An Insightful Look at Billy O’Callaghan’s Life and Work 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.

What you’ve been up to since we last spoke?

Since the interview back in 2017, an enormous amount has happened. My novel My Coney Island Baby was published by Jonathan Cape in 2019 and in practical terms changed everything for me. I’d worked on it for eight years, certain for almost the entirety of that time that it’d never see the light of day. Up to that point it was by far the most personal work I’d done, a real mining of the psyche – written to make sense of who I was and what my life had come to, albeit with a degree of abstract shielding, and cutting very close to the bone as it did, nothing could have made me abandon it.

During those years, it was what I most desperately needed to write, regardless of what it was going to amount to. I trembled with passion for it, and would lie awake at night with it, and it proved the most tremendous writing education. In the four years of intense work between the short stories that comprised my second collection (In Too Deep in 2009) and those of my third (The Things We Lose, The Things We Leave Behind in 2013) it had become apparent to me that I’d taken a giant step forward with the craft, and with this novel, and with the short stories I’d worked on in tandem, that advancement was further magnified.

I wrote My Coney Island Baby alongside other work, the short stories that gradually formed my next book, a collection called The Boatman and Other Stories, published by Cape in 2020, as well as the first hesitant steps toward other things that would eventually find their own shape as novels, giving it all the time it needed to reveal itself most fully to me, and for the longest time I didn’t want to let it go. In fact, through most of the years I worked on it, I never allowed myself to believe it’d ever be finished.

Actually, I was so absorbed with it that I couldn’t for a while see that it was finished. The last stage was one of desperation, after I’d spent a month or so taking things out and putting them back. Finally, I hit on the idea of printing out the manuscript in ten-point single space font, cutting the whole thing up and blu-tacking it paragraph by paragraph to the bare plasterboard eves of my parents’ attic space.

And every morning for the following few weeks I would climb up there and by torchlight read the entire thing from beginning to end, over and over, taking down paragraphs here and there, moving passages and moving them back, scribbling notes. And eventually I began to see that I had strayed beyond any sensible extreme, and understood that it was done.

I’ve been stunned and thrilled at the reception the book has had, both at home and internationally, being shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature’s Encore Award, finding publication in the U.S. with Harper and enjoying translation into (so far) nine languages.

Tell us about your latest books?

In the spring of 2021, during the height of our lockdowns, 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.

Can you talk about your upbringing?

My background is unexceptional. I come from an ordinary working class family and have never been to university. I left school at 17 and worked in factories and on building sites with electrical contractors. I suppose we are all, to some degree, shaped by our backgrounds, and growing up in Cork in the 1970s and 80s, a place fairly mired in recession, the value of education wasn’t fully understood or appreciated.

It was nothing like the poverty of previous generations, but neither was it anything close to the affluence enjoyed by the generations to come, and an older mindset still prevailed. You had your level, and for the most part didn’t expect to rise above that. From a very young age, though, I was obsessed with reading, and captivated by books.

All of my learning has been trial and error, and by voraciously reading. We lived with my grandmother, my mother’s mother, who died when I was seven, and she’d frequently keep me at home from school and instead fill my mornings with tales of her childhood, and of her father, of the Black and Tans, the Banshee, fairy forts and of her brother’s slow death at a young age, after he’d fallen from the back of a goat.

Those were the stories that first lit my fire, and I can hear them even now, in my head, being told in her voice. This experience, and listening even still to the stories my father tells, of growing up in poverty as one of sixteen children in a two-bedroom house, is what influences me when I sit down to write, and maybe drives me, because it has an authenticity and a sense of reality that I crave in my own stories.

As a child, and even in my teens, writers to me were like people from a different planet. I’d read books by the likes of Steinbeck, Hemingway, Ray Bradbury and Louis L’Amour (some my favourites, then and still), and never believed I could become a real writer. Even their names sounded exotic, slightly unreal; certainly no one in Cork had such names. But by my teens I had started dabbling, and by my mid 20s I’d started getting occasional stories published in magazines here in Ireland.

My first story was published in 1999, and that gave me immense encouragement. A lot of rejection followed, of course, before my first collection, ‘In Exile’ was published in 2008, but there were enough bright moments along the way to keep me moving forward.

Since then, I’ve published two more collections, ‘In Too Deep’ in 2009 and ‘The Things We Lose, The Things We Leave Behind’ in 2013, which earned a 2013 Irish Book Award.

Take us through your writing process..

It takes me a long time to write a story. Longer, it seems, with each passing year. Ideas tend to overtake me like shadows, and need the space of weeks or even months to solidify. The reason I write at all is to better understand the story that is trying to invade my mind, and so I work on it, over and over, until I have heard all it needs to say. Listening is critical. I’ve learned that I can’t force the process, or rush it. I need to have a sense of the characters before I start, and I need to be able to visualise the scenes.

I learned to write purely by doing, by reading and writing. For the past few years I force myself to keep a rigid schedule, five hours a day, every day, without excuse. I work best in the mornings, and am generally started by 7 am. But in terms of what gets produced, my way of working is utterly blind. I proceed by instinct, and let myself be led along by the feel and rhythm of the sentences.

I like to write with a theme or themes in mind, though it’s more organic a process than this makes it sound, because the sense of the theme will often be vague, more of a feeling than anything else, and usually it will take several drafts before I have a full grasp of what I’m writing about.

I rewrite as I go, so I am not one of those writers who produces clear and distinctive drafts. By the time I have achieved a clean first draft the story has already been rewritten probably a dozen times. And that’s often just the beginning. Part of the reason why they take a long time to write is because I have to wait for them to reveal themselves to me, and to decide on their own direction.

There’s a lot of trial and error, and a lot of wrong roads followed, but that’s what it takes. This isn’t ideal, because it’s not easy to really get inside a story, but it’s the only way I know how to do it, and when it all comes together it’s very satisfying. Also, nobody gets to read my work until it is published. I don’t want feedback, or comments, not while the ink is still wet. These are my stories, for better or worse.

Time, I’ve discovered, has modified my expectations. I still suffer from a chronic lack of confidence, but as the years have passed I’ve grown a little more comfortable with my insecurities.

Once I’ve finished a story, I naturally hope that it’ll be published, and appreciated, but those things are beyond my control and I’ve learned that what matters most to me, more than anything else really, is the work itself, and getting it right.

My only real ambition for the stories now, the single challenge I demand of myself, is that they seem truthful. I want people to believe that they are reading about real moments, real lives, that they are glimpsing something genuine. If I can come even close to achieving this, then that is enough.

Was there a defining moment in your life when you decided you wanted to become a writer or when you actually said to yourself, I am a writer?

From my young childhood, probably once I’d discovered the local library, I wanted to write books. To me, then, books were a kind of sorcery, and I think and hope that a little of that belief still survives within me. But at the same time, it felt like an impossible dream. Even when I started writing stories, I couldn’t equate, even at the most basic level, what I was doing with what real writers did.

But I had a compulsion, and for years I just wrote, for hours every day. Even after my first and second books had been published, though, I’d have been shy about calling myself a writer.

My most recent book changed things for me, not because of the little bit of recognition it enjoyed but because I can read the stories without fixating on flaws. The first two books were and remain very important to me for different reasons, but with the third collection I felt that I’d really begun to mature as a writer. It’s not perfect – what book ever will be? – but I worked very hard on it and it’s the closest I’ve come to getting down on paper what I’d hoped to achieve. And if I’m honest, it’s the book of which I am most proud.

Has there any challenges you’ve had to overcome on your path to becoming a writer?

Every day is a challenge, even now. I live a relatively frugal life, and have learned to get by on whatever I can earn. The most basic minimum wage job would probably afford a better lifestyle, but it’s about the choices we make. For a writer, the time to write is everything, for better or worse. And I am pretty single-minded.

But the challenges don’t stop there. With the length of story I tend to write, maybe five or six thousand words, even longer, I generally rule myself out of the magazine market here in Ireland, and have to look abroad, and mainly to the U.S. or Britain. Breaking through is hard, and you have to do it again and again. Unless you happen to be an overnight success, or are blessed with all the necessary connections, each new story, each new book has to survive the slush pile.

But that’s part of the game, and even though the rejections sting, and occasionally draw blood, they only serve to heighten the sweetness of the acceptances, when they come.

Any final writerly words of wisdom?

Nowadays, you’d have to be deluded to get into writing short stories with the idea or the intent of making easy money, because that well has long since dried up. It’s a buyers’ market now, with supply far exceeding demand. Even prestigious literary journals tend to have very low readership figures, and it’s often said that the only people buying copies are aspiring writers hoping to get their own work accepted.

That strikes me as a dangerous trend, because it does little to entice the general reading populace. And so many writers are desperate to get their work published that journals and magazines can get away with paying a pittance, or even less.

And everything is sales-driven now. Beckett’s first book, the short story collection, ‘More Kicks Than Pricks’, sold abysmally. I have seen it claimed that the book sold just 43 copies, and even if this is a number exaggerated to make a point, then it’s also pretty clear that the truth wouldn’t have been a lot higher.

Today, if a first book sold that badly, the likelihood of that writer getting the chance to publish again would be less than slim. If that had been the situation back then, the reality would be a world without Godot.

Of course, few publishers now will take a risk on work like that anyway, so we have to wonder how many Beckett-types fall through the cracks every year.

I try not to worry about these things. I can’t control the market, or whether or not there will be interest in my work. I can only control what I write. Even if I knew they would never see the light of day I’d have still written every story in my last collection. They’re for me, before they’re for anyone else. When I start a new story, I work under the assumption that nobody will ever get to read it. This is how I function.

With that mindset, I only have myself to please, I have no inhibitions about my subject matter, no limit on how much time I spend trying to get inside a story, and no eye on any market. The main thing for me at this stage in my life is to make sure the work is as good as I can make it. And by continuing to do that, I’ll eventually have enough stories for another collection, if I am lucky enough to find a publisher to take it on.

Update: Billy’s latest novel ‘The Paper Man’ is out now.

Recommended: Billy O’Callaghan on His Latest Books

Read a Review & Interview: The Dead House Here

Read a Review & Interview: ‘The Things We Leave, The Things we Leave Behind’

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