Tim MacGabhann is a Paris-based Irish writer whose recent memoir, The Black Pool, narrates his hallucination-littered descent into addiction and abjection, as well as his eventual redemption through an imagined conversation with an unlikely literary hero. His account spans several decades, two continents, and a handful of occupations as MacGabhann reckons with the chaos of his own past to shine a light into logic undergirding the “black pool” of addiction. I sat down with him to discuss the line between fiction and memoir, the truth value of an hallucination, and the unique quandry posed by representing Dublin as an Irish artist: a problem that MacGabhann, in The Black Pool, has gracefully and deftly assumed.
Had you written anything before The Black Pool or was this your first major piece of writing?
I have two novels that came out in 2019 and 2020. They were sort of gay crime novels, I guess is how I would summarize them. I want to say “gay Marxist crime novels,” but that’s not a very marketable thing to say. I was very consciously trying to use the crime mode as a way of investigating power. I was a journalist before, and there was some stuff that you just couldn’t do as a journalist. It was too dangerous for your fixers fundamentally. So I was like, fuck it, I’ll just novelize it. I love political thrillers, particularly Costa-Gavras. He did State of Siege and Z. I love those films, and what I loved about them was that they were basically—I don’t want to say didactic—but they anatomized the political circumstance. You felt like you were watching a three-act thriller, and I thought this was brilliant because thrillers are always about power. They’re always about the nexus between crime and business and politics. The tastiest ones tend to be. I loved Serpico when I was a teenager and All the President’s Men. I like John Cassavetes as well, although he’s more psychological-emotional.
What led you to write the memoir?
I was trying to write it as short stories and as a novel. I sent the short stories to my friend and editor Brandon. And he was like, I don’t know about these. Why don’t you just strip away the artifice? And I was like, okay, let’s do that. Brandon is really good at editing memoir. He’s done great pieces with Cathy Sweeney. And he’s done phenomenal stuff with Kevin Breathnach, who has a book called Tunnel Vision, which came out with Faber in 2019. That is a banger. That is a great book. The stuff that I felt like I could do was by Greg Baxter. Brandon did a series of essays with Greg that became a book called Preparation for Death, which was a memoir of failure essentially. That’s what Greg calls it too: I’m not casting aspersions. I love Greg’s novels because they have this incredible, propulsive first-person motor to them, which comes from his contact with a fairly intense memoir form. My novels were first-person fiction. And I was like, if I just reverse the Greg Baxter direction maybe I can do something that has that kind of speed to it.
Which elements of the memoir are fictional?
None. I changed some genders and anonymized some people but is that fictional?
What about about the hallucinations?
That’s just as I remember them. They’re burned into my brain. What is the truth value of hallucination? I don’t know. There’s that Oliver Sacks guy who says a hallucination is defined as something that is true and real in every aspect, except that it’s not happening. So when you do justice to it accurately, as you recall it, that for me is non-fiction too. When you write up a dream, for instance, is that fiction or nonfiction?
How did a text that began as fiction become categorized as memoir?
What element survived of the short stories and the novel? The short answer is, the good bit. When my editors were like, there’s something not quite working here, what they were talking about was, this is third person, but this is a story that happened. For example, a character has a different gender to me, and a very different background to me. There’s artifice here, basically, it feels artificial. There are these moments in the structure where it gets really baggy, where this is clearly the thing you’re really eager to say, but because it’s happening to an invented character in a distorted setting or in a different setting, it loses its sting. I was basically translating things out of the third person back into first person. I was translating it out of fiction into memoir. I began with the disguise. And this is just the undisguised bit. As for the hallucinations and stuff, that’s just how I remember them unfortunately. I was tripping balls.
Why did you decided to end on the Marcel Proust hallucination?
I thought it would be funny. I don’t know how much of the dialogue caught your eye but there was a bit in it where I was saying to him, this is just a college relationship. There’s no reason to be so upset, is there? That’s just me thinking to myself, the whole architecture of Proust is a lot of brushes that didn’t quite happen. It’s sort of a joke about how I can’t even effectively make a big deal out of this. There’s not a huge amount of screen time that he manages to spin into an incredible novel. And I’m like, a lot of crazy shit happened, and I can’t even make that work. I thought it’d be a good joke about myself primarily. And at the time I was doing all those particular drugs, I was reading a lot of Proust.
A lot of parts of the memoir are really very dark.
I was trying to make it funny, though! You go to these meetings and you say what you think is the darkest and most upsetting and moving thing you’ve ever heard in your life, and the response of the room is that they laugh. I was sort of hoping that that would be the the impact, I guess. It’s just like laughing at your pain. I don’t think of it as anything as sophisticated as gallows humor. It’s more like an emotional version of Jackass, where Johnny Knoxville has flown off the slide and he’s hurt. That’s funny. But with a psychological or emotional reality.
There were some very serious moments of reckoning with manhood, between your father and your uncle, and moments of seriousness regarding your career as a journalist.
I wanted to describe it accurately. That was the reason for moving it out of fiction and into non-fiction. There were so many distortions and requirements of form that turn a real experience into an art object. And those are a form of lie. So when it comes to just telling it straight as possible with my dad and uncle, if there’s a kind of a stripped-back, deadpan experience of this being funny, that’s good. But if your reaction is something else, then that’s also good. I was trying to be as reportorially honest as possible. That I think links to your question about investigative journalism. I didn’t want to write a literary thing at all. I wanted to be as plain as possible, because the worst writers in the world are journalists who think that they’re good at writing, I was like, how reportorial can I be here? Forgive the totally cheap analogy, but how clear a reflection can this this ink letter throw back of what’s being expressed above it.
What kind of writing are you looking at doing moving forward?
I’ve got another book out in October, which is a book of short stories. They’re all in the third person, except for the opening one. I spent ages on them. Then I have a book of poetry next year with Banshee in Ireland. I wrote two novels last summer. One was a satire of Irish literature, with apes. And there was a political thriller, but this one was different from the Mexican ones, which are in the first person. This one is set the late 60, early 70s in Argentina and Uruguay. It’s a woman protagonist, third person. I spent about eight years on that because I just didn’t really have the technical ability to reach out of my own subjectivity quite so far. So it took me a very long time to get to know her well enough to write her, or to try to focalize narration through her. And I think the short stories helped that. The short stories were my little stepping stone up to a different kind of third person narration. I don’t think I’m ever going to do the first person again, Cristina. I think I’m absolutely just sick of my own voice. Do you know what I mean?
Speaking of the Black Pool, can we unpack the title?
It’s the old name for Dublin in Irish. It’s [dubh linn], which is the Black Pool in Irish. It was whirpool or a vortex or a lake that wasn’t built on by the Irish who were there before the Vikings arrived. Dublin was founded in 988 by the Vikings. After that it took on a different name [Baile Átha Cliath], which means Glen of the Ford of the Hurdles, which is basically the constructions people made to manage to get around this waterlogged landscape. It’s a vortex that preceded the construction of the city. Why did I choose it? This is remarkably pretentious, Cristina, but this is Minor Literatures, this is what we do. At the end of Ithaca, the last episode of Ulysses before Molly starts talking, when the men finally shut up, Ithaca ends with a dot. I’ve always read that dot as the ingress for the underground river, the puddle whose waters’ sounds Molly’s voice is meant to replicate. Where did I get that from? There’s a huge passage about water in Ithaca, which is my favorite passage in the whole book. So I had this at the back of my mind. I was like, I hate Dublin, Dublin drives me mental. Dublin is basically a symptom. Dublin has driven a lot of people mental. There’s a huge literary pressure on people always when they just start to write about Dublin. I was like, well, okay, I can’t write about the thing itself because it’s been done to death. However, I can write about the nothing that came before and that is coming after. And that was what I was trying to do. The oblivion thing, that’s the forgetting bit. And also, I would say it’s a memoir of forgetting in the sense that I’m just trying to forget about all this stuff by writing it down. I’m trying to exhaust it. Unfortunately, the only thing I’ve managed to exhaust is the idea that something can be exhausted of all this, but whatever. These are the disappointments that drive people forward from one book the next. It’s fine. And so forgetting is also, like, this is all the stuff that I can remember. There’s a bunch of stuff that I cannot. So this is the construction that goes over a larger oblivion. It’s like a protrusion up out of a black pool. It’s a load of hurdles over an uncrossable, unfathomable darkness of waters. I love very few bits of the Bible because it’s boring, but “terror is rising me like water” is the best simile I’ve ever heard, from the Book of Job. I was trying to code as much of that metaphysical terror as I could into the the rhythm of the sentences, the sense of evanesence setting, and the fact that when you look at this thing from far enough away, it’s actually just a dot, it’s not that big a deal, which is what I’m trying to tell to hallucination Marcel Proust that I get that it, that it’s not a big deal, but I’m stuck in it, so fuck, what am I supposed to do here, big man? And he’s like, “I don’t know, I’m not actually here”
There’s a twelfth-century Anglo Norman text called The Voyage of Saint Brendan. Saint Brendan travels by boat to Purgatory, which he can’t describe. He and his acolytes pick up stones and bring them home as tokens of the great beyond. People realize that the stones are special. They’re like runes. It comes back to this hybridization between Celtic and Norman mythology.
It’s a lovely metaphor for what forgetting is. Here’s a bunch of stuff that happened back there and here’s some textual evidence. These are the little stones. Make of them what you will. But at the end of the day, they are just chunks of something that is indescribable. When I was in college, doing this abortive PhD, I was big into Dante and Chaucer. As a consequence, I was reading a lot of this guy called Denys Turner, who wrote a book called The Darkness of God, which is about apophasis, the unspeakable. So, you can say what the divine isn’t. And if you pile up enough, “it isn’t this” by implication, you eventually grasp what it is. I was trying to do that, in a way.
Well, that’s what happens to Dante, too, right? When he gets to Paradise, he cannot describe God. Beatrice can’t tell him either.
And he’s like, it’s the big mirror. My favorite part is the the big silence in Canto 21 in Paradise, where he meets the utterly silent sphere of heaven of the mystics. It’s starless and silent. You can really hear the whoosh of stuff. You can feel the woosh, that interstellar woosh.
That’s the black pool.
Oh, that’s Dante. I wish I could do that, but maybe when I grew up.
You need to be midway through your life’s journey.
I’m 36. He was 35. When he says midway, he’s thinking of the Ecclesiastes thing where it’s like three score and ten. He loves this coincidence. He’s like, “Oh shit, the worst thing in my life happened when I was 35. I am the Bible, man. This is class. I can do this thing, cause I am both me and an anagogical representation of scripture right now.” So he was thrilled.
Well, now we’ve established that this is your Inferno.
Oh, yeah. That’d be good. That’d be all right. I mean, there is a lot of gossip, you see, and I guess there’s a lot of gossip in Inferno.
There’s a lot of contrapasso. You do get the sense in The Black Pool that you you’re being punished for something, or maybe punishing yourself.
The thing that I do find really puzzling is the sin of birth, the idea of the sin of birth. It’s not my fault. I didn’t turn up here. Why do I feel like I did someone wrong by turning up here? That’s about as far as I can get with it, you know what I mean?
Does it have to do with being Irish Catholic?
I was raised Catholic, so once a Catholic always a Catholic in way. But the thing with Catholicism is that, if you confess it enough, then you’re fine. Everyone’s like, oh, Catholic guilt’s such a death sentence, everything is fucked. You’re just permanently guilty. It’s not true. If you complain about it enough and say you’re really bad guy, if it’s in the right context, you’re actually off the hook. That is the sacrament of confession. That’s the bit that people don’t realize, that Catholics fundamentally are performing the guilt so that they can go back to like having secret ice creams or whatever. If you feel bad enough about it, it’s fine to do it. That is the Catholic economy in ministry. It isn’t that sincere, is what I’m saying. The Catholic guilt is not real. They call it a Catholic guilt the way they call it Diet Coke.
Do you still have a relationship with Ireland?
Yeah, I go back a lot, actually. The genesis of the book was at a time when I was really eager to get back home to see my mum and dad and my sister. I was living in Mexico during the coronavirus and Ireland had a very strict lockdown. Even if I wanted to go back and visit, I probably wouldn’t have been able to see them. So, I was keen to get back. And when I did finally go back, I finished what became the initial chunk of the book. It was great. And I go back to do some readings or teach a course or just to see my family, see my friends. I like living at a comfortable remove from it. I like a long-distance relationship with Ireland. It’s nice to go back and take the things that I like, and then, once it gets a bit sort of funky mentally speaking, go back to my little life here. My mom and dad love coming to France as well. We can meet on neutral territories. Ireland has the potential to be such a great place to live for so many people. It’s got so much to offer. People from all over the world have been like, “I want to live in Ireland” In the last twenty-five or so years and I love that. When the EU got bigger and when people from other continents wanted to move to Ireland, it was exciting. It’s like, oh shit, like, we’ve got something to offer here. So when I see what looks to me like a fairly imported version of racist expression, it really depresses me. We’re so close to becoming a really good, grown-up country that does want to be cosmopolitan. And yet, there’s always this little thing that wants to fuck it up, a yen for self-sabotage at a national level, and that makes me really depressed. Yeah, art stuff is class. Some of the most exciting artists I know are working in Ireland. They might be from somewhere else or they might be nationalized Irish, or they might be Irish born. I read more Irish writers or Irish-based writers than England or the US. Not just because of personal bias, but post-colonially speaking as well. The moment that Irish literature came alive for me was when I started to view it through a post-colonial lens. I think there’s still some really interesting stuff happening there. It’s a cool place, but it’s got a lot of very old, very recalcitrant, very saddening problems. It makes me very sad when I go there.
Are there contemporary Irish writers that you consider your work in conversation with?
There’s the people who I’m literally in conversation with every day, my buddies, like Wendy Erskine is brillant. I love her. If there’s a writer I want to be when I grew up, it’s someone like Wendy. I think she’s great. Lucy Sweeney-Byrne as well. She’s doing really strange, wonderful things with the short story form, and even problematizing the novel by, for example, writing a book of short stories and auto fiction and essays, that can also be read as a novel. That’s Paris Syndrome. I think she’s tuned into a really deep, unusual voice. Cathy Sweeney’s Breakdown, for me, was the purest expression of that relentless, first person-drive. I read it after I’d begun this project, but I also read it late in the drafting period. When I was reading Cathy’s book, I was like, “Ah, this is that extra gear I needed to find in my own paragraphs here.” Greg Baxter’s Munich Airport is the best Irish book of the 2010s, I think. I talk to Colin Barrett all the time about nonsense, and I also talked to him about naughty fiction problems. My friend Paul Whyte as well. He’s a science fiction writer, but it’s not science fiction as we know it. It’s science fiction that’s set and voiced in a totally rural Irish idiom. And I think that’s great. It’s like gundams in Tipperary. It’s brilliant. It’s really good. I just read my friend Belinda McKeon’s new book. I don’t know when that’s coming out, but it’s great. It’s a mixture of the domestic and the epic. And then John Patrick McHugh, Fun and Games, I think that’s really helping me at the moment moment cause he’s just giving me license to write about lads being gross. I love it. It’s liberating. It’s great. It’s really, really good. A great book, really fun. I would have happily read another 100 pages.
The Black Pool is now available from Hachette UK.
Tim MacGabhann is the author of the novels Call Him Mine and How to Be Nowhere, the memoir The Black Pool, the short-story collection Saints, and the poetry collection Found in a Context of Destruction.
Cristina Politano is a writer from New Jersey. Her essays and fiction appear in Identity Theory, The Dodge, and La Piccioletta Barca, among other places. Twitter/X and Instagram/BlueSky: @monalisavitti.
minor literature[s] 