Tag Archives: New York

My editor once remarked that it was “interesting,” given my background in sales and publishing, that I chose to write about Irish gypsies in 1959 — not exactly the most commercial topic ever. But for me it seemed obvious: after writing my memoir, A Rip in Heaven, about my brother’s survival of a violent crime in which two of my cousins were raped and killed, I wanted to get as far away from writing about my life as possible. I’d had enough of ripping open the emotional scars of my childhood for other people’s examination. Or so I thought.

Writing about Ireland was a natural choice — I come from an American-Irish family. We were raised on a stern diet of Yeats, the Clancy Brothers, and skewed politics. I spent wonderful years living in Ireland, and then I moved to New York and found myself a west-coast Irishman to marry. When I started writing my novel The Outside Boy, I looked beyond the mainstream Irish tradition, and chose to set my story among Irish Travellers because I felt theirs was a community that was largely misrepresented. But I also chose them as my subject because they were so different from me, so foreign. I needed the comfort of that anonymity.

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