The story was assembled from bits of memory - the smell of the desk at school, the private world under the sitting room table - and it arrived in small chunks. Kevin stopped at a gate and bashed it with his stick.' (Kevin, by the way, is not Peter. Anyway, that's what I was thinking of when I wrote the first two sentences, 'We were walking down our road. I don't think I knew about the Beatles back then the song was just in the air. We had sticks and we were knocking them against the gates and walls, and singing 'She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah'. I remember, and have regularly remembered, walking down a road with my friend, Peter. So, I started writing in the first person. I wanted to see if there was another type of novel in me.

I wanted to get away from the first three books, The Commitments, The Snapper and The Van. But I don't recall a decision.īut I do know why the boy became the narrator of the book. The school I taught in and the surrounding houses had been the fields and building sites that Paddy Clarke plays in. My parents still lived in the house I'd grown up in. I was 10 in 1968, as is Paddy, and I do remember that I was thinking a lot about my childhood, possibly anticipating my son's future. I don't really remember why I decided to write about a 10-year-old boy, or about that boy in 1968 - I don't remember the decisions.

That there was still room in my life for writing. So, I started Paddy Clarke to prove to myself that I could - that it was permitted. But the other definition I'd only been getting the hang of, novelist, was being nudged aside, becoming a hobby or a memory. They were joking - I think - the friends who announced my retirement. I'd finished The Van, my third novel, the previous November and I remember being told, more than once, that it was the last book I'd write for a long time, until after the baby, and the other babies, had been fattened and educated. I started writing Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha in February 1991, a few weeks after the birth of my first child.

Author of paddy clarke ha ha ha