Writer's Block with Ronan Ryan - The Gloss Magazine

Writer’s Block with Ronan Ryan

SOPHIE GRENHAM talks to author RONAN RYAN about living abroad, READING RULES and how COPING WITH LOSS led him to writing …

Ronan Ryan’s debut novel The Fractured Life of Jimmy Dice is a uniquely imagined marvel that has everybody talking. The highly distinctive material, published in January this year, is told with a skilful wit that achieves a harmonious balance of light and dark.

At centre stage of Ronan’s family saga is Jimmy Dice, whose twin sister Elizabeth dies at birth. In a bizarre twist, her ghost inhabits her brother’s body, becoming a guardian angel of sorts. The Irish Independent has called Jimmy Dice, “An Irish epic with a potent post-millennial hum and a wave-like momentum that becomes insidiously addictive.”

Ronan’s book is dedicated to his dear friend Anne-Laure Richert, who died tragically seventeen years ago at the age of twenty. His need to write stemmed from preserving precious memories of their friendship, and from this exercise grew a lifelong passion. 

Ronan has enjoyed a nomadic life. Originally from Clonmel, Tipperary, his family relocated to Nagoya, Japan when he was a teenager. He has also lived in France, America, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Scotland and England.  

Ronan Ryan currently lives in Dublin, where he is writing his next novel.

The Fractured Life of Jimmy Dice (€10.99) is published by Tinder Press and available from bookshops nationwide.

On home

I’ve been based in Dublin for nearly four years, which is the longest I’ve lived in one place at a time since my childhood. I’ve been renting a one-bedroom flat in Dublin’s city centre, right across the road from St Patrick’s Cathedral. Jonathan Swift is buried there, and it’s heartening to have a fellow writer for a neighbour, albeit a dead one.

I don’t think I could settle on a single favourite café/restaurant or pub in the area, but I’m excited that Bewley’s has re-opened, and I’m fond of Piglet Wine Bar and Metro Café. I’d always choose an old man’s pub, where you can have a decent conversation, over a slick new-fangled bar where you can’t hear yourself over the music (grumble, grumble) so I’m a fan of pubs like Mulligan’s, The Long Hall, and The Stag’s Head.

Over the last eighteen months I’ve gotten into yoga and I go to a couple of classes a week at YogaHub on Camden Place. When I’m spending most of my day writing, it feels like I get a bit lost down a tunnel in my mind. Yoga puts me squarely back in my body and I often sort out a story problem during a class when I’m trying not to think about it. Plus, I hear that Shakespeare was big into his yoga practice and he attributed much of his success to the creativity it stimulated (this might not be true). If it’s good enough for Bill, it’s good enough for me.

On early years

With the exception of spending six months in France when I was five (my parents and sister came too), I lived in Boherduff, in the countryside of Clonmel, until I was thirteen. Our house was surrounded by fields so I grew up with an appreciation for nature. By the age of seven, I had learned that if you charge at a herd of cows, they’ll stampede away from you, but if you then suddenly turn and run from them, they’ll chase you back. In the pre-internet age, hours of fun could be had this way.

We had a cat called Fuzzy, who was a ruthless serial killer of local wildlife. It wasn’t unusual to open the front door in the morning to discover one of her “trophies” on the doorstep, such as the severed head of a rabbit, its eyes frozen in terror. After Fuzzy disappeared and never returned, we got an adorable dog called Max. He was a large epileptic chocolate-brown Labrador. Despite our best efforts to train him, he remained wilfully rambunctious. When taking him for a walk, it was necessary to hold his lead with both hands or risk shoulder dislocation whenever he spotted a puddle of mud that he couldn’t resist jumping into, which was every puddle of mud.

On creating

Sometimes I write in cafés, but lately I’ve been doing the majority of my work at home in my living room. While there are no bookshelves or bookcases, there are 241 books in stacks on the floor and against the walls and the fake fireplace. There are four framed pictures on the walls: a photo print of Molly Malone, when she was at the bottom of Grafton Street; a gorgeous but haunting painting of Paris – it features the Eiffel Tower, and everything is in black, white, and grey, apart from the leaves of two trees, which are painted blood-red; a photo print of Edinburgh at night, with Edinburgh Castle in the background; the mass-market paperback cover of The Fractured Life of Jimmy Dice. The three city pictures have strong personal associations for me and I like to be reminded of them. I put the cover of my novel on the wall because it serves as encouragement as I work on the next thing. Also, I haven’t gotten over my vanity from having managed to publish something.

My back is to the window when I’m sitting at the small table I write at. All that’s on the wall in front of me is a sheet of paper with the structure of the new novel – this is just the list of chapter titles, some of which have been violently crossed out with a red pen and replaced with titles that are a better fit.

On bookshops

In the last year, I’ve had the pleasure of doing events at a number of bookshops around Ireland and the UK. What makes bookshops really brilliant are the people who run them and Tom at Roe River Books in Dundalk, Bob at The Gutter Bookshop in Dublin, John at Bookworm in Thurles, Orlagh at The Reading Room in Carrick-on-Shannon, Dave at No Alibis in Belfast, Marie at The Edinburgh Bookshop, and Karen and Jonathan at The Bookseller Crow in London are all beyond welcoming and their passion for books is fortifying for readers and writers alike.

On his nightstand

The three books I’m currently reading are Grant by Ron Chernow, Big Dead Place by Nicholas Johnson, and Tampa by Alissa Nutting.

At 1000+ pages, Grant is a brick of a biography about the former President that earns its weight – it’s a fascinating portrait of a man whose perpetual failures throughout his twenties and thirties imbued him with the requisite empathy to be magnanimous in his treatment of the South after the American Civil War. Big Dead Place is a wryly told memoir about living and working in Antarctica, with the most insufferable conditions being bureaucracy and micro-management. I’m reading both of these as research for two separate projects.

Tampa is a novel about a female sexual predator. It was recommended to me as being very funny and very disturbing, and it hasn’t disappointed on either count.

On reading

I have a few reading rules I adhere to, which work for me but might sound like the habits of a crazy person to others. One is that I only let myself own twelve unread books at a time – if I want to buy a new book and I’m at my limit, I’ll still wander into bookshops and stare longingly at it, like some sort of book stalker, but I’ll force myself to finish one I already have before I give in. The main reason is financial. I’ve been living as frugally as I can throughout my adult life because money equals time to write and I aspire to stretch it as far as it will go. Also, I’ve moved around from country to country and, each time I’ve done so, I’ve given away the vast majority of the books I’ve amassed – my general country-hopping rule is that any possessions that can’t fit into two suitcases get left behind. It would be torture to surrender books I haven’t read.

Unless I’m travelling, I’ll cap my reading at two hundred pages in a day and one thousand pages in a week. If I didn’t set a limit, I’d be in danger of spending all my free time with my nose in a book – blissful as that might be, I’d prefer not to become a shut-in.

On escape

My parents and my sister and her family all live in Pennsylvania. We’re a close family and I usually visit them around Christmas. When the snowfall is heavy, the landscape is strikingly beautiful there. I become slightly less enamoured with the snow though when my mother asks me to clear their driveway with a shovel and icicles form in my beard.

On travel

When I was thirteen, I moved to Nagoya for a year and a half because of my father’s job as a chemical engineer. We then moved to Pennsylvania, but I dropped out of school there when I was sixteen, and moved away from my parents to Dublin. I enrolled in another school here, only to drop out of that one too, mainly to spend as much time as I could with a young woman called Anne-Laure, who I had a close friendship with. She was killed in an accident in Paris.

Trying to get my head together, I moved to Singapore for six months, where I studied for the Leaving Cert by myself. I returned to Dublin, took the exams, and was admitted to UCD. During my twenties and into my early thirties, I went from place to place in the pursuit of my wish to be a published writer, living in Melbourne, London, Edinburgh, and Wellington.

The first thing you learn when you move around is to be adaptable and then the next thing you learn is that, as long as you’re respectful, it’s okay to just be yourself and let others adapt to you. In Nagoya, I attended an international school and loved it – the other kids and the teachers came from all sorts of backgrounds, but you don’t need to share the same experiences with someone to find common ground. I’ve been very fortunate to travel as much as I have and invariably the best thing about each place has been getting to meet kind and interesting people.

On Anne-Laure

I think a lot of writers are forged through experiencing a deep loss which they can’t easily reconcile. That’s how it was for me anyway. I hadn’t registered that it was in the realm of possibility that Anne-Laure might die young, and yet she did. It was on the page where I tried to make some sense of it and to capture all of my memories of her before they could fade away. Once I had written that record, I wrote novel after novel until I was lucky enough to get one published. I doubt I would be a writer if I hadn’t known her and lost her; at the very least, I would be an altogether different one. I’ll never believe that my life could have as positive an impact on the world as hers would have had if she’d lived, but she inevitably permeates all of my work and if I can continue to publish novels, and if they find readers that they resonate for, then some small good has come from what happened. That’s a comfort and a constant source of motivation.

On what’s next

I’ve been working on a novel about the intimate friendship turned corrosive rivalry between two nineteenth-century American palaeontologists. When I’m finished fine-tuning it, I’m hopeful that it’ll be my second published novel. After that, and presuming another idea doesn’t skip the queue, I’d like to write a novel set in the near future in Antarctica. The provisional title for that one is There’s Something Wrong with Us. I might have a novel in me based around the life of Constance Markievicz too.

@SophieGrenham

Love THEGLOSS.ie? Sign up to our MAILING LIST now for a roundup of the latest fashion, beauty, interiors and entertaining news from THE GLOSS MAGAZINE’s daily dispatches.

Pin It on Pinterest

Share This