Book Review & Interview: The Things We Lose, The Things We Leave Behind

Title: The Things We Lose, The Things We Leave Behind
Author: Billy O'Callaghan
Genre: Fiction, Short Stories
Publisher: New Island Press
Release Date: February 18, 2014
Format: Digitial & Paperback
Pages: 228

Book Review:

The Things We Lose, The Things We Leave Behind is collection of masterfully written short stories by Billy O’Callaghan. Each of the thirteen stories, while told mostly from the perspective of a middle aged man, are all very different and touch on what some might consider the darker aspects of life such as bereavement, cancer, divorce, longing, mid-life crisis and miscarriage.

Although O’Callaghan’s prose is infused with rawness and melancholy he also displays moments of insight and profundity which could only come from the mind of one who has known intimately the heartache and loss experienced by the characters he writes about. Reading about the couple dealing with the loss of a child in ‘We’re Not Made of Stone’, and again in ‘Icebergs’, was so close to the bone that I literally had to put the book down to process the emotions it brought up.

Read The Hero Returns (related link)

Some people live their whole lives crippled by depression without even knowing it. The signs can be subtle. And we’re flesh and blood, you know Maggie. We’re not made of stone.

Many might expect with a collection of short stories by an Irish author that they would be set in idyllic surrounds with the ubiquitous rain sodden fields being lashed by gales from the Atlantic Ocean, or claustrophobic towns somewhere in the Midlands. But the stories contained within The Things We Lose, The Things We Leave Behind are set in diverse places such as Taiwan, New York, and Spain giving it a very international flavour as well as wind-swept islands off the West of Ireland.

It is O’Callaghan’s way with words and his ability to convey mood as well tone in the story which is his greatest strength as a writer. All throughout the book I came across such writerly gems as..

Lately though, I’ve been coming to understand that life really might be less about destination than the journey. Keep Ithaca always in your mind. That’s a realisation, perhaps even a kind of wisdom, which only comes with time, and may be one of the main reasons why this story took so long to write. In the end, if it amounts to anything at all, it is my attempt to explain and hopefully gain some understanding of who I was at twenty-seven, a wild-eyed child learning to swim amongst the big waves. A stranger, it seems, from the vantage of settled middle-age. Until I look closely.

or this..

Our pasts pool around our ankles, dragging at every forward step we take, but it doesn’t do to dwell too deeply on what has gone before, even if we sometimes use those past events to explain or excuse the things we’ve done. So much has happened to me here, enough to chase me away, enough to call me back.

Usually with collections of short stories there are hits as well as misses. This wasn’t the case for me with this book. I was fully drawn into each story but there were a few that stood out such as ‘Keep Well to Seaward’, ‘For Old Times’ Sake’, ‘Icebergs’ and the last story which gives its name to the collection. O’Callaghan’s work has given me a renewed appreciation for short story as a form. Superlative writing from a master short story writer.

Interview with the Author

You explore a lot of dark themes in your work, how much of these are reflections of your own life or are you just drawn to the shadow aspect of the human psyche?

The stories in ‘The Things We Lose, The Things We Leave Behind’ generally emerged from the things I’d been thinking about for a long time, and are definitely the most personal I’ve written. They are undoubtedly dark, but I don’t really see the darkness, I just see the story. There’s an element of autobiography about a number of the stories, but in essence rather than fact. The writing was my way of making sense to myself of the things that concerned me, and maybe, through that, getting a better sense of myself. To find out, as one of the characters put it in Saul Bellow’s late novella, The Theft, “who it is that’s at the middle of me.”

Some of the stories were entirely fictional, others, or parts of others, were triggered by things that happened, to me or to others around me. Sometimes they took shape simply from thinking about life, and the past, and what the future might hold. Regrets and mistakes are the things that people tend to dwell on, I suppose, and these are often good fodder for stories. I’ve had my share of regrets and mistakes, the same as everyone else, and writing helps to make sense of them.

I am interested in how people cope in the face of terrible and traumatic situations, how they find the strength to go on, and just how much of themselves they lose in the process. In life, and I hope in my stories, the past haunts the present, and compromise always comes at some cost. But maybe that’s the price of survival.

And I am also fascinated by the mechanics of how people interact, how and why relationships are held together and how and why they break apart. Are we all in some way connected, or are we each our own little world, only really noticing one another in our moments of collision? We’re all driven by our emotions, but how much of this keeps to a surface level and how much goes deeper is really anyone’s guess. We turn on the television, see horrific and heart-wrenching images from some third world famine or civil war, and find ourselves moved to tears. But an hour or a day later it’ll have been forgotten, or lessened, because it doesn’t truly impact on our lives. What does that say about us?

The key for me in finding my way into the collection was the title story. Of the stories in the book it was one of the first I’d written, in mid to late 2009, I think, and as soon as it was done I knew I’d written something that I’d always wanted to write. It just felt bigger than what was on the page, and I knew the world of the story inside out, I knew the characters in an entirely new way. So it set the bar at a new height for me in terms of moving forward, and it also gave me a new understanding of what I could do with a story.

Once I’d really started to think in terms of a cohesive book, knowing my direction really helped enormously when it came to writing the remaining stories. The last few stories I finished for the book were ‘Lila’ and ‘Farmed Out’, both of which took a very long time to write, and ‘Keep Well To Seaward’, the collection’s longest story, which was written in a ten-week burst a few months after I’d already submitted the ‘final’ manuscript. I was able to write these stories, all of which were full of challenges to me, because by then my vision for the book, how I wanted it to be, was so clear – to the point of overwhelming, really – in my mind.

Read a free sample of The Things We Lose, The Things We Leave Behind below..

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