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I was recently at a film event where I was introduced to a great producer and a great actor. The actor said, “this is Patrick, he has a book coming out soon.”
The producer looked me up and down and said, “You took your time.”
His game time – unlike my writing time – was very good. I laugh when I think about it. He was the type of person who prided himself on “telling it like it is”. And this is what he said: I am 51 years old. I have lived for half a year. I forget about this unless I’m past the scene, but I’m grizzled. I don’t feel disappointed. There is none he feels frustrated. As the kind and wise Terry Pratchett once wrote, “Inside every old man is a young man wondering what happened.”
Why is my first book coming so late? For some of my late starter friends there is a gender aspect. My favorite authors are all women – Louise Kennedy, Tessa Hadley, Toni Morrison. In many cases, mothers have parental responsibilities and parental attitudes to deal with before they go anywhere. My reasons for being late as a married man with no children are probably very good. I was in my early 20’s and that’s where the creative energy went. There is a half-lost book, which has been left in a room in north Dublin, but it is probably a lost remnant. It was about a man in his 20s who was very drunk and used to talk about “organizations”.
My musical experience was interesting, though. There is a business that makes one feel old. I’ve never felt older than I did in my mid-20s playing indie music. As my 20’s progressed, I felt like I had “the best” on my forehead and that my time was running out. It was true news in the world of indie rock when someone had a hit record at the age of 30. “Jarvis Cocker is 31 years old!” we all said when Interior came through with Ake ‘n’ Ake.
Thus, my band had already started listening when I was 26. When we started playing the guitar at the age of 22, we asked our female friends., “Does Jeremy make us look younger?”
“We think they make you look older,” they said sadly.
During this time I was doing a master’s in music and taking a music course where writer/teacher Donnacha Dennehy said, “The great thing about classical music is that you’re still considered a young composer until you’re 40.”
I took it a little too seriously. I decided to think that there are areas where young people have different roles and put them in the future. In my 30s, I had so much energy that I could have written a book to write a personal journal. I had a job to do and I needed to save another job from the rocktacular wreckage of the 20’s.
It took me until my 40s before I started to try outdoor writing again. I wrote a film with my brother. I wrote short stories that were published in some of Ireland’s most well-written books. My first book, a series of stories called OK, Let’s Do Your Stupid Idea, was published in 2020 and was shortlisted for the Dalkey Emerging Writers prize because the editors kindly chose the word “up and coming” instead of “young” for the award. This was a great move. However, I still put the idea that “out” means “small”. I was only 45 at the time and because of my looks I was, and still am, surprised that I wasn’t named as a novelist – the next Sally Rooney.
I, it must be said, was probably the first hip young Irish bookworm to travel with an anti-sleep machine. Isn’t it possible that I’m just making a sleep machine like my young friends did with collars and mustaches? Also: mullets and mustaches are easy. Take it again combover and bifocal glasses, they scare you.
Although it is not mentioned as much as it is in music, there is still a youth group in literature. Everyone is always looking for the next big thing, the young voice of the generation. In my darkest moments, I wonder why Me it cannot be celebrated as the voice of my generation. I agree that Generation X already has enough voices to represent them – Douglas Coupland and Kurt Cobain and Elizabeth Wurtzel and Kathleen Hanna and Johnny Knoxville and David Eggers, all of whom had the good grace to be voices born in their 20s, but what have they done for us lately? We’re looking for speakers right now, people with sore and sad knees!
Unsurprisingly I love stories about artists passing through later in life. Louise Kennedy, author of the incredible Trespasses and now Stations, was a cook who had never even considered writing until a friend brought her to a writing workshop at the age of 45. Turns out she’s a genius. Tessa Hadley’s brilliant debut novel Homeless was published when she was 46 but she said nothing about Penelope Fitzgerald, whose first novel was published aged 61.
It’s tempting right now to say that because I’m a great starter myself, I’m as good as Kennedy, Hadley and Fitzgerald, but the truth is that a late start is no more a sign of quality than a lack of consistency. I think being great at work brings others goodness. I’m confident in what I like these days and I’m very fond of my nationalistic views (“Of course, this guy’s politics are simple. We don’t want him to look like an idiot,” said my well-meaning editor at one point. mine politics,” I replied.)
In short, my book also covers stories that can relate to middle age. It’s a great look at a group of Gen-X musicians climbing the mountain, dealing with their forgotten promise, their grief, their failures, their lack of insight, guilt, betrayal and death. You know, trendy things for teenagers.
But it goes much further than that – it’s a book with many voices from the perspectives of several people throughout the city – financial, homeless, carers, priests, children, wolves, God. It includes many things I have learned about Dublin and the people who live there as a resident and a street reporter. I believe it is a sad, funny, wonderful book about community and art and aging. I think if I had written it in my 20s I would have put the story in a first-person narrator rather than a kaleidoscopic musical – although I can steer things through the first-person narrator if I want to (just look at this story).
There are other advantages to being a first-time author at age 51. Sometimes I see writers my age complain that their new job has been overshadowed by their writing promise. I have no such worries. I will not be overshadowed by my teenage contributions, unless a book can be overshadowed by ramshackle indies. I am also sure that no one is pretending to like my work because of my good looks. Although full disclosure: I hesitated to write it. Even though I’m sitting here, next to an invisible place of any kind, I can’t believe that this is true.
