IRELAND
The Guardian (UK)
John Boyne – author of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas – grew up gay in Catholic Dublin. Now, after years of silence he is finally ready to write about sexual abuse within the church – and to talk about the effect it has had on his life
John Boyne
The Guardian, Friday 3 October 2014
Over the course of my writing life, I’ve often been asked why I don’t set my novels in Ireland. To this question, I had a stock reply: that I didn’t want to write about my own country until I had a story to tell. Now, having written a book that takes the subject of child abuse in the Irish Catholic church as its theme, I wonder if that answer was entirely honest.
I’ve spent the past two years recalling experiences from my childhood and teenage years that I would rather forget, reliving events that should never have taken place and recreating through fiction, moments that seemed small at the time but that I’ve come to realise caused me great damage. Which makes me think that the real reason I never wrote about Ireland until now is explained in the opening sentence of my novel:
“I did not become ashamed of being Irish until I was well into the middle years of my life.”
When I was growing up in Dublin in the 70s and 80s, the parish priest lived in the house to my left while eight nuns lived in the house to my right. I was an altar boy, went to a Catholic school and was brought to mass every Sunday. I knew there were Protestants in Dublin, and Methodists and Jews and Mormons, but I never laid eyes on any of them, and probably would have run a mile if I had. They were going to hell, after all, or so the priests told us. And as long as we learned our catechism by heart and lived good Catholic lives, we were not.
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