Leitrim writer reveals how grief, family and his wife’s cancer journey inspired The Light at Evening

1. You’ve described The Light at Evening as semi-autobiographical. Was there any hesitation about putting experiences so close to your own life into fiction?

Yes, absolutely. In fact, there were moments when I wondered whether this story was too personal, too close to home. This is probably the first novel I've written where I couldn't completely hide behind the fiction.

There are experiences and emotions in The Light at Evening that come directly from my own life — grief, fear, the illness of someone you love, the pressures of middle age, and that unsettling awareness that time is beginning to move much faster than it once did. Writing about those things meant going back into places emotionally that weren't always comfortable.

The hesitation wasn't so much about what people might think of me. It was about the other people whose lives inevitably intersect with mine. I had to be very careful that I was telling Ciarán's story rather than simply putting my own family onto the page. That's where fiction became important. I could take something that was emotionally true and change the circumstances around it.

But I also made a decision quite early that if I was going to write this book, I couldn't protect myself too much. There would have been no point. I wanted to write honestly about what it feels like to reach your fifties and suddenly realise that the people you always assumed would be there are beginning to disappear, that the people you love are vulnerable, and that you are vulnerable too.

So yes, there was hesitation. But I think the things that frightened me slightly to put on the page eventually became the heart of the novel.

2. Your father passed away in 2024, and grief is central to the novel. Did writing the book help you understand your own grief differently?

Yes, although perhaps not in the way I expected. Writing didn't resolve the grief or provide some neat sense of closure. What it did was make me realise how deeply grief becomes woven into ordinary life.

When my father died, one of the strangest things was that the world simply carried on. You get up the next morning. Cars are going past outside. People are going to work. Somebody is talking about the weather. You make a cup of tea. Yet for you something enormous has happened, and the world is permanently different.

That contradiction became very important in The Light at Evening. I didn't want grief to appear only in dramatic scenes. Often it arrives unexpectedly. You hear a phrase your father used to say. You drive along a road you travelled together. You find something belonging to him. A song comes on the radio. For a few seconds the distance between the past and the present seems to disappear.

Writing Ciarán's grief made me understand that perhaps we don't really "get over" the people we lose. We absorb their absence into our lives. They remain present in memories, habits, stories and even in the way we see the world.

My father's death inevitably changed the book. It gave it an emotional depth that I don't think I could have manufactured through imagination alone. But I also didn't want the novel to say that grief is the end of the story. Ciarán gradually discovers that you can carry loss with you and still move forward. Perhaps writing the novel helped me understand that too.

3. Ciarán is grieving his father while caring for his ageing mother and supporting his wife through cancer. Why did you want to explore that particular stage of life, where someone can suddenly find themselves caring for everybody around them?

I think it is a stage of life that isn't written about often enough, particularly from a man's point of view.

You reach your fifties and suddenly the landscape changes. Your parents, who were once the people you depended upon, may begin depending upon you. At the same time, you may have worries about your partner, your work and your own future. You become very conscious that the generation ahead of you is disappearing and that you are moving forward in the queue yourself.

Ciarán finds himself trying to hold everything together, and I think a lot of people will recognise that. There is love involved in caring for people, of course, but there can also be exhaustion, frustration, fear and guilt. Those feelings can exist alongside one another. I wanted the novel to be honest about that.

4. Your wife is a cancer survivor. How difficult was it to fictionalise an experience that you both actually lived through?

It was probably one of the most difficult elements to write because it wasn't solely my experience. When somebody you love is diagnosed with cancer, you are frightened and affected by it, but ultimately, they are the person going through the illness. I was very conscious of that distinction.

So, I didn't want simply to reproduce our experience on the page. I used some of the emotions surrounding that period — the uncertainty, the fear, the strange way ordinary life continues while something enormous is happening in the background — but Joan is a fictional character, and her story isn't my wife's story.

Perhaps what interested me most was the helplessness of the person standing beside someone they love. You want desperately to fix things and sometimes there is very little you can actually do except be there. That became an important part of Ciarán's experience.

5. Did your wife read the manuscript before publication — and what did she think of seeing echoes of your shared experience on the page?

Yes, she was aware from the beginning that this was going to be a much more personal book than anything I had written previously. I think we both understood that there would inevitably be echoes of our lives in it.

But she also understood that it was a novel rather than a record of our marriage. Joan isn't her and Ciarán isn't me. Fiction takes fragments of real life and mixes them with imagination until eventually it becomes its own thing.

I think what mattered most was that the experiences were treated with sensitivity and respect. I would never have wanted to publish something that made her uncomfortable or felt like I was appropriating an experience that belonged primarily to her.

6. Ciarán is a teacher and an unfulfilled poet, and you yourself are a secondary-school teacher and poet. Did you deliberately give him so much of your own life, or did that happen naturally as you wrote?

A bit of both. Making him a teacher gave me a world that I knew intimately, so I didn't have to invent the small details of that life. The poetry was probably even more important.

I've written poetry for many years, and I understand that feeling of having a creative life running parallel to your working life. You go to work, pay the mortgage and deal with all the practical responsibilities of adulthood, but somewhere inside you there is still the person who wanted to write.

Ciarán has allowed that part of himself to drift. His poetry manuscript becomes symbolic of something larger — the part of himself that he has neglected. Finishing it is not really about becoming famous or even becoming a successful poet. It is about reclaiming something that matters to him before he feels it is too late.

7. There’s a strong sense in the novel of dreams deferred — of reaching middle age and wondering about the life you might have lived. Is that something you wanted to confront personally through Ciarán?

Very much so. I think most people eventually wonder about the roads they didn't take.

When you're twenty, life seems almost limitless. There are all these possible versions of yourself ahead of you. By your fifties, many of those possibilities have disappeared. That sounds bleak, but I don't necessarily think it is. There can also be something liberating about accepting the life you actually have rather than constantly mourning the imaginary one.

Ciarán has to confront that. He wonders what might have happened if he had taken his writing more seriously or made different choices. But ultimately the novel isn't about regretting your life. It is about recognising the value in the life that has actually unfolded around you — the people you've loved, the places you belong to and the seemingly insignificant moments that turn out to have mattered enormously.

8. Do you think there comes a point in middle age when people begin taking stock — asking, “Is this the life I thought I was going to have?”

Absolutely. I think it is almost inevitable.

There comes a point when you realise there is probably more road behind you than ahead of you. That changes your perspective. Things that seemed enormously important when you were younger can begin to look quite trivial, while things you once took for granted — health, family, friendship, home, time itself — become much more precious.

But I didn't want The Light at Evening to be a depressing book about ageing. The title itself is important in that respect. Evening isn't darkness. There is still light. As Bob Dylan said, “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there” There is a stark beauty in the evening twilight at dusk, perhaps the most beautiful light of the day.

Ciarán begins the novel looking backwards and wondering about everything that has gone. Gradually, I think, he learns to look at what remains. For me, that's ultimately what the book is about: loss, certainly, but also endurance, hope and the possibility of finding meaning in ordinary life.

9. You’re known for crime fiction, whereas this is a much quieter, more literary novel. Why the change of direction now?

I think this is probably the book I was always moving towards.

I enjoyed writing the crime novels, and they taught me a great deal about storytelling, character and keeping a reader engaged. But my deepest literary influences have always been writers such as John McGahern, Dermot Healy, Eugene McCabe, Kent Haruf, Charles Bukowski and, more recently, writers like Claire Keegan, Carmel McMahon, Niall Williams, Donal Ryan and Grainne Murphy. I'm drawn to writers who can find enormous emotional significance in apparently ordinary lives.

Perhaps I simply wasn't ready to write a novel like The Light at Evening when I was younger. I needed to have experienced more — love, loss, disappointment, grief and the passage of time.

Crime fiction often begins with an extraordinary event. With The Light at Evening, I wanted to do almost the opposite. I wanted to ask whether the ordinary events of a life — a marriage, an ageing parent, a death, a walk through the woods, a poem, a Christmas phone call, sitting quietly with somebody you love — could carry the weight of a novel.

I think they can. In fact, increasingly, I think those ordinary moments are where the most important stories are found.