'No one seemed to know what happened to my aunt': Sebastian Barry on The Secret Scripture

After a slow start, the Costa prize-winner completed his novel, inspired by a family mystery, in between visits to his mother in hospital

My first intimation of Roseanne McNulty came when I was driving with my mother through Strandhill in Sligo. We had just gone by the derelict remnant of my great-uncle’s dance hall, the Plaza, which looked out blindly on the stormy bay. Now we were passing the ruins of a little hut by the road, engulfed in an enormous rose bush.

“That’s where your woman was put,” my mother said.

“What woman?”

“Uncle Pat’s first wife.”

The tone suggested the deepest disapproval.

​I think she said a few more things about this nameless great-aunt. That she had been the piano player in my great-uncle’s band, for instance. But not much else. Something had happened, something dark and irredeemable, and she had ended up being put in the Sligo Lunatic Asylum.

​In the following years I wondered what was she supposed to have done. Why had they committed her? No one seemed to know.

​But wondering and writing are two different things. In 2001 I wrote a first chapter. It was just about how much Roseanne loved her father. I didn’t know if it was any use. Then the impulse vanished and there was nothing for two years.

​At that point the working title was The Hammers and the Feathers, and I wrote a chapter to explain it. Something in that section, which recounts her father and herself going up into a round tower so he could prove Galileo’s theory to her, that all things fall at the same rate, seemed to suggest the presence of the book beyond it. Like an edifice standing off in the mist.

​Soon there were a few chapters. I began to feel Roseanne’s presence keenly. I was supposed to be writing the book but it didn’t feel like that. I had the odd feeling of standing at her shoulder, watching her scratch out her story.

​In the beginning, Roseanne only mentioned her psychiatrist Dr Grene when he came to visit her in her room. Then I began to alternate sections between him and Roseanne – or rather, he did, because he is writing his own account in his commonplace book.

​I was about two-thirds into the draft when I got a note from my mother’s theatrical agent, asking did I know she was in hospital. We had been at loggerheads the last two years and had not been in touch as much as we should have been. It was a great shock.

I found her in dire straits. My first thought was, I can’t write the book now. It would be a long drive to the hospital and back each day. But Roseanne wasn’t interested in stopping again, so I wrote in the gaps.

​The actual nature of the story, the elements of it, what happened in it, seemed to me to be fully decided by Roseanne. It was her story. Her voice was strong and confident. I couldn’t interfere with it

​The book seemed to go on of its own accord. Which was just as well, as I was so distracted at the time, I was merely obeying its instruction to be in my workroom. Driving, driving, playing Joni Mitchell’s Blue over and over. Washing my mother’s clothes, folding them, ferrying them back to her. When did I write the book? I barely remember.

My mother got a little better, she got a little worse. I noticed her courage. Roseanne also has that. Her love of simple things. The sum of a long, vivid life, anonymous with age in a hospital bed.

By the spring of the next year, The Secret Scripture was drafted, and Roseanne had told her story, and Dr Grene had completed his. The ending of the book was a sort of chastened tribute to my own realisation that, no matter what trouble there might be between you, there is a cable connecting a mother and a child laid so deep that not even ordinary life can disturb it.

Sebastian Barry’s A Thousand Moons is published by Faber (£8.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

Sebastian Barry

The GuardianTramp

Related Content

Article image
'A lightbulb went on - I had the location for a sex scene': Louise Doughty on Apple Tree Yard
Discovering a hiding place for her lovers in the Houses of Parliament gave the writer the ‘big bang’ moment she needed

Louise Doughty

16, May, 2020 @10:00 AM

Article image
André Aciman on writing Call Me by Your Name: 'I fell in love with Elio and Oliver'
The novelist on his famous romance, initially scribbled as a distraction from the novel he was supposed to be writing

André Aciman

09, Jan, 2021 @12:30 PM

Article image
John Lanchester: 'I started writing Capital in 2006 assuming a crash was about to happen'
The author on watching the global financial crisis in real time and writing a nonfiction book to avoid ruining his novel with too much knowledge

John Lanchester

21, Nov, 2020 @12:30 PM

Article image
'I wanted to write about a care system that didn’t care very much': Kit de Waal on My Name Is Leon
The novelist did not set out to write a political book, but a lived experience

Kit de Waal

22, Aug, 2020 @11:00 AM

Article image
'I decided the book should taste like a lime': DBC Pierre on writing Vernon God Little
Out of work in London with nothing to lose, the author wrote 100,000 words in a few weeks – and then mined the ‘gibberish’ for his debut novel

DBC Pierre

08, Aug, 2020 @10:00 AM

Article image
Jonathan Coe on The Rotters’ Club: ‘My diary provided endless material, but I didn’t like the person I was’
The author on mixing semi-fact with fiction – and the school rule about swimming naked that inspired the novel’s big comedy set piece

Jonathan Coe

24, Jul, 2021 @11:30 AM

Article image
Roddy Doyle on writing The Commitments: 'Whenever I needed a name, I used the phonebook'
The Booker winner and dramatist on writing his much-loved novel while teaching at a secondary school in a Dublin suburb

Roddy Doyle

12, Dec, 2020 @12:30 PM

Article image
Emma Donoghue on writing Room: ‘I toned down some of the horror of the Fritzl case’
Donoghue’s bestseller drew on the case of Felix Fritzl, who was held captive in a dungeon by his father, and her observations of her own children

Emma Donoghue

08, May, 2021 @12:00 PM

Article image
‘An image came into my head of two little boys sitting on either side of a fence’ - John Boyne on The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
The novelist on how it took him two days, writing through the nights, to complete a first draft of his famous Holocaust novel for younger readers, and how he remains ‘immensely proud’ of it

John Boyne

06, Sep, 2021 @9:00 AM

Article image
Pat Barker on The Silence of the Girls: ‘The Iliad is myth – the rules for writing historical fiction don’t apply’
The Booker-winning novelist knew when she read the Iliad that she would write about Briseis one day

Pat Barker

07, Aug, 2021 @11:00 AM