Damian McNicholl's Backstory

"You can write but the manuscript’s too long, flirts with being a romance novel at times and the English woman near the end is too catoonish!" These words formed the nucleus of advice a friend—someone involved in publishing—gave me one evening after he’d read my first attempt at writing a novel. They were also the words that propelled me to write my next novel, A Son Called Gabriel.

In hindsight, that first novel was long and unwieldy, but at that moment, having spent over two years on it, I could not bear the idea of rewriting the thing yet again. As I crossed the field toward my own home, I resolved to show him I could write a novel that would get published. Next day as I sat at my desk the voice of a young Irish boy popped into my head. Right from the beginning I knew his name was Gabriel, and I seized my pen and began to write out his bio. After I’d finished and read it through, it became clear I had to write a story about my homeland. It would be Irish but, instead of being set in the Republic of Ireland as most Irish novels are, I wanted to write about Ulster at a time when the Catholic minority was marching in the streets for basic civil rights and were sometimes shot to death for it. That my parents were disenfranchised and treated as second-class citizens in the land of their birth was something I had willfully ignored for years, indeed I’d cleared off to law school in Wales as soon as I graduated high school so I could get away from the stench of bigotry, yet its insidiousness must have been percolating and I was now ready to write about it.

Gabriel told me from the very first paragraph that he was a very different Irish boy. For starters, he was very innocent and highly intelligent and realized early on that his Uncle Brendan’s past—a priest who’d left hastily for the African foreign missions—was connected to some dark family happening from which he and his siblings were forbidden to pry. He was also a bullied child and had to deal with his predicament alone because, in the pugnacious, machismo-centered North, his parents—particularly his father—expected him to fight and vanquish his enemies. And as he matured, Gabriel realized he was attracted to men, and this struggle over his sexuality and battle to overcome what he and the conservative Catholic community in which he grew up in regarded as a mortal sin was central to the book. This last plot element caused me to realize the novel would indeed be a different kind of Irish novel, because no contemporary Irish work that I knew of had ever dealt with the fears, torments and, yes, comical situations a young boy experiences when he is growing up gay in an environment both loving and hostile.

The writing went quickly and I completed the first draft in about four months. Less than two years later, I had an agent, the manuscript was on submission to major houses, and I’m not afraid to say it was passed on quite a bit. Some editors passed because of its Irishness and the fact there’d been a ‘big’ Irish book a few years earlier and, consequently, believed this would hurt it. Others could not get past the protagonist’s conflict about his sexuality and saw it as a ‘gay’ novel, and their correspondence would state things like, "I love his writing but unfortunately the market for gay fiction is soft currently, but if anything else of his should become available in the future, I’d love to see it." Those letters were particularly frustrating because I couldn’t believe editors could be so shortsighted and not recognize the work was a mainstream contemporary novel that happened to deal with a boy’s sexual confusion among other issues. However, everything worked out in the end because the publisher who took it recognized what I was trying to do and committed to publishing it right.

When I’m interviewed about the novel, some people ask whether Gabriel is me because it’s written in the first person and they feel the book reads like a memoir. (In my opinion, many novels written in the first person read a little like memoirs.) Of course, my experiences growing up in Northern Ireland form the skeleton of Gabriel’s character and life but, at the end of the day, the work is fiction. I actually say its fiction rooted in experience in that the characters are universally recognizable as Irish, but Gabriel is not me and his family are not my family.

Damian McNicholl is a novelist and attorney and maintains an author blog.