I interviewed Shane MacGowan and ended up drunker than him

While crime writer Michelle McDonagh gets to solve intriguing cases that unfurl on the page, no less than 19 consultants were unable to get to the root of the terrible pain that she lives with.

The Blarney-based writer has just published her third novel, Some Of This Is True, which is set in the County Cork village. A young Irish-American woman called Jessie arrived there in search of the father she had never known, but her body is found at the bottom of the Wishing Steps at Blarney Castle.

Jessie’s bereft mother believes her daughter was pushed, and sets about uncovering evidence when she arrives from America to identify her body.

Michelle, describing herself as a ‘blow-in’, originally being from Galway, moved to County Cork when she met her Cork-born husband with whom she has three children.

Michelle has carved out a career for herself, both as a journalist and now mostly as the author of novels that are full of psychological suspense.

But she its that her latest book was really hard to write.

“I lost a lot of time due to pain,” says Michelle. “You’d think after six or seven years the doctors would have found the cause of the pain.

“But over that period of time, despite so many scans and needless surgeries such as having an ovary taken out, as well as my fallopian tubes and appendix, plus going to London for nerve entrapment surgery, nobody could figure out what was wrong.

“I had colonoscopies and spent thousands on pain management.”

Thankfully, Michelle was put in touch with a physiotherapist who seems to have discovered just what is wrong with her body.

It turned out that writer, Sinead Moriarty, who was on one of Michelle and Kate Durrant's podcasts about books, also suffered severe pain from rheumatoid arthritis. The two writers were talking about pain.

A friend of Kate's, who had also had bad pain and various tests waiting for years for a diagnosis, heard the discussion and ed Michelle on the back of it and recommended her physiotherapist.

The physiotherapist is in a lot of demand. Michelle managed to get to see him and he told her that the psoas muscle seemed to be the problem.

“It’s thick muscle really deep in the abdomen that basically straps the top of your body to the bottom of it, explains Michelle.

“Mine was completely rock hard because it was so contracted and tight. That was causing all the pain and there are probably nerves trapped in it.

“It’s mind-boggling that all the consultants I went to see couldn’t give me a diagnosis. It’s not sorted yet, but I’m on the road (to recovery). It’s going to take a lot of intense physiotherapy because the pain is so stuck.

“It’s hard to work with it. The muscle doesn’t like the work being done on it. It’s like poking a wasps’ nest. But at least I’m hopeful for the first time that there will be an end to it.”

Michelle always wanted to write books, but realised that she needed to make a living. On the advice of a career guidance teacher at school, she decided to get into journalism, gaining an arts degree followed by a qualification in journalism at the then University College Galway.

She worked in the Connacht Tribune for 12 years which she says was like a family and was full of craic.

During her fruitful stint at that paper, where she covered everything from inquests to garden fetes, Michelle took leave from her job and went to Boston.

“I had never done the travelling thing when I was younger so I did it in my late twenties,” she says.

Michelle tried waitressing, but used to cry “down the phone at my mother, saying I was absolutely useless. But I was really lucky because The Irish Voice in New York were just opening an office in Boston. I ended up getting a job there, travelling around the place, writing local stories”.

Describing that summer as “mental,” Michelle fell in love with “a crazy Galway man and I came home early”. But not before achieving her “not so great claim-to-fame that I got drunker than Shane MacGowan. This was in the back of an Irish bar, McGanns in Boston.

“I was due to interview Shane MacGowan before his gig, but they were late arriving. I thought the interview wasn’t going to go ahead and I proceeded to get absolutely hammered.

“I ended up on the floor. I’ll never forget Shane looking down at me, skitting laughing. He was lovely; such good fun.”

Michelle had promised herself that she’d have written a book by the time she was 30 – but that didn’t happen. There was no book at 40 either.

“I would get to 30,000 words and then I’d be stuck.

“During covid, I decided to do something about it because I’d always regret not writing a book. So I did an online course with Faber on how to write your first novel.

“What I learned from that course was how to plot. You can be a plotter or a ‘pantser’. As a plotter, you have a map to tell you where you’re going. ‘Pantsers’ just sit down and fly by the seat of their pants, making it up as they go along. A lot of literary writers would probably do that.

“But when you’re doing psychological suspense or crime, you need to know what your plan is. It will change, but it’s like having GPS. You have the security of knowing that if you get lost on the way, you can go back to your plan.”

Plotting and planning suits Michelle, who initially got a two-book deal from Hachette. She is under no illusions about writing

.“Even if you were working full-time at it, you would probably earn more working in the local chipper. Because the population of Ireland is so small, you really need to be selling in a bigger market like the UK or the US or .”

Who knows? Michelle’s latest book could crack the Irish American market with its tragic protagonist and a setting that has always drawn Americans.