BOOKS
Débuts of 2024: Vol 2 Author Interview: Oisín McKenna
Oisín McKenna Evenings and Weekends
“I
t felt like your life could always change at short notice – even though it never really did – but that
feeling was intoxicating.” Oisín McKenna says, reflecting on his move from Dublin to London, specifically into “a sort of warehouse commune situation”, and the excitement he felt back in 2017 as a 26-year-old new to the cit. And it is that dizzying sense of life’s possibilit amid its precariousness that McKenna captures so well in his début novel.
Evenings and Weekends is mostly set over two days in London, 2019, with the cit sweltering in the grip of a summer heatwave. It centres on a vividly drawn trio: 30-year-old café worker Maggie, who is newly pregnant, her boyfriend Ed, a bike courier, and Phil, Maggie’s best friend from way back when they were growing up on a Basildon council estate, who hates his office job and spends his time fantasising about his housemate Keith, who already has a boyfriend. All three spend their lives living for the weekend, in one way or another. As McKenna observes: “The weekend—for some, obviously depending on your working life—can be a time of expanded possibilit, where the conditions of your life just get a litle bit looser.” Maggie escaped from Essex
to art school in London but now, working full-time in a Greenwich café on minimum wage, she knows she and Ed can’t afford to have a baby in the cit that she loves. The only option, and therefore the plan, is to move
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back to Basildon, where rent is five times times cheaper than the damp flat in Dalston she shares with Ed. But before that, she has one last weekend in the cit. And central to her weekend plans is Phil, who, about to be evicted from the warehouse along with his nine housemates, is planning to throw a massive part on Saturday night.
When we meet in a café near the British Library, McKenna, a soſtly spoken Irishman originally from Drogheda, says of Maggie and Phil’s relationship: “I was really interested in that quite formative, long-term friendship between gay men and straight women. I think a lot of those kind of friendships have been hugely significant in my life and shaped me in lots of ways.” It was also a
relationship he felt was relatively unexplored in contemporary fiction. In the novel, Phil and Maggie’s friendship is not straightforward—it’s a complex, many-layered thing, not least because Phil has a secret history with Ed, Maggie’s boyfriend. Also seeking Phil on this
particular weekend is his mother, Rosaleen, who emigrated from Ireland to London in the 1970s. She lives in Basildon, with Phil’s dad Steve, and is travelling into London to meet her son and tell him of her cancer diagnosis. McKenna tells me he hadn’t expected to write a multi-generational story with an older character, but he captures her beautifully and writes perceptively about the territory of a long marriage: “So much of the
book is to do with the unsaid. The dramatic tension focuses on the characters exploring their worlds at great length and in detail, but what they say to express their inner world is oſten fairly sparse or not really representative of what they’re feeling.” Evenings and Weekends draws from McKenna’s own experience, including the struggle to have a creative career as well as enough money to live on. In the novel, Maggie has set aside her art school dreams—as McKenna writes: “She doesn’t make art any more. She just socialises in proximit to it.” In his own life, he has managed to balance a career as a writer and performer—in 2017 he was named in the Irish Times as one of the best spoken- word artists in the country – with various day jobs for charities and NGOs. “It always feels like a problem to be solved, every year. It has definitely got easier for me with time, but for many years, it was this equation that would have to be solved every day in terms of how was I going to earn enough money to write, but also be able to see my friends and be relatively healthy etc.” He secured a Next Generation Bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland – the highest award for an emerging artist in Ireland – which made writing the novel possible. In fact, he came up with the title Evenings and Weekends before he had started working on it, when he was seeking funding and needed a name for the project in order to pitch it.
When he did start to write,
he took inspiration from Zadie Smith’s NW, which, I suggest, is surely one of the best novels about modern London life. McKenna wholeheartedly agrees: “That heady, heatwave energy and the interconnected stories. There were so many times I went back to it, like ‘how does she do that?’ I’d say she is probably my big literary hero.” Alice O’Keeffe
Fourth Estate, 9th May, £16.99, hb, 9780008604172
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