Page Turners: ‘Fun and Games’ author John Patrick McHugh

I fell in love with John Patrick McHugh’s writing back in 2021, when I read his short story collection, Pure Gold, and the release of his debut novel, Fun and Games was a source of great personal excitement.

Set on an island off the west coast of Ireland, Fun and Games opens in the summer following the Leaving Cert exams, that liminal space of being too young to get into nightclubs, too horny to think straight, and still not quite ready to be seen out in public with your mam.

Not one word is out of place, and the writing roves between beautiful, almost lyrical prose and the contemporary Irish tongue we hear out in the world every day. He’ll take the time to whittle out the details, but isn’t afraid to cut in with a ‘you know yourself’.

The book captures the poetry of GAA, the all consuming awkwardness of turning from boy to man, and being shellshocked by the realisation that your parents are real people too. John Patrick McHugh’s voice springs from the page, and his work makes me feel excited about reading, which is exactly what a good author does.

Did you always want to be a writer? Tell us about your journey to becoming a published author.

Not really, no. Or at least, I never thought I could be a writer. I liked reading, I loved my Beano growing up, and I had an excellent English teacher in my secondary school – Mr Kelly, Coláiste Éinde, thank you again – but I never thought I could be a writer: that seemed far away from me and my world.

The catalyst for thinking I could be one was that I was accepted into a new course in NUIG called the BA Connect with Creative Writing: basically, a normal BA but with an added weekly creative writing class. This meant I had to write, yes, but also I had to think about writing beyond secondary school essays. Even then, I never suspected I could be a writer until the third year of the course when you are given an academic year out to focus on a writing project: I spent those nine months employed in a hotel and under the mentorship of the great Mike McCormack.

I developed so many healthy habits that year: the value of routine, finishing pieces, reading widely. I developed my craft through endurance and Mike’s supreme guidance. I also wrote piles of terrible stories but the very last story I submitted to Mike was called Bonfire and Mike gave it a thumbs up. Bonfire would eventually become the first story in my debut story collection, Pure Gold. It was only after this year that I had a sense that I could be a writer: that this is what I wanted to do with my life.

What inspired you to start writing?

The joy of language, the thrill of playing with sentences and trying to make them click together and sing. It gives me true pleasure: getting words down right. Obviously, I love developing characters and situations, I love teasing out what I think and why, but the initial buzz of writing for me is always that simple desire: to slant the sentences my way, to twist them in fun and new and interesting directions.

Tell us about your new book, Fun and Games. Where did the idea come from?

Fun and Games is my debut novel and it follows the seventeen year old John Masterson episodically over the course of the summer of ‘09 – after the Leaving Cert but before college – as John tries to make the local senior football team, as his mam and dad slowly split apart, as a leaked sext from his mother swirls around his hometown, as he and his friends contemplate this alien concept called ‘an adult future’, and as he begins a tentative romance with a slightly older co-worker named Amber Goold from his summer job at a hotel.

It’s about friendship, masculinity, family, class and power, and, of course, love. I suppose it could be labelled a coming-of-age story, but I’m not totally sold on that notion myself: do we ever come of age, or at least do Irish boys ever come of age?

As to where the idea came from: I had this image in my head one afternoon of sunlit foliage, hairy green trees, and then as we descend down from the trees, we see a couple doing what they are doing on the first page of the novel, and from that everything flooded: the characters and their dynamics, the Masterson family and their issues, the Gaelic football, Amber and John.

What do you hope this book instils in the reader?

I hope readers enjoy their time with the book: I hope they laugh and feel something for these characters and perhaps see themselves in these characters – good and bad. Laughing and crying is the dream combo but beyond that, I can’t say.

What did you learn when writing this book?

How tough it is to write a novel, how much fun it is to write a novel.

Tell us about your writing process?

I’m a sucker for routine, so I’m up and at the desk for nine each day with a jug of coffee and I’m sat there till four, five, unless I have to do other paying work: be it editing, teaching, etc. Nothing glamorous or exciting: very regimented. I try to write every day – and I’m at my happiest when I am working on something everyday – as I feel writing can be like a muscle: you have to flex it, use it or lose it. I didn’t plan this novel beyond having vague watery images in my mind about where it was all arrowing: and I think having that spontaneity is important for fiction. You need to be surprised by your writing now and again. Your characters need to be able to shock you.

Where do you draw inspiration from?

Loads of different stuff inspired Fun and Games, loads of different people and events and personal experiences, loads of different books – The Pale King by David Foster Wallace for instance – but if I had to narrow it to one major influence, it would be an exhibition I went to in London: it was a retrospective of Francis Bacon’s work. The ghostly faces with beestung-lips, the bulls, the brutality, the smears.

The controlled menace and primal aggression in Bacon’s work blew me away that day: I left the exhibition pumped, inspired, exhaling as if I had sprinted a mile and with the mad impulse to write in the manner of those paintings. I often find visual art can influence my writing as much as any book: the impossible dream of rendering the visual into the text, capturing the energy of a particular painting in prose, is a wonderful exercise for discovering something new in your writing. Failure is a good thing for a writer.