(Not) the true history of the Kelly Gang

Like any quality bildungsroman, Julia Kelly’s first book With My Lazy Eye proves that if you’ve got strong characterisation and prose chops, you can do without high-concept pyrotechnical plotting. This stylishly written debut sold out its first printing within a month of publication and recently earned Kelly a Best Newcomer nomination in the Irish Book Awards, while John Banville bestowed a generous blurb upon the jacket, proclaiming her “the freshest voice in Irish fiction since the wonderful early novels of Edna O’Brien”.

“I read The Sea while I was writing this book,” Kelly admits. “I’d read very little Banville before, and I absolutely adored it, that got me through writing this book. Really inspiring. I was a little bit worried when he agreed to look at my book. Of course I didn’t plagiarise him or anything, but I was thinking, ‘Not only is he going to say this is nonsense, but it’s poorly plagiarised nonsense!’ I was so scared about him getting back to me, but thank god he was okay with it.”
Who else would she consider her literary masters? “Oh, let’s see. I love Jonathan Franzen. Raymond Carver, I love the way there’s so much not said. Ian McEwan. Dorothy Parker. Joan Didion, The Year Of Magical Thinking.”
Julia, the daughter of the late politician and attorney general John Kelly, and the sister of singer-songwriter and music advertising maestro Nick, studied English, Sociology and Journalism in Dublin, spent her wild years in London, and currently resides in Bray with her partner, the painter Charlie Whisker. Born in 1969, she came of age in the 1980s, and her book paints an all too accurate portrait of the time. Forget retro Channel 4 shows that focus on the gauche, the gaudy and the garish: the reality in Ireland was pretty grim.
“Yeah, there was a lot of religion around still,” Julia remembers. “I had quite a middle-class upbringing, but there was never much money. I remember buying a pair of Dock Martins and wearing them all throughout the ’80s. I was so desperate to have them, I bought a size three pair because they were the last ones in the shop, and I’m a size six. The pain! The vanity! And the need to be part of the group.”
With My Lazy Eye, Julia says, is broadly rather than specifically autobiographical.
“I was determined to say that it wasn't, but realised at my very first interview that wasn’t going to work,” she laughs. “All my friends are reading it as a straight autobiography, but that’s not true, there’s an awful lot of stuff that’s fabricated and exaggerated, stuff that didn’t happen at all, or stuff that happened to someone else.”
There’s been a lot of controversy recently concerning relatives of authors complaining about being used as fodder in books: Hanif Kureishi’s sister Yasmin, Peter Carey’s ex-wife Alison Summers, Augusten Burroughs’s surrogate family the Turcottes. How did her family respond?
“Well, I only showed them the book a few days before the launch, and luckily they all really loved it. And it made the launch a bit more exciting for my friends, there was a bit of a buzz about it because no one knew anything about the book. I was so nervous about that night that I had a double vodka and half a Xanax just to get me up there. I’m so shy of public speaking. I didn’t discuss what the book was about with anyone at all for the whole time I wrote it. I didn’t show it to anyone apart from Charlie, I was too scared.
“I’d done very little writing before this,” Julia continues, “and it did not come easy at all. It was three years, very, very lonely and very hard, working full time. Charlie was absolutely brilliant at getting me to open up, ’cos for a long time my writing was very self-conscious, overworked paragraphs about old men or dead pigeons I’d seen on the street.
“But I started doing these things called ‘morning pages’ where you basically write three pages of the first thing that comes into your head as soon as you wake up, you’re not even properly awake, a semi-sleepy state, which is probably the best state to write in because it means you’re not worried about making it good. I did that for months, and that’s a really good way of seeing what you’re interested in writing about, and also it gets you to write in a more fluid way. I have quite poor concentration span, but when I’m in that flow, it’s almost a dream-like state.”
Here’s one to chew on: does writing make you a better person?
“God, that’s a question, isn’t it? Well, maybe a more fulfilled person. It makes you more clear-headed. I suppose I feel like I’ve grown up a lot through writing this book. I’ve never been self-disciplined and I’ve never been able to commit to something before in my life, so in that way I think writing has improved me, just being able to get the thing done.”

With My Lazy Eye is published by Lilliput