My Coney Island Baby by Billy O'Callaghan

This year, he published Life Sentences, which followed his second novel, My Coney Island Baby in 2019 and a short story collection in 2020. Lockdown proved to be a creatively fertile period for O’Callaghan, as he finished his latest novel, due to be published in 2023.

Some people are lucky that they can write a story in two or three hours but I don’t seem to be one of those.” The stories for me live and die at the sentence level and so each one has to be worked, it all has to gel together. This story was percolating for a while and once I started writing it, I probably spent about three weeks at it. Often I would have them in my head for a year or two before I start them.

I carry stories around with me for a while before I start them. O’Callaghan’s short stories have drawn praise from all quarters, much of which is no doubt down to the care and effort he puts into their fine tuning. To a child, everything seemed big and bright. I remember the crib on Patrick’s St, things like that.

Looking back on it, it is the feeling of it you carry with you more than anything, that sense of Christmas.' We would have a day out to do Christmas shopping in town, my birthday was December 9, we would usually go the day after. I remember going into Cash’s to see Santa a couple of times. We would have gone to see Santa in the shopping centre in Douglas, it was Quinnsworth then. Douglas is so close to the city but it felt very much self-contained. “It was an ordinary Christmas - I’m from that generation of people, I would think that most people had a similar kind of Christmas. Growing up in Douglas, which was then a village rather than the sprawling suburb it has become, Christmas was a time of simple pleasures, says O’Callaghan, who is on the cusp of his 48th birthday when we speak.

All of that, that is probably where the story came out of.” There is a kind of a bittersweetness about it and maybe that’s true for people as they start to get older anyway. For the most part, it is the good memories, although I know some people don’t necessarily have that. At Christmas especially you think of your childhood and growing up. “Everything we are is what went before us. The past and its effect on our present is a recurring theme in O’Callaghan’s work, most recently in his acclaimed novel Life Sentences, which is based on the lives of three generations of his own family. Dead of Winter is a beautifully expressed and moving story about family, love and loss, and how the seemingly mundane memories of our youth can comfort and sustain us in our grief.

My Coney Island Baby by Billy O'Callaghan