I resumed my audio diary on 4 January 1994: ‘Good morning. It’s extremely late. Twenty-five past seven. Holy fuck! And I’m only coming out of New Hall! I’m fourteen bloody stone. I get married, contentment arrives, I buy a car, ditch me bike. My waist used to be thirty-two, it’s now thirty-six!’
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My memoir, In My Gut, I Don’t Believe, will be published on 19 December.
It has been 25 years in the making. I’m proud of it and a bit scared about its publication. Honesty is the best policy, and I have been honest, very honest. I wrote things in my personal journal while I was a student for the priesthood that were for my eyes only. Yet, on 19 December, much of what I thought would never be read by anyone else other than perhaps my spiritual director will be in plain sight for anyone to read.
If a book is to be any good, especially a memoir, the author has to become vulnerable. Well, I did. So my apprehension is, I think, a good sign. I feel a bit like I felt some 30 years ago when I was leaving the Marists. You make a decision and there is no going back.
What kept me for so long in the Marists was my ability to see 360 degrees of any issue I faced. Even the week or so before I finally left, my mind could still glimpse another interpretation of my life – the religious one. Called by God. Remaining true to your vocation. Sacrificing yourself.
In my mind, I really could see both sides. And my cure was to get out of my head and into my gut.
‘In your gut,’ asked my counsellor. ‘What do you believe in your gut?’
It was the turning point of my life. A scary prospect. Was I to determine my life, not on my mind, but on the solution offered me in my gut?
Then, as now, it was scary. Literally, I could have been making the biggest mistake of my life, leading to my unhappiness and a lifetime of regret.
Decide on the basis of my gut?
What was ingenious about my counsellor’s question was that my gut doesn’t give a damn about what anybody else thinks. My gut isn’t swayed by other people’s opinions. My gut, it turns out, knew the answer.
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AS the big Five-O looms and gets closer and closer – the half-century – I cannot believe the computation of years. How could it be? Eighteen years living at home, a student until my late twenties, five years’ teaching, seventeen years working as a writer, journalist and editor. Meeting my wife, the love of my life; fathering our children – the eldest now as tall (or could he be taller?) as me. The house built, the books written, the trees planted. The jobs done: Irish Times columnist, managing editor for Ireland of a publishers, chair of Irish PEN. The high points, the low points; the joys and the sorrows.
Our life tasks change. Time is more precious. Love alone makes sense of it all.
I’ve finished my memoir. Hardest thing I’ve ever written. And it was like a different person writing it, looking back at a younger self. I’ve the distance of age now to laugh at the young man’s follies and delusions. But it was so difficult going back there, revisiting insights, transitions, decisions delayed, decisions taken. Fear and risk at play in me.
Looking back, I saw the patterns, the traps, the seeming security and the terror of taking a risk confident only in my raw gut and trusting it, and outgrowing the need for others to agree or confirm or verify.
I’m writing a play. And I’ve written a short story.
What would I do if I’d only a year to live? Or a month? Or one day? I know I’d spend some of it writing.