Billy O'Callaghan on how the loss of his mother inspired his short story Dead of Winter

"Once I was writing the story, I knew that was what was behind it. I am not sure it was something I was necessarily thinking about, but maybe it was all I was thinking about for a while"

Fri, 24 Dec, 2021 - 06:00

Marjorie Brennan

Christmas is a time to make merry — pandemic notwithstanding — but it is also a time for reflection and, for many, a time when we remember those we have loved and lost. For author Billy O’Callaghan, it will be the first Christmas without his mother, Gina, who sadly died in October.

It is a loss that has hit hard and one that is echoed in Dead of Winter, the Christmas short story O’Callaghan has written especially for the Irish Examiner. “Once I was writing the story, I knew that was what was behind it. I am not sure it was something I was necessarily thinking about, but maybe it was all I was thinking about for a while,” he says.

Dead of Winter is a beautifully expressed and moving story about family, love and loss, and how the seemingly mundane memories of our youth can comfort and sustain us in our grief. The past and its effect on our present is a recurring theme in O’Callaghan’s work, most recently in his acclaimed novel Life Sentences, which is based on the lives of three generations of his own family.

“Everything we are is what went before us. We are carrying a lot of that with us. At Christmas especially you think of your childhood and growing up. For the most part, it is the good memories, although I know some people don’t necessarily have that. There is a kind of a bittersweetness about it and maybe that’s true for people as they start to get older anyway. All of that, that is probably where the story came out of.”

Growing up in Douglas, which was then a village rather than the sprawling suburb it has become, Christmas was a time of simple pleasures, says O’Callaghan, who is on the cusp of his 48th birthday when we speak.

“It was an ordinary Christmas — I’m from that generation of people, I would think that most people had a similar kind of Christmas. Douglas is so close to the city but it felt very much self-contained. We would have gone to see Santa in the shopping centre in Douglas, it was Quinnsworth then. I remember going into Cash’s to see Santa a couple of times. We would have a day out to do Christmas shopping in town, my birthday was December 9, we would usually go the day after. We would make a day of it. Looking back on it, it is the feeling of it you carry with you more than anything, that sense of Christmas."

I remember the crib on Patrick’s St, things like that. To a child, everything seemed big and bright.

O’Callaghan’s short stories have drawn praise from all quarters, much of which is no doubt down to the care and effort he puts into their fine tuning.

“I write fairly slowly. I carry stories around with me for a while before I start them. Often I would have them in my head for a year or two before I start them. This story [Dead of Winter] was percolating for a while and once I started writing it, I probably spent about three weeks at it. It probably had a dozen drafts. Some stories have less, some have more. The stories for me live and die at the sentence level and so each one has to be worked, it all has to gel together. Some people are lucky that they can write a story in two or three hours but I don’t seem to be one of those.”

Lockdown proved to be a creatively fertile period for O’Callaghan, as he finished his latest novel, due to be published in 2023. This year, he published Life Sentences, which followed his second novel, My Coney Island Baby in 2019 and a short story collection in 2020.

“It seems like I am prolific because I had My Coney Island Baby in 2019, then The Boatman and Other Stories came out in 2020 but they were all in the works for years, it is how they all came together. Lockdown didn’t affect me in a negative way in terms of writing. If anything, it kind of suited me. I have basically lived in lockdown for 20 years, that is what writing is, really, especially when you are writing a novel. I was able to write 10 or 12 hours a day and keep my head in the space the whole time with very little distraction”

Author Billy O'Callaghan with his book Life Sentences. Picture Dan Linehan

O’Callaghan also won Cork Person of the Month in April, an accolade in which he says his mother took particular pride. “It’s funny because it was one of the things my mother got such a real high out of, she was sick at the time, and it was in the middle of lockdown. There is a dinner in January for all the Cork people of the month throughout the year and that was something my mother was really looking forward to. I do feel sad that she will not be around for that.”

O’Callaghan says he has been reflecting on the support his mother, and his family, have given him in his career as a writer.

“One of the things I have been thinking about a lot in the last couple of months is the encouragement — it is very hard to do something without someone in your corner telling you you are doing the right thing. That more than anything else has been such an important thing for me in my life. I probably never realised it or fully appreciated it. I know she was proud of me and I’m glad she was. My parents didn’t have too much that they could give me but the encouragement was like gold.

"You don’t realise or appreciate it at the time but it definitely makes the road ahead a little smoother. I count myself lucky for it. The other thing I am glad about is that Life Sentences in many ways is my mother’s book. It is about her people and the stories she used to tell me. That is a really important part of the book, it wouldn’t have existed without that. To know that she saw it come out and she was able to hold a copy of it in her hands, and see it doing well, that was good.”