Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
The last word. With Life Pharmacy. Over 100 local pharmacies nationwide that are always here to help. Life Pharmacy. Live better together. We're delighted to have Seamus O'Reilly back with us. You may remember the last time he was with us. He'd written his memoir, Did You Hear Mammy Died? which was a bestseller, won the best biography at the 2021 Irish Book Awards.
He's been writing for a multitude of newspapers and websites.
Chapter 2: What is Seamas O'Reilly's debut novel about?
But now, he's become a novelist. Seamus, thank you very much for coming back to us. Was this always the ambition? Were you always working towards the novel?
Not sure of working towards it, but it was definitely something I knew I was going to, you know, get to eventually. A voracious reader my entire life, but always, you know, fitted between fiction and non-fiction, so... What do you read? Mostly, I would say at the moment, I read a lot of old stuff that I haven't gotten around to reading before.
And occasionally, obviously, I have to read stuff for work in terms of like reviewing books or interviewing authors. But most recently, I'd say a lot more nonfiction.
I think when you're writing fiction as well, you kind of, or I do anyway, a few authors I've spoken to have said this, you avoid reading too much contemporary fiction because you might magpie some details or start to feel like you're copying other trends or whatever. So just to make sure that you're original. Just to make sure that, yeah, because I'm probably, yeah, I'm a bit of a magpie.
I remember I had to read four Evelyn Waugh novels for a piece and I could see on the page when I was trying to, you know, accent it a little bit with, you know, one of the great literary prose stylists of the 20th century. And I thought, that's probably, that's enough of the Evelyn Waugh in the middle of writing my memoir, which has very little to do with the themes of Evelyn Waugh.
So I think most of the time I'm probably reading about two or three books at once. Usually two non-fiction, one fiction.
Hang on, where do you get time?
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Chapter 3: How did Seamas transition from memoir writing to fiction?
You have young children, don't you?
I do. I read them very slowly. And also audiobook is a lot. So if I'm going out running and, you know, kind of bantering around.
I'm fascinated by people now talking more and more about audiobook. And I presume Prestige Drama, are you reading it yourself? Given that there's so many different voices, male and female, in it.
Yes, well, I mean, I'm always very eager to shout out the audiobook because there is a sort of a, what would you call, a sort of a hinge character that goes throughout the book named Dermot. He's a screenwriter who's tackling this titular Prestige Drama about the Troubles, which is set in his hometown of Derry.
And so he's there and he's kind of back in Derry and you see in his version of events, you know, what's going through, the sort of doubts he has, the sort of influences he's had over his life in terms of, you know, this story and maybe where the story came from. But there's also then, interspersed with that, there are 13 characters who are just, you know, locals.
And what they think of the book, what they think, or rather what they think of the TV show, whether they think it's going to be an absolute, you know, hames, it's going to bring up all, you know, traumas, it's going to, you know, be a corny, Americanised thing.
Or whether they think it's going to be brilliant, it's going to bring money to the town, or they just don't care either way, but they want a job. Um, so each of those I do in the audio book, I read the Dermot chapters and then every other one is done by a different actor. So there's some great people, Ian McElhinney from, uh, Derry girls.
He might know as the granda who doesn't get along with Tommy Tiernan. Um, he's wonderful. Um, Frank McCafferty, we've got Kathy Keira Clark. So we really have, uh,
You have a cast, if this is turned into a movie or TV show, they've already done their auditions.
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Chapter 4: What influences Seamas's reading habits as a writer?
And especially because so many of them were from Derry. I think they kind of approached it with that tone and that sort of, that meter, that rhythm.
Okay, just tell us a bit more about the book, because is there a danger that now when people see something to do set in Derry, that they immediately think of Derry Girls and are going to start comparing it to Derry Girls?
I mean, that has happened to me with most of the stuff that I've done. But it's better to be compared to something like Derry Girls, which I love. And I think the good thing about Derry Girls is that I think it showed... I mean, and the North more broadly, but it showed a less dire, more, you know, fun, absurd, silly side of Derry, which is exactly the Derry that I grew up in.
And I think there's, there's elements of that in Prestige drama and in Did You Hear Mammy Died? Because Obviously, it's a novel that's about, you know, trauma and all that stuff. Anger, I would say, is there. Resentment, bitterness. But humour. But also about, yeah, it's humour and fun. And the whole, I want, probably I would say the compliment I want to hear first is that it's funny.
And anything else that comes after that is a bonus.
But it is a challenge, isn't it, as well, to get 13 different voices to make sure that they don't all seem the same. How much of a challenge was that for you as a writer?
I suppose it was, certainly initially as well, when I was really coming to form, okay, who are these cards? Who could they be? What would they have to say for themselves? But very often, it would be quite quick that they would settle. They would kind of congeal on the page into a specific person. Because you start off on this very broad, perhaps,
Or you've got someone in your head, or maybe it's a bit like, I don't know, anti-Pauline or whatever. But surprisingly quickly, they kind of cohere. And sometimes it can be a single phrase. It can be a single thing that they're doing. So there's a young actor in it called Turlock, and he's very...
angry young man, you know, he's bitter at not having the opportunities that other people might have. And he wants to be on this show, even though he seems to have no love for the script. He thinks he's above and above everything. He's that kind of character.
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Chapter 5: Who are the main characters in Prestige Drama?
An awful lot of the history of the time now has almost become politicised. Politicians and others are telling their truth as they see it. But I wonder how important is the role actually going to be of authors like yourself to get to the truth through fiction?
Well, I certainly hope we get a chance to add to the collective truth. I mean, I think the authors you mentioned, people like Susanna Dickey, Roisin Lanigan, I mean, there's just so many now. I don't know that many of us, if I can say us, I don't know that many of us would have been getting those opportunities even 10 years ago.
I think there has been a sea change and I think everyone has noticed it. Occasionally I'm asked if I... I think we're all asked as ambassadors of whatever this thing is, you know, why that is. I don't have a single answer. I think the fact that we get the chance to be, you know, ambassadors or witnesses is good.
I also think the fact that maybe if I could imagine that we're all maybe in that sort of mid thirties to mid forties kind of age bracket, we do straddle both of those things. We straddle the sort of say nothing era. And then the, you know, the ceasefire baby era as, as, as Lyra McKee once put it. And so I think that those, those perspectives are maybe slightly more fresh, um, in mind.
And also maybe they give us a confidence to talk about things in a slightly different way than our parents' generation. perhaps. But I just think that a few success stories, I would think of Anna Burns' Milkman and Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe, even though, of course, he's speaking as an American.
I think they had a huge effect because they knocked down a door of perhaps a perception that these stories were things that people, oh, we've heard so much about this, or it's always the same old story. And show that there could be, you know, in Patrick Radden Keefe's case, you know, deep and probing sort of, you know, investigative nonfiction.
Or in Anna Burns' case, you know, very challenging, quite progressive, you know, literary fiction about these things and about these places. And I think a lot of people perhaps in the industry said, oh, people don't mind reading this. Who else have we got lying around here? So I'm not saying that I directly trace, you know, any opportunities I've gotten from that thing.
But I think sometimes people have it in their heads that people don't want to hear about these things or that every story's been told. And it can take a few sort of disconnected things coming through and all of a sudden you see the wave. And it's people that were already there, but maybe now they're getting the opportunity to tell their stories. And I think thank God for that.
Although you've been living in London now for how long?
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