In Conversation with Michael Magee
“I felt a degree of responsibility towards the place to honestly articulate the experience of living there and growing up there.”
Luminous and devastating, Close To Home by Michael Magee is a portrait of modern masculinity shaped by class, trauma, and silence, but also by the courage to love and to survive.
His poignant debut has already brought in a multitude of literary prizes, including being crowned the Winner of the Nero Book Award for Debut Fiction 2023. Most recently, Michael was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year, we caught up with him in the days leading up to the award ceremony.
Discussing poverty, place and the inescapable history of conflict, Michael shares with us the journey of his striking debut.
I know it’s not always a good idea to assume that the protagonist of a book must be its author but, in your case, there is this quite a strong personal connection. Would you be able to tell us a little bit about that?
For the first few years of composition, I moved back and forth between memoir and fiction. That got quite complicated, but essentially the whole conception of the novel started with a letter that a friend of mine, the writer, Thomas Morris, set me as a writing exercise. I guess this exercise was a means for me to trick myself into thinking that I wasn’t writing a novel at all. I was saying all these things about myself; my past, the history of the place I’m from, my family – all the stuff I felt I couldn’t articulate in the space of fiction. I was just writing things down without thinking too intensely about what I was saying, and without getting in my own way. Over the course of two or three months, the letter got longer and longer and then, suddenly, I had this manuscript.
The process became quite difficult because I felt that I was too close to the material, it was too personal, and I was unable to step back from it and allow myself to shape it into something resembling a piece of literature. So, the shift, that sort of recalibration, from memoir to fiction, came about two or three years in, when I changed the narrator’s name from Mick to Sean. The reason I chose Sean was because, when I was born, my mother wanted to call me Sean, but my father wouldn’t allow it. He was stringently against it. It was 1990 and Belfast was a very different place, even then. It was at the tail end of the conflict, but my father knew from experience that having an obvious Irish or Catholic name at that time could mark you out, it could lead to you being discriminated against in education, housing, employment. Also, the British Army, who had checkpoints set up all over the city, would see your name on your license and pull you out of your car, search you, and hassle you. There was a lot of harassment back then, a lot of violent modes of repression, and people from West Belfast, where I’m from, and other areas like it, suffered these humiliations and degradations at the hands of the British army for decades. Neutralising my name was therefore a way of protecting me, and it’s understandable. My father didn’t want me to experience the oppression he experienced growing up here, and this was a small, innocuous way of trying to do that.
In that sense, naming the character Sean was an act of reclamation. By using a name that died the moment my name was decided on, it allowed me to see the narrator as another version of myself, which gave me the distance I needed to be able to shape this material that I had dragged out of myself in the letter. That distance was important, it allowed me to create a kind of narrative persona, through Sean, and that in turn opened up the story in all sorts of ways.
Not only is Close to Home beautifully written, but it’s also very specific in terms of its setting. It’s clear how the socio-political and cultural situation of the characters affect their lives, their outcomes and the paths they take. How do you see the value of fiction in informing readers who maybe don’t know about certain periods in time or places? Do you think that the educational element is important?
Close to Home is set in a very particular locale. It’s provincial in its own way and that specificity was important in terms of what I was trying to say. Earlier on in my writing career, I felt an impulse towards the more general in terms of writing something that I felt accommodated the reader. That was difficult because I knew I wanted to write about the place that I was from, but I didn’t think that fitted within the remit of what constituted literary fiction.
I guess that was what the letter allowed me to do; to think in terms of the specificity of the place rather than to remove myself from it. It’s a book about a young guy who has a university degree and can’t seem to get on his feet, get a job or find any kind of stability. Without intending it at all, that speaks to a lot of people’s experiences, whether they’re from poor backgrounds or lower middle-class backgrounds; people are experiencing precariousness across class boundaries in a way they haven’t before, there’s so much insecurity, so much anxiety about the future, and I think the book speaks to that experience very directly.
But in all honesty, the only thing that anybody hopes for when they write a book is that it resonates with the reader. If, in some way, it gives them some degree of aesthetic pleasure or they read it and think it’s a well-written piece of work, you know, job done.
At the same time, one of the most surprising things about publishing the book was the response I got from young working-class men. They saw themselves in the book, and there was something very profound and moving about that, especially when you consider how the novel is not the traditional medium through which their stories are told.
Oh, wow. I think sometimes, if you start from a specific viewpoint, the general comes as a by-product. So, you have that specific character and circumstance to attach yourself to emotionally, and then the learning and everything else comes out of that.
For sure. I can’t really say that there wasn’t part of me that was very conscious of writing a book set in West Belfast, which is a place that has historically been silenced and misrepresented in all sorts of ways. I think I was trying to write against that and I felt a degree of responsibility towards the place to honestly articulate the experience of living and growing up there. But I also didn’t want to romanticise or caricature it, which is something that you often come up against in literary representations of the people here.
I actually wanted to talk to you about the idea of class in fiction and how even the subject of money tends to not be not mentioned, even though it’s a huge part of our daily lives. How did you avoid generalising that experience and kept it honest?
Most things that are written about the North of Ireland have something to do with religion or sectarianism, and the conflict itself is rarely analysed through a sociological lens, which is a massive problem, because then it gets framed as a tribal conflict between two warring factions, or religious denominations, but it was much more material than that, you know?
I wrote this book as part of a PhD in Creative Writing, and there was a critical component in which I read Didier Eribon’s Returning to Reims. That book spoke directly to my own experiences of class migration / social mobility, and what happens when you move away from the social space you were born into, the place that socialised you, and attempt to assimilate into another, more bourgeois space, and are exposed by all these class indicators you didn’t even know you had. That discomfort, that feeling of being a fish out of water, of being torn between two opposing worlds, which are utterly at odds with each other in all sorts of ways, that’s what the book became about—class as felt and experienced in the body, through social interaction.
I also think the experience of living precariously was feeding into that as well. I came from a generation of people (I was born in 1990 and the peace agreement here was signed in 1998) who were promised that they would reap the spoils of peace. I keep coming back to The Troubles and it’s fucking annoying because you can’t really get away from it. But, just to contextualise, The Troubles happened in poor, working-class neighbourhoods. Out of 94 postcodes in the North of Ireland, a disproportionate amount of violence happened in 12-14 of those postcodes, which are all profoundly poorer areas. People’s experiences of the conflict are therefore very different depending on where they were from. Sean’s mother, like my mother, grew up on the Falls Road, which was the centre of some of the most intense violence, and was under constant military occupation for 30 years. The experience of living through that conflict as a working-class woman, a single mother with two sons, later three, and moving through an environment that was incredibly hostile and repressive, especially towards women, and how that experience shaped her, was central to understanding who Sean was, where he’d come from, and how he, like me, had indirectly inherited the different forms of trauma his mother experienced and continues to carry.
It's funny because I was always reluctant to write about The Troubles. I felt that it had been done to death and that I had nothing more to say about it. But I was fixated on writing about the people I grew up with and the place where I’m from. My generation, the generation whose parents lived through this conflict very directly, was also profoundly affected by it, and so it was unavoidable. We had, in some way, inherited the damage that was done to our parents, and I realised that nobody I had written about that experience. I was perfectly placed, in that sense, and so there was a degree of urgency about it too.
At the same time, Sean is teetering on the brink between two social worlds. I wanted him to feel that discomfort of somebody with an attachment to the world he comes from, but who is also trying to remove himself from that world because it’s associated with everything that’s gone wrong with his life; the complicated family situation, the drugs, the painful legacy of conflict. Then another world opens up to him, a more cultured, middle-class world where people go to exhibition launches and read poetry in rooms above bars, and although he’s drawn to that world, he’s also distrustful of it, and rightly so, because he recognises, in some way, that he could lose something of himself in the process of assimilating into it.
Is that how you felt when you entered the literary world?
Oh Jesus, yeah, fucking hell! Similarly to Sean, I also went to university in Liverpool, and it wasn’t until I came back to Belfast to do a master’s at Queen’s that I felt my class-ness for the first time. I was completely outnumbered by all these bougie fuckers. I walked in the room and was like, holy moly, these people actually exist in this city? I had no idea. It took me aback in all sorts of ways. At the same time, I was drawn to that world, I wanted to be part of it. That’s a big difference between me and Sean; he’s savvier than me and sees through the bullshit in a way that I didn’t. I felt impelled to become part of that world because I associated it with some degree of escape, an escape from where I was at that moment in my life. Also, I knew these people who were attending poetry readings were interested in the things I was interested in, they were serious about writing, and that’s where I wanted to be.
Is that why you mentioned that you were perfectly placed? Because you were genuinely interested in similar things but had actually experienced the other side?
I think so. I think a lot about that Bell Hooks essay, ‘Choosing the margins as a space of radical openness.’ She speaks about how the marginal vantage point is an inherently radical one, because of the unique perspective, for sure, but also because of how being situated on the margin allows you to appropriate the language of the oppressor and use it to challenge the hegemonic power of the institution from within. But in order to do this, you have to understand the structures of power within these institutions, you have to learn the rules of the game, but you have to do this without being co-opted, without being subsumed, otherwise, you become part of the apparatus you’re trying to dismantle. Learn the rules in order to break them type thing. That goes right down to language, how we speak, how we articulate ourselves, and how we interact in different social spaces. It’s kind of like learning a new language, and as with any language, you need to be confident in order to communicate clearly. I didn’t have that confidence, not for a long time, and not because I wasn’t blessed with articulacy—I had simply moved into a world that wasn’t for people like me, that was even openly hostile, and I had to overcome a lot of barriers, both externally and internally, and learn the rules of a game that I had never played before, which was utterly alien to me, in order to survive.
And then you published a book, so you must have felt that the publishing world was also quite unfamiliar.
Aye, but by that stage I was ready! I’d spent most of my 20s slowly battling with it. Saying that, when I first went to London, I didn’t go to London until I got a book deal, which is mental – I’d never been before, and I was quite overwhelmed. But I was ready. I was old enough and had been around different groups of people enough to be able to navigate my way through it – only for a few hours at a time though!
You’ve mentioned in other interviews how much harder it is for working class writers to be published. What do you think are the main barriers to entry? What do you think needs to happen to level out the playing field?
I remember watching Zadie Smith in an interview and she said that, had it not been for free education, she wouldn’t have been a writer and couldn’t have been. I think it’s a much broader and bigger structural thing than even just the publishing world. We’re told over and over again that there are more working-class people going to university, although they never say anything about the high drop-out rate among people from poorer backgrounds. And those people who make it through, who actually stick it out, despite the incredible discomfort they often experience at university, aren’t studying subjects in the humanities, Art, Literature etc. But that also has a lot do with external pressure to study something that will get you a secure job, preferably one that will pay enough for you to transcend your class position, which is a massive barrier to overcome.
There was a study carried out for Trinity College, but I think it also applies to the Oxbridge universities, that less than 5% of people who went to Trinity College in Dublin are from poor backgrounds, which is kind of astonishing. Also, people read and are moved by the things that speak most directly to their experience, and if the vast majority of agents and editors in the publishing industry come from a very particular socio-economic background, that makes it that little bit harder for that writing to find its place. That isn’t by any means a swipe at all editors, and it can’t be true for everyone because I’ve fucking managed to break through somehow. But if you consider the previous point, and if it’s hard enough for people from more traditionally middle-class backgrounds to find the time to write, what with low wages, high rents, the looming threat of eviction, and very little in the way of job security never mind free time to actually sit down and think, how the fuck are people who come from working-class backgrounds going to have a chance?
This is the situation with working-class women in particular. They often inherit duties of care, and they are forced into certain positions and feel pressure to make decisions in their life that will give them a good career or some degree of professional attainment, so any artistic impulse they have is quickly extinguished. Which is interesting because you see, in Ireland anyway, there’s an emerging group of older women who have come to writing later in life, such as Wendy Erskine and Louise Kennedy, and it’s like they’re bursting at the seams with incredible stories, incredible work, and you can’t help but wonder how much more of it we could have if only the conditions were different.
Ah, I love Louise Kennedy! She was one of the first authors I spoke to, and I just loved her, she was hilarious.
Louise and I were doing a PhD at the same time at Queens, and it was glorious. She is one of the few people I know who can hold the attention of an entire beer garden. We would go to this bar in Belfast, and everybody would huddle around and listen to her tell these incredibly funny stories. She’s fucking class.
But yes, all those barriers make it more difficult in all sorts of ways for people from working-class backgrounds for sure. Publishing tries its best, but I think there are broader structural problems, and I think it’s getting harder. It’s getting harder for everybody to write, and that comes down to how much rent you’re paying, and how much of a safety net you have to fall back on. I mean, if you live in Dublin or London and you find time to write, I’ll shake your fucking hand. Unless you come from a wealthy background, in which case, you do you. Having to work full-time in and of itself is a nightmare, then rent and bills and the pressure of that… it all feeds into it.
You mentioned fiction being an escape, and that you gravitate to reading about places you’ve never been to or people you don’t know as an entrance into that world. Close to Home is so entrenched in the specificity of world, how does it feel for you that thousands of readers are using your book as an escape?
I was asking because I was thinking about the scene in Close to Home where Sean’s at the poetry reading and he’s uncomfortable with the poets talking about certain issues because they weren’t actually there to experience it, and he sees through it. They don’t have any bad intent, but he knows they were shielded by it. So, although there may be genuine interest there, do you feel any discomfort knowing that a lot of your readers don’t have any experience of the world and events you’re talking about?
Yeah, maybe. The setting, environment and socio-political context are obviously important, but at the end of the day, you’re writing about people and relationships, and that’s how stories resonate with the reader. In Close to Home, love is so important in that so many of the relationships that Sean has are filled with love, it’s central to who he is, and it saves him, I think. It pulls him back from the brink, as suffocating and all-encompassing as that love is. It’s something to hold on to. Not just for him, but for his family too. They need it urgently, you know, and they hold on to it because, often, it’s all they fucking have.
Also, I kind of get a buzz off making people feel a little bit uncomfortable, you know? Particularly when it comes to talking about The Troubles, they’re always very guilty – ‘I don’t know anything about this. I feel really bad’, and then you can poke them a little bit, see how far they’re willing to go. But it’s a difficult line to tow because you don’t want to be a dickhead and make people feel uncomfortable for the sake of it. It’s more about confronting them with a reality that they’re sort of aware of but haven’t really delved deeper into or given any time or space to think about.
The Troubles is very, very hard for people to comprehend what it really was. If it happened in Liverpool or Glasgow, it would be a very different experience collectively for the British consciousness. It’s the same in Ireland. There are people down South who don’t understand much about what happened up here and that isn’t their fault. They were sold a story, I get it. But still. It’s nice to see them squirm.
I actually did a reading in Cambridge last year and there was a fella who came up to me afterwards. He was in his 60s – a big bald unit of a man. He told me that he was in the British Army, and he had been stationed in the North of Ireland during The Troubles. He said, ‘I was 17 years old, and I had no idea what I was doing there’. He was enlisted, and six months later he was suddenly in an environment where he was seen and treated as the enemy, and rightly so. What really hit home though was that he said, ‘I’m from Sheffield. I grew up on the same housing estates that I was then sent to, and I was the occupier.’ It was deeply uncomfortable for him, and I can understand why—the people in West Belfast were instantly recognisable to him, they were his people, working-class people like him, living in council estates like him, and they were suffering under the same conditions, the same debilitating inequality, and I got the sense that he had never really recovered from that.
A friend of mine is also from Sheffield and he said that the first thing you’re met with when you leave the school gates at sixteen is a man in a beret and a clipboard. They’re right there waiting for them, promising them the world, and within a few months, these young people are trained and fucked off to Afghanistan or wherever, to fight against and kill the poorest and most vulnerable people in society. Those kinds of conversations, those moments when the facade falls away and we see each other very clearly, our commonalities, our shared experiences, our class solidarity, that’s serious stuff.
Yes and, as you said, it’s the emotions, the people, the love, and the connections that are actually important.
Yes, and I think the impulse initially was to explain and contextualise, and what I actually wanted was to just have the characters interact with each other. They needed to have space to be people outside their social conditions and realities. They needed to just sit and watch TV or give each other a hug or get drunk and tell stories and sing.
There are a lot of moments of joy for sure, which I loved, but it is contrasted with a darker side. You explore violence in many different forms, and the book starts with an act of violence. It can be quite rare for a book to do this in a nuanced way, which I think you did really well. Could you talk a little about the different types of violence you wanted to portray and why?
The book always started with the punch – those opening lines were always the jumping-off point, and that became a kernel for examining the various forms of violence that Sean’s life has been structured by. There is, of course, the violence within the domestic space, the sexual violence Sean’s brother suffered as a child, and the profound effect this violence has had on Sean and his family. Then there’s the legacy of historical violence in Sean’s community, my community, the Catholic working-class community in West Belfast, and how the lasting trauma of colonial violence has been inherited by a generation of people who are still reeling from one of the most catastrophic economic crises of the last century, which was the 2008 financial crash. All this is to say that violence doesn’t happen in isolation. People hit people because they have been hit. That’s not to excuse it. Sean has agency, that’s an important distinction, but these external structures factor into how he perceives violence, particularly as a man who has grown up in a culture where violence is seen as the primary mode of resolving conflict, and also as a means of survival. You see this early in the book when Sean remembers how his mother forced him to go out onto the street and fight when he was a kid. He had to do this, even if he was going to get a beating because the alternative (running away, being a coward) would’ve been worse. What happens then when this mode of resolving conflict, which is at odds with liberal attitudes towards violence, comes into contact with the more symbolic acts of violence that Sean is confronted with?
The punch is a reaction to a comment made by a guy at a house party who’s much more middle-class than Sean is. The comment exposes Sean as a working-class person from West Belfast who is socially inferior to the people he’s surrounded by, and he doesn’t have the language or the social capital within that space to be able to defend himself, that’s how symbolic violence works. And it touches a nerve, the allusion to Sean’s father, Sean’s estrangement from him, and the suggestion that childhood abandonment is symptomatic of being poor, which then triggers deeper feelings of inadequacy, of shame, that Sean has repressed for a very long time. And for Sean, this felt as painful as any punch in the face he’s ever had, you know? In that way, Sean is perfectly within his right to punch Daniel Jackson. It’s like, okay, this is the mode of violence you’re using against me. Well, now I’m going to drag you into my world, let’s see how you fare.
What is the best writing advice you’ve ever received is? Or a routine you’ve picked up?
There was a moment during writing Close to Home, and it was probably something I realised a bit too late, but throughout my 20s, I was a hungry bastard, and I was desperate to publish a book. I was also completely deluded. I thought when I did my master’s in Creative Writing that I was going to get a book deal immediately, and I was in a terrible rush. I was writing a lot and I was very disciplined but getting published was the driver – that was the priority over everything else. That stymied me in a way because the work was secondary, which meant that I was rushing things , I was writing without thinking, without doing the actual work that’s required to write well. A lot of this also had to do with the fact that I was desperate to make something of myself, and there was a degree of pressure that came with being the only person in my fucking family or social group growing up who had been to university. I wanted to succeed, and that somehow structured my relationship with writing. Looking back, it was deeply unhealthy, but it lit a fire in me, in a way. And then when it came to writing this book, Close to Home, something shifted, and it dawned on me that the work was the important thing. That’s where all the joy comes, where the revelatory moments come – when you’re sitting on your own at your desk, working through it. That’s where all the pleasure happens. That shift changed everything for me. So, I told myself that if I had time, patience, and put in the work, publication would come. I wish I had realised that sooner, but it is what it is.
It’s okay, everyone has their own path! I love reading the acknowledgements section in books as they’re always so telling. I loved that the last one of yours was your English teacher. Would you say that your English lessons were the beginning of your writing career? Was he inspiring to you?
That was Gerry Sullivan, aye. He was some teacher. I wasn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, a gifted student. In fact, I didn’t go to school that often. I was mitching off a lot, particularly when I got to my GCSEs because I thought I was going to leave school at 16 and do a trade. That was what everybody around me did, and there was no world in which I was ever going to university, that was just outside the realms of possibility for me, it wasn’t even spoken about as an option. But in his class, something just clicked. There wasn’t much structure, he would just sit there and talk about poetry and writing, and he was a massive fan of Wordsworth, Lord Baron, all the old English poets. He would get us to read the poems out together and we would analyse them in a very free-flowing way. There were no rules, no wrong answers, and it wasn’t about answering questions for an exam paper, it was about formulating your own thoughts, your own emotional response to the words being presented to you, and that was incredibly liberating.
I didn’t start reading properly until I was 13. I did this secretly, of course, because if any of the boys found out I read I would be fucking tortured. But it was a secret thing that I was doing on the side that nobody knew about, except my English teacher. His was one the one class I was good at and felt impelled to turn up to. It was mad, like, I would be mitching school and if I had a period of English literature in the afternoon, I would go in, and then go back on the mitch again straight after. He gave me some brilliant books too, like A Kestrel for a Knave, and he nurtured my interest in literature all throughout my teenage years. He also gave me a book of Hemingway's short stories as well, which changed everything about what I thought literature could do. It felt right to give him his place in the book, you know?
That’s so lovely! Does he know? Are you still in touch?
I couldn’t find him for years, and then one of the other teachers who taught at my school connected him with me. I asked if Gerry Sullivan was still alive, he said aye! I got his number and we met for coffee around the corner. He lives like fucking ten minutes down the road from me now. He retired when I went to do my A levels. As soon as started doing my A levels, he retired. I was heartbroken, I was just devastated, and I hadn’t seen him since it was like 17. It was amazing.
That’s so nice. I feel like everyone has a great story like that. Have you seen that video of Ian Wright reuniting with his teacher? I cry every time.
Oh my God. Oh yeah. That’s the thing, I always had this fucking deep fear. I think it was from looking around me and seeing how a lot of young men from where I was from ended up in jail or addicted to drugs or dead. But you only need one person to show you kindness or interest or foster something, and it can change everything for you.
The final question that we like to ask everyone we speak to is, do you judge a book by its cover?
I don’t know, it depends. No, I don’t think I do? Well, if I see a nice cover I’ll certainly pick it up. I do like a nice cover.
Do you like your covers?
I do like my covers. I think I was very lucky with my covers. I was worried about the American one, but I actually love it. It’s interesting how different people react differently to them. You know, older people do not like the American cover. It’s too loud or something for them. But no, I actually don’t think I do judge books by covers. I don’t even know how I get around to reading the books that I end up reading. I just pick them up and hope for the best.
