Author attributes resilience to his loving wife - and some ‘thickness’
AUTHOR Donal Ryan said he felt like a “bit of a fraud” being a part of the resilience and resolve panel as whenever he displayed either in life, it was because his wife, Anne Marie, had told him to.
Mr Ryan’s inner resilience stems from when he was first trying to get published.
“I printed off manuscripts when I wrote my first novel and l sent them everywhere to literally everybody. I got letters from solicitors' offices actually coming back saying ‘it's very good but we don't publish books’,” Mr Ryan recalled.
“I really only kept going because Anne Marie kept saying ‘just print off one more’. The first day I got a slip in the door saying that ‘this book isn’t for us’, from an agent, I said ‘that’s it, I am terrible, I can’t write, I’m giving up’.
“She said ‘you fe**ing eejit, go upstairs and print off another manuscript and send it off’. I was really annoying her because she was pregnant and she was kind of scary,” he mused.
Mr Ryan said he sent out 150 manuscripts at the time.
“I got 47 rejections. That number is kind of arbitrary, I counted the rejections I had in my email when I was asked that by a journalist but it was actually far more if you include the non-responses,” he said.
“But I genuinely feel like a fraud today being here with Caroline and Joanne and all these people who have achieved so much in life and I felt like a fraud then because when my first book came out, and got nominated for the Booker, there were editorials in the LA Times and the New York Times in the same week about me and how great I was and how brave I was to face all this trauma of rejection.
“I mean it was no trauma really. It was just letters coming in the door saying basically ‘fe*k off’ and after the first one or two it was grand, you know eventually something will happen. So it really, really did feel like I was undeserving of any praise I got.”
According to Mr Ryan his drive to print off more manuscripts came from that old Irish thing “thickness”.
“It was thickness really, I just decided I was gonna be thick about it. My dad kept saying the best quality you can allow yourself in life, when you’re lacking in talent, is thickness, just be thick about it, so thanks dad, that was great advice!”
Joanne O’Riordan said she was given similar advice. “My mother told me that she didn’t raise a quitter but she might have raised a dumbass.” Caroline Currid laughed with the crowd and said she was going to use that advice working with groups going forward!