50 shades of honesty - Irish American Mike Farragher informs your inner dialogue with the old sod

As 50 Shades O’Green shows, Farragher’s early life certainly provided him with enough classic rites of passage chapters to plunder at will for the rest of his writing life. But Farragher has another writers gift that’s God given, and that few enough ever genuinely possess, which is a creative fearlessness when it comes to which subject he’ll address. 

“Picked last in gym class, not a great student in school, I graduated summa cum lucky,” he says with characteristic directness. 

“I grew up with cousins, and every one of them was on the dean’s list and I just wasn’t. So being a writer was probably just the next step for me because it was something that no one else in my family was.” 

But it wasn’t handed to him, this new writer’s path. In fact, as the book makes clear, Farragher had more than a little native Irish Catholic reticence to navigate through first. 

Let’s face it, speaking up, or even thinking you have a story worth telling, is a stumbling block that most Irish people actually never get beyond. That might have been his story too, if it hadn’t been for Sir Bob Geldof.

As he recounts in 50 Shades O’Green, Geldof told him during the course of an interview for the Irish Voice that he never gave a fig about what other people would say about his creative efforts. Geldof used more colorful language to make his point of course, but the lesson stuck with Farragher. Eighteen months later he published his debut novel, Collared.

The best literary critics, in Irish circles, are the ones you also happen to be related to. But even now, he admits, some relatives are still uncomfortable at the idea of him expressing himself so publicly. 

Still others explode with pride over his output. You can never predict how people will react.

“One of my cousins papered the entire town of Tuam in Co. Galway with posters about my forthcoming book reading there. She was proud of me and so supportive and this was how she showed it,” Farragher said.

“ She told me, ‘I believe in what you’re doing and saying and no one else is doing that in this family.’ That makes it so worthwhile.”

The first book created some extraordinary conversations with his readers, he admits. 

“One day someone came up to me and said, ‘Hey, I know you! You’re that guy I read in the bathroom!’  I wonder if people ever came up to Yeats with lines like that.”

In lively scenes in the new book Farragher sometimes writes about his struggles with his Irish temper.  I asked him about it and he laughs, “What the f*** do you mean?”  

“It’s in your genetic code to restrain yourself, walk away from a situation and come back later with a level head. That’s for sure. We’re passionate,” Farragher says.

“My wife, who’s Jewish, has a magnet on the refrigerator that reads, ‘Pray for me I married an Irishman.’  But the positive side of that is that you’re passionately engaged with life.”

​
Nster.com