Galway writer Alan McMonagle chats with Hot Press about his debut novel Ithaca

Alan McMonagle is an extremely happy man, and has been that way ever since late November 2015. Not that the Galway-born writer was unhappy before then, necessarily, but he gleefully maintains that the last 16 months of his life have been all gravy.

This period of contentedness kicked off with a welcome phone call from his literary agent Ivan Mulcahy. “Yeah, I got this great piece of news and it sort of sent me into a tailspin,” he recalls. “It’s not every day Picador come knocking, you know? I think I’ve been spinning since, really.”

Picador were offering a relatively lucrative two-book deal. McMonagle’s debut novel, Ithaca – a darkly comic coming of age story set in post-boom Ireland – was launched just a few weeks ago. Although he already had two well-received short story collections under his belt, it’s all still something of a dream come true for the softly spoken 43-year-old. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s all good,” he smiles. “Every bit of it. I’ll roll with the punches if and when they come as well, but time has just blitzed by since I got the news. November 2015 and then suddenly it was March 9th, 2017. Launch day…”

We’re sitting over pints of Guinness in a Salthill bar not too far from where he spent his earliest years. His mother is from Sligo and his father is a Longford man, but they had Alan while they were both students in UCG (three sisters eventually followed).

“My parents were still in college when I was born,” he explains. “So the house I grew up in was floor to ceiling bookshelves. They were both movie buffs as well. I remember my dad plonking me in front of the TV from a very early age. Mum would be reciting stuff to me. Sadly, they didn’t ultimately stay together, but it’s all good now.”

He started writing short stories at a very young age. “I was doing my own thing with all of this. I was churning out these minor epics, juvenile sagas, as a young lad, but at the age of 12 I just stopped. Teenage years kicked in. That whole barrelful of distractions and so forth.”

After graduation his father got a teaching job in Longford, which is where Alan spent his formative years. “I didn’t write anything at all in my teens,” he reflects. “All I remember is just wanting to be out all the time. I was a bit of a townie like that. Hung around with a couple of guys, and we just did typical teenager things. Played games, teased girls, had fun.”

He returned to the city of his birth after his Leaving Cert. “I was restless and I wanted to get away at all costs so I signed up for a business degree here in Galway,” he explains. “I still don’t know why. I never really used it. I spent my twenties more or less drifting. Worked as an office slave, packing shelves, floor sweeping, the usual over the counter jobs. I remember a stint selling greeting cards.

“I did some travelling, too. I lived in London for a year, and in Australia for a year. I travelled around the rim of the country, hitchhiked up and down Ireland. I visited New Zealand, a couple of parts of Africa and Southeast Asia. The film The Motorcycle Diaries with the young Che Guevara going from Buenos Aires to Havana – I did that trip in reverse. Started in Havana, ended up in Buenos Aires.”

Travelling was actually what got McMonagle back into writing again. “I started doing articles for a couple of UK based travel publications. I recall one called Outdoor Adventure Guide. Yeah, feature length pieces about certain parts of the world with a particular angle.”

He put a lot of work into his travel articles, but it wasn’t until he turned 30 that he even began to consider writing as a potential career.

“I’d been lashing out the articles. I got to know one of these editors over in England and she was a great encouragement. I remember her saying to me at one point, ‘Alan, this is a snowboarding feature article on the Alps that you’re writing, not War and Peace!’ So that comment struck home and got me thinking.

“The MA in writing was up and going in NUI Galway at the time. I thought that might be a good way to knock some of the restlessness out of myself. So I applied, submitted some of my writing samples, and got a place.

Adrian Frazier was running it, and there were people like Mick McCormack, Michael Gorman, James Ryan and Mary O’Malley lecturing. And, as I suspected, it kept me at the desk for lengthier stretches. I got a bit of focus and discipline and concentration going.”

By the time he finished the year, his file portfolio comprised about a dozen short stories which formed the spine of his first collection. Liar, Liar was published by Galway indie Wordsonthestreet in 2008. “It sold nothing, but it gave me a lot of confidence because small presses sail so close to the wind all the time and they have to be so careful and picky about what they publish. I thought I was all set to lash out my first novel and then nothing happened as far as that was concerned. I was still in short story mode. But what I did do, the restlessness kicked in again and I had to get out of town. So I spent most of 2010 abroad in two or three writing residencies.”

Following lengthy stints in places such as the Banff Centre in Canada and Yaddo in New York, McMonagle returned to Galway and continued to write. A second collection called Psychotic Episodes was eventually published by Arlen House in 2014. “That one picked up a little bit of notice, garnered a few reviews, and crucially it caught the eyes of some festival organisers, so I started to get invited to read at a few events and festivals.”

Ithaca came about following a drunken challenge put to him by three fellow scribes at the 2013 Dromineer Literary Festival in Tipperary. “I was put on the platform with none-other than Julian Gough, Donal Ryan and Paul Lynch,” he recalls. “They were schlepping novels around at the time and I had rocked up with my second collection of short stories. The four of us hit it off in the bar afterwards. They playfully, collectively, threw down the gauntlet: ‘Have a good go now at the novel!’ So I literally cleared away 2014 and said, ‘I’m just gonna do nothing else this year.’”

McMonagle lives with a very supportive girlfriend, but also admits to having a fairly frugal lifestyle. “It’s tough to make a living as a writer,” he shrugs. “You sell the odd body part, and a couple of arts officers have been very good to me. I was giving writing classes, the odd bursary, selling the odd story. It’s erratic and sporadic all the time, but all you want is enough.”

Of course, the Picador deal changed everything. The reviews so far for Ithaca have been universally strong, with many comparing it favourably to Pat McCabe’s The Butcher Boy, and his follow-up novel is now in its second draft. “I feel like I’m getting a life out of writing now,” says Alan, taking a satisfied sip of stout. “And I’m gonna be able to for the foreseeable future. Not that I think that far ahead to begin with. And there are also the usual things that have kept me going until now anyway. It’s made all the early effort worthwhile.”

Ithaca is published by Picador.