The Path to Playwright

The poem purled itself to life in the oyster of my tiny mind almost unbidden, then slid past my lips and into the darkness of my bedroom. It was electric. To this day I can still recall the feeling of my heart thumping in my chest as if a jolly giant were hammering the rhythm of the words on the inside of my rib cage. It was my first experience of a creative high. I was so elated, I had to share it with the public immediately; I got out of bed and went downstairs to the TV room to perform it for my parents. “Go-ing through the gar-den, blah di blah di blah…” Out the pretty little triplet came, replete with heroes, villains, and life-threatening circumstances to stoke the dramatic tension. They thought I was sleepwalking. Tired from the day and not overjoyed to see me up and about after the laborious task of putting me to bed, they managed to pitter patter a limp applause, then sent me back to bed so they could return their attention to the evening news.

This was my first lesson in the perils of sharing work too soon, of chasing that intoxicating high of affirmation instead of seeking out the stomach-plunging discomfort that comes with constructive criticism. Still, I didn’t let their blearily performed parental enthusiasm deter me. As far as I was concerned, I had found my calling. From that moment I compulsively wrote poems about anything and everything, from the flowers in the garden to the dry goods in the kitchen cupboards:

I was hooked. Sonically symmetrical words, I realized, had the power to deepen the gradient of human expression. Syllables were magical Lego bricks that, when clicked together in the right order, had the infinitely pleasant capability of building worlds inside your mind. This obsession with DIY nursery rhyming took me to places no doll ever could. I graduated from single-syllable words ending in -ate—late, mate, gate—to two-syllable words such as cleaning, leaning, meaning. Then polysyllabic words such as information, congregation, constipation. My appetite for this elegant delivery system of language gave meaning to my days. Poems grew into stories, and stories grew into plays, which came with extensive casting processes that my dolls and teddies had to wait in line to audition for. I must have been the single most annoying child on the entire planet.

Having a sense of true vocation in life is half the battle of good living won. Of course being Irish, I assumed it would be a simple hop and a skip from childhood nursery rhyme expert to grown-up playwright. After all, Ireland is a nation that takes great pride in its playwriting heritage and exporting that identity to the world. Samuel Beckett, Brendan Behan, W. B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, and James Joyce—a battalion of pale-faced men with unruly eyebrows and tousled forelocks posing enigmatically in sepia. When I was growing up, they were the centerfolds of the great Irish literary tradition. Their pictures hung on the walls of bookshops, libraries, school classrooms, and airports, glamorizing an Ireland that could be snapped up in gift shops in the same manner as those hot priest calendars sold beyond the sacred walls of the Vatican.

Of course, these iconic writing exports were invariably men. To the best of my recollection, posters of female Irish literary icons were not even thin on the ground; they were non-existent. While a healthy interest in the arts was seen as a sign of good breeding and a solid education in a woman, to want an actual life in the arts as an artist was looked on with deep suspicion. Despite its centuries-long battle for independence, Ireland was still a place where the apparatus of the state had a remarkably myopic vision of women’s intellectual potential. When I told my school career guidance counselor I wanted to go into theater, I remember her telling me it was a world inhabited by “people with unconventional lifestyles,” making it a very “dicey choice” and an “unsafe road to go down.”

The Ireland of my childhood endured as a monocultural, monoracial, staunchly Catholic country that was deeply controlling of who went out to work, who remained in the kitchen, and what went on in the bedroom. All over the country, women in crisis pregnancies were still being dumped at the doors of Magdalene Laundries, forced to work in miserable conditions, beaten, abused, with no alternative but to give up their children for adoption. (The last institution of this kind closed as recently as 1996.) The laws controlling women’s autonomy over their own bodies were draconian in the extreme. Condoms only became available in pharmacies to those over 18 without a prescription in 1985. Homosexuality was a criminal offense until 1993. And divorce was illegal until 1997. Decent young women were expected to move out of their family homes as virgins on the day of their wedding. Abortion, of course, was illegal and would remain so until December 2018. Article 41.2.1 of the Constitution of Ireland still reads as follows: “In particular, the State recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved.” Thanks a bunch, lads. What would you like for your dinner?

every which way you turned as a female, you were reminded of the limits to your ambition and judged for having the audacity to step outside your lane. For a brief period in the mid-eighties, there was an Irish television show called The Women’s Programme that covered issues affecting women. It came on after the news one night, and my father instantly bolted up from his armchair and marched toward the TV, shouting, “Turn them off the telly! Turn them off the telly!”

By the time I reached my teens I had also realized I was one thousand percent gay, which meant that on top of wanting to be an artist, I had to carry the mantle of being the worst thing you could ever be next to getting pregnant without a ring on your finger. I recall one Friday evening in 1985, I stayed up with my parents to watch The Late Late Show, a chat show with a baffling format of musical guests followed by a celebrity interview, then a segment where members of the audience sang greetings to their family and neighbors, followed by a panel discussion on a controversial subject, then a postal competition in which a viewer could win a car. On this particular night, Rosemary Curb and Nancy Manahan, two former nuns from America, had come on the show to promote their book about their own experience of homosexuality in the female religious orders. In our living room, you could have heard a pin drop. If ever I wished for the seat of an armchair to swallow me whole and suck me into the abyss never to return, it was right then. I kept my eyes fixed on the TV for fear that my face would be caught in the act of betraying the personal empathy I felt for these remarkably brave people. They were the earthworms underneath the magpies, but this did not deter them in their brave battle to reach the safety of the garden lawn.

After the broadcast, the sense of national outrage was widespread and apocalyptic. Gay American nuns having sex with each other, then coming over here to sell us the book they had written about it! These American vocational dropouts had the temerity to set foot on Irish soil and plunge the snow-white sanctity of our religious orders into the worst kind of disrepute. The backlash was swift and merciless. Irish customs attempted to use our obscenity laws to stop a shipment of their books from coming into the country. Soon after the women left the country, a story circulated that when they arrived back at their hotel, they found their suitcases packed and waiting for them at the door. It seemed that the only fit place for people like these was out on the street. This savagely cruel humiliation put me into a state of terror about who I was and the consequences for what I hoped to become. The future was a forbidding wasteland. I learned from watching that show that there was danger in difference, a fear of individual self-expression that pervaded every aspect of your life, from your curtain choices to your career choice to your sexual orientation. Pleasure was for the weak. Extravagance was for the shallow-minded. Ostentation was the Achilles’ high heel of the morally indecent.

Sitting in a perplexingly opposite binary to all of the above was the Irish appetite for American television. It was a strange dichotomy. If a pair of lesbian nuns set the bar for the worst offenses in Irish broadcasting, I don’t know how on earth American television managed to sneak its way in. In the 1980s, there was a tidal influx of American dramas, soaps, and comedy shows that served as a counterweight to our own self-inflicted moral penury: Diff’rent Strokes and Hill Street Blues, Dallas and Dynasty, we got it all and lapped it up like hungry kittens. With the curtains firmly shut and the TV on, Irish people were finally free to dislodge themselves from the shame associated with luxury and able to derive pleasure from the well-to-do; suddenly we were exposed to shoulder pads, cattle ranches, skyscrapers, postcoital bedsheets, hot tubs, and hot dogs. We followed the fortunes of Denverites and Dallasites as the characters performed dramatic showdowns in boardrooms and bedrooms. Through the trials and tribulations of Sue Ellen and Cliff Barnes, at last the people of Ireland could vicariously live out an extramarital affair. Week after week, the dirty laundry of the fantastically rich and powerful flapped about in the public sphere with blithe abandon. Doors were slammed. Life support machines were unplugged. Characters stormed off in the middle of meals before everyone had finished their food. To an Irish person, this was an unthinkable transgression. Basically, every act that could buy you a ticket to hell by Irish standards was performed for us on our very own televisions. But lesbian nuns? Hang on a minute!

What must it have been like for the women of our secret Ireland, the ones we habitually hid from view for fear that their deeds would poison the culture? What must it have been like for those whose lives were confined in the tight theocratic grip of self-sacrifice and self-suppression to watch their jewel-encrusted transatlantic counterparts throw plates at their wayward husbands? For the women who had secretly handed up their babies born out of wedlock for adoption, then silently returned to their families with no one ever mentioning a word about it or offering a word of comfort? What must it have been like to watch the likes of Sue Ellen standing beside her baby’s crib and telling J.R. she was leaving him—and taking her infant son with her? The truth of it was, we lived in a country that made it all but impossible for an unmarried mother keep her child, and illegal for a married woman get a divorce. And yet the state broadcaster would happily let us watch Americans do all these things, and more, every night of the week from the comfort of our living rooms.

Even if the characters of Dallas and Dynasty managed to liberate the Irish mindset into acts of moral rebellion, they fell short of offering the role models I was looking for. While I appreciated that they were free to leave the table while people were still eating, and to abandon bad marriages, in many ways they were not dissimilar from us: Sue Ellen never said, “Get out of my office, J.R.! I’m trying to write a five-act play here!” I had to look elsewhere for an iconic TV character whose natural intelligence was celebrated, who was well educated, well read, well traveled, self-made, and a trailblazing ass-kicker.

I do not think many people can say that Murder, She Wrote was the catalyst for their feminist awakening, but there you have it. Jessica Fletcher showed up in the corner of my living room just in time. I will never forget my first encounter. Our family TV set was a bulky black-and-white, remote control-less contraption about the size and weight of a baby elephant. It had cumbersome function buttons that left an impression on your thumb long after you switched it on. Then it took several seconds for the picture to emerge. One evening after homework, I clunked it on. The jaunty piano plip-plip-plop of the signature tune piped away as I waited for the image to appear. “Doo-doo-dee-doo-doo-dee-doo-doo-doo-doo. Diddle-oop-dee-doop-dee-doop-dee-doop-dee-doo-dee-doo-dee-doo!”

And there she was, a faint outline at first, like a shadow in a snowstorm—Jessica Fletcher, sitting in her office, her plume of short yellow hair framing her deeply focused countenance, her reading spectacles expertly perched on the end of her nose, as she winds a crisp sheet of blank paper into an old-fashioned mid-century typewriter to begin another chapter. And off her fingers fly, bathed in that iconic carefree signature tune as she effortlessly clip-clops out her latest novel. My hero just showed up in the guise of a widowed, globe-trotting author and amateur sexagenarian sleuth with a canny knack for solving gruesome homicides as a side hustle. Jessica Fletcher was to writing what Indiana Jones was to archaeology and what Harry Potter was to life at boarding school—utterly thrilling and completely inaccurate. Still, why ruin a good story with the truth?

Aside from the life jacket for my hopes and dreams that Murder, She Wrote provided me with, the show was probably the most shining example of everything the Irish national broadcaster failed to notice. I offer by way of example a rough outline of the plot of Season 5, Episode 10, titled “Weave a Tangled Web.” Disguised as a good-time, hard-drinking, cigarette-smoking floozie with a gambling addiction, Jessica rocks up to a shady bar to scope out who stabbed one of its customers to death in a seedy motel room. The chief suspect is the bread-winning wife and stepmother to her househusband’s two children, who had a brief liaison with the victim but whose secret double life as a bicoastal polygamist provides the alibi she is desperate to keep under wraps. Determined to make the police see they are targeting the wrong suspect, Fletcher closes in on the barman delivering the authorities sufficient evidence to let the jet-setting plural-marriage career woman off the hook to return to the forgiving bosom of the aforementioned househusband and stepchildren. I must confess that in its distillation, my patchy memory does the true nuance of this story little justice. Still, it is an absolute stealth bomb to the bedrock Victorian narrative principle that the fallen woman must die. In “Weave a Tangled Web,” Jessica makes certain that the fallen woman is exonerated and is given the chance to return to her life to make her own choices and to repair the relationships (damaged by her own hand) on her own terms. Again, that the Irish public were permitted to view this episode in the same decade that two gay American ex-nuns were given the boot is a mesmerizing index to the hypocritical fish tank of my youth.

Nonetheless, I am forever indebted to Jessica Fletcher for showing up in the corner of my living room and becoming my very first literary role model. Despite the bonkers storylines and shoddy continuity, for a young person like me she made a career in writing look possible. She also made a career in writing look easy, which I now understand from my own experience to be the opposite of true. Looking back as an adult at YouTube clips of those opening credits, as her hands effortlessly glide across the keyboard without a furrow or a frown, without a trip-up or a typo, the wastepaper basket I imagined by her feet, perplexingly empty, I can’t help but give a cynical smile. Hey, Jessica? Where’s the part where you take your manuscript, throw it on the floor and stamp on it shouting, “I have spent two years on you! Why don’t you make any sense, you fucking asshole!” Hey, Jessica? Where’s the part where your computer’s hard drive fries and you realize that you never bothered to save your latest draft to the cloud? Where’s the part where you say, “Screw this!,” open a bottle of wine at eleven o’clock in the morning, order a pizza, and turn on The View?

In the TV show, Jessica the writer had no relationship with failure. In my writing life, it is my relationship with failure, my acceptance and management of it, that forms the cornerstone of my creative process.

margaret atwood once said, “The wastepaper basket is your friend.” She’s not wrong. I’d say less than 10 percent of what I write ends up in front of an audience. The other 90 lies in drawers and document folders. Occasionally I “select all,” delete in despair, and spend the rest of the day Googling how to get it back. Some of it never leaves my head. But despite the relentless failure and the ceaseless desire to give up, I continue to endure. And even though writing is nothing like the opening credits of Murder, She Wrote, I understand why they tell a different story of what being an author is like. Had the show introduced a creatively insecure, self-doubting Jessica Fletcher surrounded by balled-up paper, weeping into her typewriter, and wailing, “I can’t do this! I can’t do this!,” I very much doubt it would have lasted the twelve seasons it did.

Equally, I doubt if I’d have lasted as many “seasons” had I not accepted the unavoidable and ceaseless sense of struggle tethered to the craft of writing plays. For me, it’s like this: You have a spark. You are excited. You begin to feel your way toward it in a darkened room. Strewn across the carpet are the Lego pieces of your play. You stumble on one, then another, and try to fit them together without being able to properly see what it is you are making. Sometimes you have to break it up and start again. All the while, a light very slowly comes on until the thing reveals itself. You are excited again. Then you show it to people. At this point you have to say good-bye to it, and you feel sad for a while. Then you begin all over again in the dark, but this room is not the same one you were in before. The journey to the end is not the same. The Lego pieces lie in different places across the floor. The only template you have is the memory of struggle and that it’s normal and okay. Oh, and hopefully somewhere along the line you get paid.

Science and physics were never my strong suit. I do remember staying awake in class long enough to hear something about the steeper the slope, the faster you accelerate—don’t quote me on it, but it reminds me of the country I grew up in and the events that shaped me. It’s almost surreal to think the Ireland of 2024 was once the Ireland of 1984. The country has backflipped into a new reality. The monoliths wobbled, then slowly lost their center of gravity, then, like a set of dominoes, fell in rapid succession. Now, green is no longer the only color in our rainbow. It is an island all the richer for its acceptance of new cultural, racial, and spiritual colors to the spectrum, an island where its inhabitants have finally won the right to control what happens to their own bodies. And I have the things I hoped for as a teenager but had a hard time believing I would ever get: a wife, a child, a writing career. I have a family who takes pride in my identity and achievements, and I spend my days as I’d always dreamed, clicking syllables together like Lego bricks.

The earthworm made it through the garden grass, all the stronger for the journey.