JOHN BUTLER, screenwriter, journalist and novelist
Can I call your debut novel, 'The Tenderloin', a coming-of-age story? Or does that description make you cringe?No, it has to be that, doesn't it? The "innocent abroad" is another one I get a lot. It's about a very naive young Irish boy, who lands in San Francisco in 1995. The dotcoms are exploding and the world is about to change forever. He has a year to figure out who he is, to either regress into the past, back to what is familiar and secure, or to move into another world that is completely unfamiliar to him. It's not autobiographical, but that's what youth was to me.
At the heart of the story is a love triangle.Right. The guy's sexual orientation is not clear to him. I don't think he appreciates that there's a scale, that there are degrees of hetro- and homosexuality. He sees the world in terms of absolutes and so, residing on neither end of that absolute scale, he has trouble working out who he is. And he lacks the courage to go and find out.
You worked in San Francisco during the dotcom boom. Was there really a sense of almost religious vocation among internet advocates?Absolutely there was. Programmers and coders worked all night, eating junk food at their desks and sleeping in their cars. People put in 20-hours shifts, six or seven days a week. Everything they had, they put into this work. Which was why when the crash came in the early 2000s, their sense of betrayal was heightened.
One of the most striking things about this book is just the dam burst of mid-1990s cultural references. Was it fun to immerse yourself in all of that stuff again?Yeah, it was great. I think all of those tiny quotidian details are the things that drag you back. It's like a smell or a particular song coming on the radio. As a reader myself, I always really enjoy that stuff.
Windows 95, the OJ Simpson trial, ecstasy tablets secreted in CD copies of 'Maxinquaye' . . . It's funny to think that stuff is now receding into the pages of history.The mid-1990s, I think, were a really unique moment in history, when the past and the future were almost on top of each other. There seemed to be no present.
You returned to San Francisco to finish writing the book. Had it changed much?I went back last summer. The writing was almost done at that point. It was more just small bits and pieces I had to check. Like whether you can see Alcatraz and the Golden Gate Bridge simultaneously from a particular point in the bay. There are some things you can't find out even on Google Earth. The place really hadn't changed a bit.
As well as your writing, you also directed the RTÉ sketch show 'Your Bad Self', which divided the critics.It was a sketch show very much in the British tradition, which is to say that it had actors rather than comedians. Ireland has amazing stand-up comedians, but the sketch show is a very specific craft we've never mastered. The idea was to have a cast of 11 or 12 actors who were all contributing to the writing. It wasn't well received by the critics, but it has found an audience more recently on YouTube.
The sketch with Domhnall Gleeson and a plastic bottle in a moving car is really one to tell the grandkids about.That sketch definitely caught the imagination of the public. If you read the YouTube comments on that sketch, some people have the most insane ideas what it's about. One poor guy thought . . . . I mean, how could anyone even think that?
The book obviously mines a lot of personal experiences. As the publication date approaches, are you apprehensive about how friends and family will react?I'm not too worried, I've changed enough of the names. Obviously, there's a chance someone will think some character is based on them, when it isn't. But I can't do anything about that. They tell you to imagine a friendly reader when you're writing. And I suppose at the back of my mind, I'd have been thinking this is never going to be published. But now that it is, I suppose, the only person who's really exposed is myself. Clearly, when my parents read it, that's going to be a fraught moment for them. But I can't worry about that.
will be published by Picador on June 3rd (£12.99/€15). John Butler is reading with Kevin Barry at the Dublin Writers Festival on Thursday, May 26th at 6pm in the Samuel Beckett Theatre, Trinity College, Dublin. Dublinwritersfestival.com, 01-6040200
The Tenderloin
