‘Live Dublin, Die Young’: A Conversation with Tim MacGabhann
by Tadhg Hoey
MacGabhann is the author of two novels, Call Him Mine (2018) and How To Be Nowhere (2020), as well as the long poem ‘Rory Gallagher — Live! — at the Hotel of the Dead’ (2023). Many of the years covered in The Black Pool take place in Latin America, where he lived and worked as a journalist. Not as the shiny shoes kind of journalist, he writes, but the dirty boots kind, covering the fallout from political instability and cartel violence.
MacGabhann is currently based in Paris, and is working on a PhD on the idea of the anti-plot sentence. I spoke with him recently over Zoom to try and understand more about the process of writing this book, his experience in recovery, and to learn more about what led him to leave Dublin. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
I have a very vivid memory of reading an essay of yours called “The Black PooI” in The Dublin Review. That essay is an excerpt from what would become this book. It was Christmas 2021, and I was bed bound with Covid, and I remember thinking, holy shit — this is great. Tell me how The Black Pool came about.
I was trying to write it as short stories and as a novel, and they were just quite crap. I get on very well with Brendan Barrington at The Dublin Review. We were looking at these stories and he was like, ‘well, why don't you just strip away the artifice and tell it as it was?’ What I love about the stuff he tends to publish is the more autobiographical memoir-y stuff. Greg Baxter's work is a really huge thing for me. Especially Munich Airport, which is like he's doing in fiction that [same] relentlessness that he does in his A Preparation For Death essays that Brendan published. So, when Brendan wanted to do essays with me, I was like, ‘this is a summit moment for me’. Something I've been dreaming of for a while. It was 2021, the vaccines were rolling out quite slowly. I couldn’t wait to go back to Ireland.
You were living in Mexico then?
Yes, living in my studio. I had a very spartan studio because my landlord used to design sets for films. The furniture was really interesting looking.
I remember seeing a few pictures of it on your Twitter around that time.
It was a gas place. The windows were kind of smoky at the back, so it was a bit like being sealed inside my own skull. I'd get up quite early and just hammer the keys for as long as I could, physically. I was doing yoga and I’d meditate for an hour, then I’d just fucking throw myself at the keyboard and go at it for a few hours.
By the end of a few weeks, I had a big unruly chunk of prose and sent it to Brendan. He was like, ‘right, I've got a lot of queries about this bit, fewer queries about this bit, almost none about this bit. That isn't the temporal ordering’. It was all over the place. Some bits he was, like, ‘I don't think that works’, I just put them in a document. Then we had this huge lump of about 25,000 words, and then Brendan was, like, ‘I guess it fits roughly into these three sections. What do you reckon?’ I was like, ‘yeah, cool’. I was pretty happy with them. I felt like I hit a different level of rhythm and sound in the language than I'd managed to, technically, up to that point.
I pitched Eleanor [Birne[], my agent, with the three essays, and she was like, ‘oh yeah, I reckon there's a book here —l et's take the idea to your editor’. Federico Andornino has been my editor for the first two books, and on this one too. He's great. He liked it. He was, like, ‘how about we do this as a book, a full-length thing? I want more here, less here, more here, less here. Three acts, kind of thrillery vibe. What do you reckon?’ I was like, ‘yeah, that sounds real fun’. I'd love to do a crime novel without the crime. Just have that same noirish urgency and intensity.
So, by this stage, me and Fede[rico] are working on it maybe a year and a half after the first publication. It was early 2023, and he was like, ‘let's try to make it thrillery’ and I was like, ‘yeah, I’m well up for doing it’. A bit like Kathy [Sweeney's] book, Breakdown. Then I went back to the big chunk I'd done for Brendan and realised that I couldn't really remember anything else.
I went back to this big formless chunk of text and I couldn't remember anything beyond it. Fede wanted more bits to make it three-acts, and I was like, Fede, there's just quite a lot of fucking gaps in my memory. Do you know what I mean? For reasons that are quite clear, and he was like, yeah, no problem — let's just make it more experimental. I couldn't believe he was saying this. I was like, ‘fucking great, I’lll write everything I can remember, put it in an order that makes more or less sense’.Then, I did it in another kind of six-week, fairly gymnastic attack.
So, that’s how you wrote a lot of the book — in these intense bursts?
We did another six-week run at it. I write every day, a few hundred words, but, with this project, it wasn't a thing where I could look at it every day for a few hours. I had to build myself up and attack it almost 10 hours a day, which is really not a way that I advise anyone to do anything, but I broke more of my own rules to get it done. Then we did another attack on it early 2024, late 2024, and it was done. It was flying attacks on the thing, trying to remember as much as I could. Then keep the through line, the sounds and rhythms in the sentence, because that pulls more unconscious truth than you will usually allow into your mind.
I thought the writing was unusually beautiful for a memoir. I was savouring parts of it. A particular line comes to mind, and it reads like a mission statement for what you want to achieve. ‘I developed a fetish towards a kind of writing that wanted to destroy the reader. Yes, the point was to give everything, to drain yourself out, to invite all comers to have a suk on your carotid artery; and yes, the point within that was to feel as though you still hadn’t done enough.’ Was it cathartic writing it?
I'm really happy that the sentences read nicely because it was ‘first thought, best thought’ at the beginning. The thing that was hard was editing it, reshaping it, keeping what freshness there was while making it legible. Catharsis is a function of plot structure. You're flung into a scenario, complication forks it towards crisis, climax releases pity and terror, and then you dissolve into denouement of some sort.
I think I was trying to do something against plot because I don't like recovery memoirs that have that three-act structure where it's like, ‘here's how I was, here's what happened, here's what I’m like now. Isn't it great?’ Those things feel a bit. . . I don't trust them, hugely. I assume they're true. I'm not accusing anyone of being a liar, but it's not the way I've experienced it, and it's not the way I usually hear it discussed at the places where I talk about these things.
So, catharsis — I exhausted my interest in talking or thinking about these things, which is even deeper than catharsis. That’s the therapeutic release of psychoanalysis. You've talked about these things for sessions and sessions, and I guess there's just nothing left to say.
That’s more what I meant — the idea that you had purged the subject from yourself.
Definitely. There was no moment at the end where I was like, ‘oh, this is my cathartic moment—I'm done with it’. It was more just like, ‘ah, class — I don't have to rewrite this anymore’. It was a release because it felt so anticlimactic. It was really good, and the proof of its benefit is I now find it a lot easier to write stuff that came before or during those times, which I hadn't been able to remember until they were coughed out of me.
Like I said in the book, my childhood was pretty good. Things were fine. I get on very well with my family now. It was the first relationship I repaired. The proof of some sort of psychic payoff in its composition is that I'm able to remember shit that happened at the same time as these things with a new clarity, and write them. I have new memories that have bubbled up under the surface. It's a memoir of forgetting, in that I've become able to forget about this shit by writing it.
There's a moment in it where you're describing your descent into alcoholism. There's a part early on where you really wanted your dad to catch you out. You're lying in a heap and he sees you and says, ah, I'll leave you to it. You're kind of crying out to be found.
At that moment, I don't think I drank again until college. It was quite funny. The thing is, the moment wasn't a result of neglect. As I say, it was just that my da doesn't drink. He doesn't really know what drunk people look like. He doesn't spend a huge amount of time around them. I was barking up the wrong tree there. My ma doesn't really drink much at all. I was definitely looking for the wrong guy to recognise what a drunk teenager looks like. Until he retired, he taught primary school. There aren't a huge amount of drunk 12-year-olds rambling around, but, in that moment, I felt like I'd gotten away with one.
You did very well academically, but your parents often seemed to want you to do better. There's one or two moments in it where you're being screamed at essentially for not doing better.
I think it's their fear, really. I grew up afraid of what my da and ma were afraid of, rather than being afraid of them directly. I think they were in a panic about stuff happening to me that might've happened, that they would've been afraid of happening to them when they had been my age.
I think it was that Celtic Tiger panic, as well. None of the Celtic Tiger stuff ever felt quite real to me. I was born in 1988, so it was a third-world country until I was about nine. I think that being the pressure of quick get on the ark before the rains come, prosperity-wise, I think that was probably in play because they had immigrated in the eighties and my father had been born in London in the fifties in that other wave of emigration. I feel like every 30 years, Ireland just exports about 30,000 people per year or whatever. I know you live away too, so you're probably part of the same current.
I think it was their fear that if you're not going forward, you're going backwards. Terror, I would say, and because I was good at school, it was, like, that's the safe one. There's a clear railroad here — school, job, et cetera. Then the crash was pretty bad, of course, and that's just a moment of having built up a huge head of steam along a railroad that abruptly cratered into the void. If my parents had seen that coming, I suspect — being the loving people they are—they would've emphasised being more resourceful or canny in some way. But, it was more of a naive faith in causality that was still adhered to in those times. Where you do X, therefore Y would occur.
At Trinity, you had schols, a much sought-after scholarship a few people receive each year which covers tuition as well as room and board. I’ve known a few people who got schols. Smart people.
Mental people.
[laughter]
It seemed intensely stressful, and that it played a role in your unravelling. You put yourself through the wringer to get it, then, once you receive it, that level of competitiveness never really drops off. There’s a heartbreaking moment in the book where you start noticing that your friends are going off to study abroad at Oxbridge or the Ivy League, and boozing has really started to impact what you would be capable of achieving, academically.
It's a fundamentally intense spot. It's got simultaneously a superiority and inferiority complex hovering around it, as a brand or presence. Trinity, that is. It’s quite arcane. The rituals of academic sadomasochism were, I guess, for me, the truth hurts. Therefore the hurtier it is, the truthier it must be. I was really attracted to the worse, the better. I think it probably intensified a spiral I had in me anyway. I think I look at the stuff that gets examined in the book, and I think that I'm not really blaming any of it. I'm just saying like, ‘oh, no, the shape was fucked’. These objects made it more fucked simply because the shape was fucked. It was like there was no way I was going to be able to draw a straight line within a curved space.
As to the contribution of the exhaustion. I would've found something to exhaust me, really, because I was attracted to that ecstasy of exhaustion, and I was desperate to overcompensate. I’m from Kilkenny. My accent is funny and I don't look or smell very wealthy, and there's all these English people who I'm now afraid of. It was a pretty brutal encounter with the realities of life outside of this very small town. It was my fascination with hazing that made it so bad. Even if it were a squishier experience, I would've found a way to make it un-squishy. Where my temperament ends and a structure begins is always. . . I was like, well, I definitely had something to do with it. In every case, I can never really blame anybody but myself. More’s the pity.
I didn’t go to Trinity but I made friends with some people who went there and I remember feeling like I was speaking a different language from them. It was like this moment of feeling like you’re being dragged into self-consciousness.
It's really awful. It's birth in reverse.
And you're not attuned to any of those signifiers or references.
My solution was, ‘oh, I'm going to read all of it. It's fine’. No, that just confirms how much of a gobshite you were to begin with. [laughter]. I can't fake it. I was convinced that I could. Then you realise that most people were actually going through some form of anxiety at the time.
I want to talk to you about drugs. How long did the period you were on heroin last for.
A year and three months. I arrived June, 2013, got clean mid-November 2014. I'm nearly 11 years now.
Totally sober since?
Yeah. A year and a half of really going for it in Mexico, going to parties. I liked being an isolator sometimes, but in Mexico, I was going to all the parties. Then, in my spare time, when I'm just very depressed and can't bear being on my own, I top it up with an extra excursion into the fucking needleverse. I was so paranoid about getting fucking hepatitis that I was very careful. I learned how to do it off fucking YouTube and Reddit.
Did your writing get better when you quit?
Of course. Up to that point, I wasn't able to do anything more than a few sentences that didn't make internal sense. When I quit, I was so fucked up still that I was able to be in that kind of cracked head space, but still lucid enough to narrate it. I got my brain back from the dry cleaners.
This was just journalism at this point?
What was I writing at the time I was out of my gourd? 2011, 2012, I was getting a lot of rejections. 2013, book reviews, interviews for Totally Dublin. I was publishing under a different name. I had some things in The Quarterly Conversation, places like that. I started pitching stories as soon as I arrived in Mexico. To that point, I was doing these silly psychogeographic fucking essays which were actually quite close to the nonfiction I write that isn't the memoir, but with less intention. I was buckled and free associating about facts. It all happened, but it's not crystalline, in the way journalism needs to be.
When I got to Mexico, I met Alfredo Corchado at a cantina. I wanted to interview him about his book, Midnight in Mexico, for Totally Dublin. I pitched it and they were like, ‘yeah, sounds class’. I emailed Alfredo and he was like, ‘no, I don't want to do an interview, I just want you to meet the guys’.
So, I went to this cantina and they were all having a blast. I started pitching stories and people started saying yes eventually. The stories got a bit better. I was quite high and uncoordinated, not very reliable, but I was a freelancer, so no one really could tell. Things became untenable at the end of 2014 and I quit. I was always writing fiction and things on the side. It was crap and it wasn't coherent.
Then, 2015, I made recovery a full-time job. I was writing articles to keep my head above water and I was starting to write again. I wanted to do a master's in creative writing, so I took a month off, hit out to my then girlfriend's house, and wrote a novella to use as my portfolio. I was quite instrumental about it. I was like, ‘I'm going to really, calculatedly, get my shit together’.
You moved to England for it?
For 16 months. Straight back to Mexico afterwards. I missed it so much.
Four books in, what does the act of writing do for you now?
It's a ritual. I feel worse if I don't do it, so I just do it every day. That's what I mean by ritual. I don't mean that it's, like, fucking communing with the lads or whatever. It gives shape to my day, like an exercise routine. People use ritual to describe fucking hand-ground coffee, you know? I mean it in that very Instagramatised, hollowed-out sense. I get up, meditate for an hour, hand grind my coffee, and annoy my girlfriend with some things that I've seen on Twitter. Then I write for a few hours.
I guess it still has that function of removal, but, in a very hygienic sense, it makes me feel like I've paid my dues to my ego. The feeling that I have to do it so that I have room for other people. It doesn't take terribly long. I'm usually done after a couple of hours and then it's like, alright, cool, I'll do my share of what it is to be a boyfriend or step-dad(ish) figure. There's always something to do, always something to fix. I usually stop when I know where I'm going. There's always a commission that will come in and that's the perfect destination for that thing I've been half engaged with.
You like having lots of different pieces on the go?
Love it. It means I know where I can begin every morning. I have a thread to pull on in the morning.
What was the hardest book to write?
It was the Rory Gallagher one because that was a novel. 450 pages long. I think it's now 18 or something.
You cut it from 450 to 18?
It was like passing a kidney stone.
[Laughter]
The ending of The Black Pool is probably one of my favourite endings to a book ever. It reminded me of those surreal moments at the end of a night out, where you’ve been out all night and the sun's coming up. Somehow, you’re by the sea. Some of my favourite movies end on a beach, or by the ocean. Yours ends by the water, too. It’s also the moment where it’s apparent you can’t live in Dublin anymore. It’s killing you. You pass by some graffiti on a wall that encapsulates that.
‘Live Dublin, die young.’ The most literal thing I've ever seen in my life. It was definitely there.
Did you feel that either you leave, or Dublin kills you?
I was very sure I was going to die if I continued to be there. I really felt like there was a hit out on me. It was really awful. I don’t know if this is actually still in the book, but I saw this parking meter. I really did think that that parking thing was an assassin. I was like, this is it. It looked like a human outline, and it had this big white ‘P’ at the top of it. I was like, that's death.
[Laughter]
There was no subtext. Acid trips don't have subtext.
No subtext, just text.
It's fucking 'One Of These Nights’ by The Eagles on repeat. I really did just think I wouldn't have to do anything by myself. I wouldn't have to kill myself. It would just kill me. The pain would just do it for me. The sadness was such that it was like, yeah, this will just fucking do it for you.
Tim MacGabhann’s The Black Pool: A Memoir of Forgetting is published by Sceptre.