Nell Whittaker  We’re in your office, in Dublin’s city centre. Why do you find it useful to come here?

Roddy Doyle  At one level, I can work quite satisfactorily at home, as I have an office in the attic, but coming into the city centre is great. Somehow, I’m away from distraction, with no domestic things to think about. I don’t have internet at the office. I often decide that if I get a certain amount of words done, I’ll look at what’s on at the art cinema around the corner, and aim to finish in time for a screening. Right across the way there’s Dublin Castle: I’ve seen photographs of it in the backdrop of the Anglo-Irish Treaty negotiations. The Olympia Theatre, where I’ve had work on the stage, is literally beside us. I know I’m lucky insofar as I have two offices instead of one. Some people have none. But guilt doesn’t really kick in – I don’t care. I’m 67, an age when a lot of people stop working. A lot of them are reluctant to come into the city centre, but I feel the opposite.

NW Is the walking-in element important, too? Some writers talk about themselves, often in cities, as satellites gathering information. Do you see yourself as one of those?

RD I do wander around. At some stage today, I’ll put on my jacket and go for a wander. I might turn a corner I don’t remember turning before. Even if you feel you know a city inside out, there are pockets that you just don’t know, or wrongly assume you know. I don’t know if that’s me the writer, or me the citizen of Dublin, or if I’m just filling time. The book I’m working on at the moment is set in the mid-1980s, so what I see on the street today isn’t of much use to me. One of the pleasures of a bus is watching people have conversations in different languages. If I put a character on a bus in 1982, I have to wipe all of that. I have to wipe any notion of anyone doing anything other than reading, perhaps, or chatting. It was a much simpler world.

NW In your short story collection Life Without Children (2021), there are these moments where children aren’t where they should be – a woman comes along with a teddy bear, not a baby, strapped to her front, or an empty buggy on a beach unnerves our protagonist. Does that relate to having grown-up children?

RD One of the things about being much older than you used to be, which even hearing yourself say sounds daft, is that you carry a lot more with you. When I was a child in the 1960s, we used to go down to Wexford a couple of times a year. One of the farms didn’t have electricity. There was no inside toilet; a donkey and cart collected the milk. That was 1968, not 1958, or 1948. I’ve got a foot in that, and I’ve got a foot in the present day. Similarly, it’s a strange experience being the parent of grown-up children. There is a period of redundancy, where the straightforwardness of activity – taking them somewhere in the car, bringing them to football, going to the supermarket with them, picking them up – all drops away, and with it a bit of power and an obvious sense of purpose. It takes a while to get that out of your system. I’m currently using memories and feelings and impressions from when I was a much younger man, but I’m also writing from the perspective of the man I currently am, examining what I’m writing and wondering about, and experimenting with “I” and “he”, swapping them to see which feels closer. So, the only good thing about getting older is the experience you can use. The bag is fuller and heavier. The physical changes, the psychological changes. The grief. I was nearly 60 when I became an orphan. Still, it’s almost a physical sensation. When my mother died, I wasn’t thinking, there’s a story in this, although there ended up being several. It just happens.

NW Do you only stop being a child when you have no parents?

RD There was still that feeling when she died – and I’ve spoken about it with people whose parents died much younger, or who are my age and still have a living parent – that there was no one to run home to anymore, even though I wouldn’t have done so. There’s no one to bring a new book to and say, “Look, Ma.” I would’ve thought that wouldn’t have been a feeling at a couple of months shy of 60 but it was, definitely. And I’m not alone in that. It’s not a conversation we would’ve had 30 years ago, when people just did the decent thing and died much younger.

NW I had a very intense reading experience with your novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, which is about a ten-year-old boy. My class at school read it for a year with a teacher who we loved, and we were not very much older than Paddy, so we were still children yet also felt parental towards him. When I revisited it, I found it so agonising. It is such a sad book.

RD I haven’t read it since it came out, so I’ll take your word for it.

That little child’s view of the world when they’re sitting on their arses – it’s the perfect place to be

NW Where did that anguish come from?

RD I was a secondary school teacher when I wrote Paddy Clarke, and I was becoming aware of the layers of living. The housing estate was a building site when I was a kid, and the local train station was just two slabs of concrete and almost overnight, it became a train station. I finished The Van in November 1990, and I knew I was going to be a father the following February, and I had been told by people that after, I’d never write another book again. I think of that Cyril Connolly quote, “There is no more sombre enemy of good than the pram in the hall.” I always felt in my gut he wasn’t talking about writing, but about drinking, that ancillary business that people romanticise about writing and drinking and cocktails and high or low living. But anticipating becoming a father myself, I started thinking about my childhood, and as I was starting the book, I was bringing the baby to the same house that I grew up in. I went into the kitchen where I’d grown up, and the fridge was still in the exact same place. I just got down on my knees in front of the fridge to remind myself of how I would have seen it when I was a boy of ten. I was 32. I was working full-time as a teacher, and my son was just born, so I was really grabbing moments. I was also writing, I think, the script that became the film The Snapper (1993), getting up to go to work, up half the night, walking the baby, getting him back down, feeding the baby, going shopping, the usual frantic chaos. The script wasn’t based on my childhood because, as far as I could make out, my parents were content together right up to the end of their lives, very affectionate, talking incessantly to one another. But Paddy is gradually watching his parents’ marriage fall apart. I didn’t realise I had reached the end when I sat down to write that day, but then there it was. I thought, “This is as sad as it can get.” So I stopped.

NW It makes sense to me that the book was formed in the context of a new baby, because it’s about a little boy who’s also coming into full knowledge of how much damage he can do, particularly to his little brother, Sinbad.

RD I had a younger brother – still do – and I don’t think I was like that with him. I remember my sister saying it felt so familiar yet unfamiliar at the same time. I think it was just that stage of my life. It’s really some sort of crossroads, or some sort of stop. You’re 30-odd, saying goodbye to one set of priorities and hello to another. It is chaotic, and there is no precedent for becoming a parent. What made me feel good is that all those people who said I wouldn’t write again – it was bullshit. The domesticity of it all, for want of a better word, fed me creatively. All those little observations came up to the top. The things I would’ve been watching my mother do in the kitchen, I was doing not for myself, as I had been doing for years, but for an infant and a toddler, and watching my partner do the same thing. I became me, as a boy, watching my parents. That little child’s view of the world when they’re sitting on their arses – it’s the perfect place to be. I don’t think this explains why the book is so dark. I suppose there’s always a fear. My first child was born on a Tuesday, so every Tuesday felt like a bit of a triumph.

NW Do you ever feel conflicted about taking ownership over shared experience, through writing about it?

RD I do a bit sometimes. Once, a holiday with friends made it into a story called “Bullfighting”. It was in a small working town in Spain, about 40 minutes on the bus from València, and there was a bullring that they had erected while we were there. Four or five of us, we’d been in València, got out of a taxi, found the bar just about to close and had a bottle of beer. We were walking back towards the house where we were staying – it was two or three in the morning, walking by the bullring, and the lights were on, and the big door was open. We stepped in, and there were people in the stands. A truck backed into the ring and released a bull, and we were standing in the middle of the bullring. It was exactly like the cliché cartoon bull on a bottle of wine. There was a wooden frame on the horns, and somebody put a match to it – it became a satanic scene. I turned to run, and I fell. I thought, there’s a story there. It’s not about my friends, but there are elements of them in it. I showed it to them before I sent it to The New Yorker, and they were delighted. There are other little elements in Paddy Clarke. I remember being on the bus and meeting someone I’d grown up with, and I was chatting away, and I realised, Christ almighty, his house is in Paddy Clarke. The chaos he grew up in, the sadness, the motherlessness. He never mentioned it. I suspect he’d never read it, or hadn’t at the time. I would’ve felt a little awkward if he’d brought it up, though I don’t think I would’ve felt bad. Even though it’s the house he grew up in, it’s still a house I was familiar with. 

NW Would he necessarily have recognised it?

RD Our memories are always partial. I met this guy who had a terrible time when we were kids because he was bullied. I remember feeling relieved it wasn’t me. I met him years later when he was with his daughter, who was 21 or so. I had a chat with him, and his memories were nothing but brilliant. “We had a great time when we were kids, didn’t we?” I wasn’t going to say, “Remember that time when we tied you to a tree and called you horrible names? When you were in tears?” No, it was a great time. And he wasn’t being evasive: that was what he’d decided, somehow, to remember. I wasn’t going to tell him otherwise, not in front of his daughter. If I ever meet him alone, I’ll put him right.

NW I wanted to ask you about judging the Booker Prize in 2025, and a comment you made shortly afterward, that you found it impossible to understand why you’d been asked to judge some of the submissions.

RD Well, I don’t remember the full quote, but I do know that in a very few instances I wondered why we were reading the book at all. There were 153 books and I finished 104, which is slightly more than two-thirds, so that, to me, denotes a certain enthusiasm. For the 49 remaining, there were some whose presence mystified me. It wasn’t just taste, or because the subject matter didn’t interest me. That was one of the interesting things about being a judge – I was a 67-year-old Irish man, working alongside a 60-odd-year-old New Yorker, a Nigerian woman in her mid-thirties, an African-American woman in her mid-thirties, and then an English man in his early fifties. There are five very different sets of eyes reading each book, so it wasn’t just that I was being dismissive. The other four judges were terrific, andI really enjoyed their company and listening to them. All four were so different in the way they looked at books, but when it came to the crunch, it was funny how much we agreed on. I read a lot, but it was just like it was going from beer to spirits, with no practice, and going forward, forward, forward.

NW Were there certain themes, preoccupations, similarities, in subject matter but also style, that came up over and over?

RD There was a lot of present-tense writing. There was an awful lot of wine drinking, not much beer, so it struck me that much of the writing still occupied a middle-class world. Many of the younger writers in particular wrote about life as though it could be mapped onto some notion of career. The word “career” wasn’t necessarily being used in the writing, but there was the same logic of path or journey. It’s a lazy kind of language that seems to be the stuff of YouTube and self-help guides. In the work that wasn’t good, somebody’s told the writer that when a character comes into the narrative, you should describe them. A fellow walks in, he’s wearing a plaid shirt and a pair of jeans, then there’s no more mention of his clothes for the rest of the book, even if it’s a sprawling epic taking place over four decades. It would appear he hasn’t changed his clothes or hair in that time.

NW Have you ever done jury duty?

RD I was selected a few times – once when I was a teacher, but I had exam classes. I was selected again just after I’d won the Booker Prize, but I felt I was too well-known. And then I was selected a few years back, just before the cut-off age of 65. Two men clearly recognised me, and judging by their demeanour, they were the defendant’s friends. So I was let go. But judging the Booker Prize reminded me really of being a teacher, even though there were only five of us – trying to make sure everybody was heard, in their different ways. It was good to resurrect that feeling and the memories that came with it. The novel I’m working on at the moment is about a young teacher. 

NW How much can you tell me about this new book?

RD Well, it’s about a young man who’s a teacher in a fairly new school in 1980. It’s a community school, the equivalent of a comprehensive, so it’s co-educational and multi-denominational. These were two new things in Ireland at the time. I remember walking up the road for my first day’s work, and the first thing I saw in the school’s office was a picture of Pope John Paul II. On one level it was funny, but also, what was he doing on the wall? This was the Irish version of multidenominationalism. But the story is about this young man falling for the school, learning to be a teacher, and then calming down. I was a teacher for 14 years, and it put flesh on my political views, being with these kids and listening to them. I loved the place, and I’m trying to recapture that.

NW Before I came over here, I was at the William Butler Yeats exhibition at the Irish National Library, which contains some of his automatic writing. How much mysticism is involved in your own writing?

RD I never plan too meticulously. I know how this book is going to end, but if we were talking two months ago, I wouldn’t have had a clue. When you’re coming up to the end of something, there’s a door, and sometimes you just touch it and it opens. Other times you have to heave it. Sometimes it’s just not opening, so you realise you’ve come to the wrong door. Occasionally, I’ve stopped to enjoy the feeling that I’m about two-thirds of the way there. It’s not something I have on paper – it’s just a feeling. Usually, I just keep going, in the knowledge that I’ll come back and clean up the mess. When I get to the end, there wouldn’t be a day when something occurs to me that I had no idea what was going to happen. To a degree, there’s no magic labour, that mysticism you’re talking about. I do believe something happens within the writing that you can never plan, but I’ve never looked at something and thought, I don’t remember writing that. I’m always in charge. I’m the writer and the editor, and at the stage I’m in at the moment, the editor can stay away. Second draft, then final draft, then the writer can fuck off. .