Mandatory Reporting, A Dublin Mystery by Jenny Wilson O’Raghallaigh
How writing about the Irish taught me I don’t know anything about the Irish . . .
Sure, I’ve lived in Ireland for over 25 years. Yes, I have Irish friends and we’ve accompanied each other through the ups and downs of life. And perhaps most relevant, I’ve worked as a clinical psychologist in the Irish healthcare service for almost all that time, listening to Irish people work through their tribulations and trauma.
But when I sat down to write a novel based in Ireland, I realised I had no idea what any Irish person is thinking or what they’ll do in any moment. I could guess what my Irish characters might say, and I could move them around like they were on a stage, but I could not write from their point of view—I could not inhabit them. Which is exactly how I ended up in the tricky first-person present tense vortex that is my debut novel Mandatory Reporting.
I moved to Ireland for the typical ‘one year abroad’ on a scholarship from my local Rotary club. It’s a familiar story—an intense romance that makes us neglect our studies and become a different person for a year—but mine stuck. Twenty-seven years later when I visit the U.S. to see family, I look around at what is now only a semi-familiar space and think, “What the hell happened?” How did I end up so far from home?
When I talk to other Americans, even when there is a gulf between our politics or geography or life experience, I feel a connection. As if I am able to communicate with them in a weird native tongue that allows my body to relax and my mind to believe we have something essential in common, even if that is only a fantasy. Maybe, because it is fantasy.
I started writing fiction because of a strange confluence of events that included a fifty-euro gift certificate to the Irish Writers Centre. “Am I an Irish writer?’” I ask myself, and then immediately stop thinking about that. It’s too confusing, and the IWC doesn’t care.
I was lucky to be selected for the Novel Fair, and then to get some really great feedback from the agents and publishers who attended, but nobody picked it up. It wasn’t until a much stronger second draft and the near accidental introduction to an American literary agent living in Howth, that things started moving. The kind of introduction that happens in Ireland. A friend from church trying to make conversation at a Scouting Ireland event with another mother. “Oh, you’re a literary agent? I have a friend with a novel…”
And the core message from this miracle agent? This is a novel about an American in Ireland. With all the cultural near misses that happen between people who theoretically speak the same language, but in many ways, speak it differently. My long-suffering husband and I, when things aren’t going as smoothly as we’d like, quote a story, which may be apocryphal, about what Brendan Kennelly said when asked why he and his American wife divorced: “Deep cultural differences.” My agent essentially said the same thing, but in relation to pitching the novel.
And those cultural differences reared their ugly heads when I tried to access the interiority of my Irish characters. Interestingly, my main character, although American like me, is male. It creates for me the kind of distance from his experience that allows my creativity a little breathing room, and trying to write from a male perspective simply didn’t scare me as much as trying to write from the Irish perspective. Maybe because although I’ve spent over 25 years trying to figure out what Irish people are thinking, I’ve spent a lot longer wondering what men are thinking.
The journey from American-clinical-psychologist-in-Ireland to American-clinical-psychologist-and-writer-in-Ireland is one that I’m only starting. Kind of like that first early decision about my life that has meant a lifetime of trans-Atlantic longing and travel, I’m not going to get any perspective on this new journey anytime soon.
(c) Jenny Wilson O’Raghallaigh
Jenny’s debut novel, Mandatory Reporting, A Dublin Mystery, is published by Seventh Street Books.
About Mandatory Reporting, A Dublin Mystery by Jenny Wilson O’Raghallaigh:
Debut author Jenny Wilson O’Raghallaigh is sure to stun readers in this page turner of a psychological thriller.
Jonah is in way over his head. His study abroad year in Dublin isn’t going as planned: instead of the engineering program he requested, the only option available to him is a course in psychology. Rather than the predictable world of numbers, he is forced into the complicated and unpredictable world of human emotions and actions—exactly where he doesn’t want to be.
In therapy with an enigmatic doctor, fumbling to acclimate to a new country, and plunged into the quicksand of family mental health alongside a beautiful but troubled clinic supervisor, Jonah begins to unravel. How can he help others navigate the murky depths of family trauma when he’s still fighting to survive his own?
And then, someone dies.
Jonah is caught in the complex and unfamiliar web of relationships at the core of the Irish experience. He has the familiar feeling of being watched, carefully. The familiar feeling that he is to blame. Did he reveal too much to his therapist? Has his work at the clinic enraged a violent father?
As the Irish police begin to investigate, is Jonah now the prime suspect?
Order your copy of Mandatory Reporting, A Dublin Mystery by Jenny Wilson O’Raghallaigh online here.
