Brought to you by Penguin.

Hello and welcome to the Penguin podcast where we talk to writers about, funnily enough, writing. I'm Nihal Arthur Nica,

and today I'm speaking to Michael McGee about his astonishing first novel, Close to Home.

Luminous and devastating, it's a portrait of modern masculinity as shaped by class, by trauma,

and by silence, but also by the courage to love and to survive.

Michael, so good to see you. Thank you for coming on.

You too, Niha. Thanks so much. Thanks for having me.

When did you begin to believe that you could create Sean, that you could make Sean a real, living, breathing character within a book?

It came probably pretty far into the process of writing the book. The book when I started

writing it was actually a letter. A friend of mine sort of set me a writing exercise, a task,

basically as a way of getting out of my own way.

I think at the time, I mean, this was back in 2016,

I just started a PSD in creative writing.

And I don't know if it was the pressure of starting a PSD in creative writing

or if I was going through something or other, but I just couldn't quite find my way in the anything. And it was, I mean, I was still writing at the time, but it was, I just wasn't really hitting the right beats or I couldn't quite find the voice that I was looking for. And it was strange because I did know what I wanted to write about. It just, at least I knew in general, I wanted to write about the place I was from the people I grew up with and whatnot, you know. And he sort of set me this task to, it was one night we set up drinking essentially and I told him more than I should have about myself. Sort of told him about all these things about my past and where I was from and where I

grown up. And he said, basically, they start at any point in your life and go from there. And so I sat down, and I started writing this letter. And over the course of a few months, the letter just kept getting longer and longer and longer. It was almost like a diary. And I was just sort of saying things. And then at the end I had this manuscript of about, I don't know, 60, 70,000 words, and was just sort of saying things and then at the end I had this manuscript of about

I don't know 60 70,000 words and we both sort of realized that whatever this thing was there

was something in it that needed to be molded into the shape of a book because there was as highly

confessional as it was there was like a narrative and I was using sort of novelistic sort of ways of telling the story. You know,

it was dialogue was there and there was moments of description and lyricism and drama and stuff

all within it, you know, but it was very rough and embryonic. But it was all true and it was all

about my life and my friends and my family. And everybody had the real names and everybody had their, you know, it was very sort of, I think

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