering things from every angle I can think of. Then I’ll break down the story to plot points, or chapters, try to tighten this for pacing, and then write 500 or 1000 word summaries of each step. This is essential if the story is a nonlinear narrative. When I am ready to start writing, I feel on solid ground. I keep a line of Bob Dylan’s always close: “I’ll know my song well before I start singing.” This way, at least I won’t get lost along the way.

Has there been any important lessons you’ve learned as a writer?

I’ve learned not to compare myself to others. Even if we’re all running the same race, we all start out from different points. Decide on your own measure of success. The work has to be the thing. I write for myself, I keep trying to set my bar high, and my goal is to satisfy myself first and foremost. Of course, once it’s ready for the world, I hope, firstly, that a publisher will like it enough to want to publish it, and secondly, that it’ll connect with readers.

But so much of that is beyond my control that there’s little point in worrying about it. It’s best to ignore trends. Everything is fleeting now, except excellence. There’s no sell-by date on that. For short stories, I’ll be reading the likes of Hemingway, Alice Munro, Chekhov, Updike, Flannery O’Connor, William Trevor, H.E. Bates, McGahern. Novels have other masters. And those I need are the ones who have something in their work that calls to me, whether it’s Garcia Marquez, Dickens,Ray Bradbury, Simenon, Anne Tyler or Patrick White. Or Louis L’amour. I’m not reading to impress but out of need.

Do you have any writing projects in the works?

Always. There are a couple of unfinished novels inching their way along, and short stories keep insisting on being written, though I am finding that they are often now too long to publish in journals. Everything, it seems, insists on opening wider and deeper than I’d ideally like. But they still need to be written, whatever becomes of them. And I’ve been thinking about another novel that I am putting off starting, because it’ll benefit from the idle time.

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Further Read: Review and Interview on The Dead House here

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