There’s something about summer in London. The smell of BBQs and warm sewage are thick in the air as you walk to meet a friend in a beer garden. On the way you bump into a friend-of-a-friend who is having a party in a park you have to DM an Instagram account to get the address to. You go there and it’s fun but you see the guy that broke your heart last year and have to leave. But it’s OK, because another friend has WhatsApped you the location of another party somewhere else in the city, where someone else could be, and something else could happen, and new ways of being hurt, or having fun, will open up to you that you don’t even know about yet.
The heat draws people out of their houses: they wear less, they do more. There’s this energy to the city tugging you along, pushing you to stay out later, text people you know you shouldn’t. It’s amid this frenetic heat that award-winning spoken word artist Oisín McKenna’s sensual, addictive debut novel Evenings and Weekends takes place. All the characters are trying to make the most of the time they have before Monday morning, but there’s so much going on in their lives: money they need to earn, things they need to say.
Maggie wants one last hurrah before she moves to the suburbs with her boyfriend Ed to have a baby. Ed desires things he will barely let himself acknowledge, and his past with Maggie’s best friend Phil is catching up to him. Phil loves the warehouse where he lives, and his flatmate Keith who he always ends up in the same bed as. But Keith has a boyfriend, Louis, and Phil is not sure how he fits into that. And then there’s Phil’s mum Rosaleen, desperately trying to get hold of him because she has some news to tell that might shatter his whole world into pieces.
We’ve just had a bank holiday in the UK, not quite so hot as sweltering as the one in the book, but equally as charged with promise, so much that I delayed the call with McKenna by a day to recover from the effects of it. Once I’d recovered, I spoke to the Drogheda-born author about his creative process, the changing face of London, and the path to finding happiness.
Evenings and Weekends was set over a weekend and we just had a bank holiday. Did you get up to much? Did you feel that sense of possibility and restlessness the characters experience in the book?
Oisín McKenna: Yeah, I did have a bit of that. I’ve not been doing much socialising because of the book coming out. It’s been a very busy time, sort of stressful. I’ve been tired at the weekends most of the time. But this one opened up a bit. I went to two day parties. On Saturday I went to one in Denmark Hill, that was really good, and then some of my friends went on to a party in Peckham which I didn’t go to. On Sunday I went to the Dalston Superstore party on Gillett Square which was super fun. South London is so much cooler.
A lot of the characters in Evenings and Weekends are from Basildon and you get a sense that their upbringings were quite claustrophobic. And then they move to London and even though the city is so huge, all of their lives continue to overlap. It’s funny, because London is such a big place but it can end up feeling really small – you start talking to someone and it turns out they know people you know.
Oisín McKenna: Yeah I know what you mean. When you move here you think that your world will get bigger but it kind of feels smaller, in a nice way, like you’re in a village almost but one where you’ve chosen who’s in it. But then also it’s maybe bad that you’re always hanging out with people who have the same views as you, or are so similar to you. When I grew up in a small town I knew everyone and they all knew me. There were bits about that which were nice, but often it felt limiting because you know everyone there is to know and there are no more people. Especially when you’re a young queer person wanting to find people like you, for friendship or romance.
It took me a while when I moved to London before I felt a part of something, could go to a party and there would be a bunch of people I knew from one part of my life, some people from other parts and they’d be connected in all these ways I didn’t know about. I really love that, it makes me feel a part of a scene or a community. It doesn’t feel as limiting because there are all these different combinations of people in the mix. Part of why I came here is to be around like-minded people, I take a lot of strength and enjoyment out of that.
There are a lot of moments in Evenings and Weekends when characters struggle to communicate with one another. Phil won’t talk to Louis about something traumatic that happened to him. Ed doesn’t know how to be there for Callum, who just found out about his mum Rosaleen being ill. It strikes me as quite a modern conundrum. Why do you think that’s something that continues to shape our generation?
Oisín McKenna: A big part of the way I experience the world is feeling like there are all these things going on inside of me that I struggle to verbalise. I am able to talk about my emotional life pretty competently. I can describe what’s happening to me in a way that can be understood, I’m not particularly shy about it. But for a lot of my life, I’ve been very shy, and spent a lot of time not really speaking that much and feeling frustration because I had these very real desires to connect to people and be understood and those desires went unmet. That’s caused a kind of sadness and loneliness. Even now, when I find I can articulate my emotional life pretty well, there’s this feeling of distance sometimes which is quite hard to get across. I think that’s quite common with people our age – maybe it’s common for people among people of all ages, all the time. A lot of people our age spend a huge amount of time thinking and talking about communication, trying to figure out the best way to do it in friendships and romantic relationships. This whole infrastructure of communication has become very common. I think it’s basically good.
The book asks you to empathise with characters that other authors might have made into the villain. Callum is quite messy and destructive but there’s this moment where he rescues a frog and then drives around with him in the passenger seat. Ed has been a bully in the past but he’s also a very caring person who tries hard for the people he loves. Why did you decide to ask us to empathise with them? And is that something you’ve learned to do in your own life?
Oisín McKenna: It’s an approach I developed through the writing process. Prior to the book I did a lot of theatre and spoken word. Sometimes, in that work, I used caricature or satire to make a political point. Often those political points were aimed at different people with a lot of power who were maybe wielding that power for oppressive or unkind ends. When I was writing this novel there was more of that in it. The character of Louis, for example, was a caricature of a clueless rich guy. Later I felt that this was less narratively interesting to read, for these characters to be evil meant they were inherently less complex. It’s more interesting for the reader for them to be allowed to be good, morally ambiguous but with redeeming features.
The Ed and Callum characters are both types of people who I have had quite negative experiences with growing up. I was thinking about who does bad things and how everyone at different stages of their life will do things that are more than questionable, which hurt other people, and how people integrate those events into their perceptions of themselves. Often if you do something very unkind to another person you’ve got to invent a moral code in which you are not the villain, you were doing something necessary and justifiable. Or you can have a more complex understanding that you’ve done something unkind for complex reasons but that doesn’t mean it’s OK. Or it can become someone’s entire perception of themselves in a very corrosive way, where they feel as though they are irredeemably bad and they can’t ever be forgiven. That’s a very difficult thing to think about yourself.
The book articulated so many things I didn’t even know I felt. Have you always been quite an observant person?
Oisín McKenna: I’ve been a very shy person for a lot of my life. Often in social situations, I’m not really contributing a lot verbally, which leaves a lot of energy for observing people and my own thoughts and feelings. I also have a very good memory, I can remember a lot of stories and events from across my life that I can extract from.
For something that’s so beautiful and nuanced, Evenings and Weekends is such a page-turner. How important was it for you to write something fun?
Oisín McKenna: Most of the time I was writing I didn’t have that much plot and it was just characters in rooms having thoughts and feelings and not really doing anything. I was most interested in political, social and cultural ideas, and also rich emotional details and sensory details about London. I wanted to make a bargain with the readers that if they were willing to read some of these more nebulous ideas, then I’d make sure it was really fun. I wanted to make it very smooth, no moments in it that clagged, I wanted it just to flow seamlessly from start to finish.
It was also probably partially to do with wanting to maximise my chances of getting a book deal. I didn’t really know much about the contemporary fiction landscape and didn’t feel very confident in my ability to write what I thought of as a ‘proper novel’. I just thought, ‘oh yeah a proper novel has plot, I need to have plot’. But I transplanted that over the existing emotional political and social content, then I tried to escalate that as much as possible. So if there was something that would make the plot more high stakes, while still being in the realm of believable, then I would add that in.
“That’s something I really wanted to capture in the book: people trying as best as they can to improvise a happy life in the face of huge political, social and economic pressures” – Oisín McKenna
I’ve read elsewhere that you were working on Evenings and Weekends for five years. The form of the book must have changed so much in that time. Was there a particular moment where you realised, ‘oh this is what it’s about’?
Oisín McKenna: For so much of the time I was working on Evenings and Weekends it didn’t really feel as though it worked well. There were moments where I’d think ‘oh this could be great’, but they were only ever short passages or seeds. It wasn’t until the last year and a half of working on it that it came together, probably when I introduced the whale stranded in the Thames in the book’s opening. In 2021 I’d been working on the book a while, for about two years at that stage, and in May of that year there were lots of stories of whales that caught my imagination. Really quickly I wrote the first paragraph of the book, it was a fictionalised version of several different whales that had been found. Once I did that it made sense that it would take place over the course of a weekend during which the whale is being rescued. It gave structure and timestamped the whole thing.
What was it about the whale that helped everything fall into place?
Oisín McKenna: There’s something whimsical about it, a bit ridiculous, and that suited the uncanny atmosphere of the book. I was interested in exploring the weekend as a time when the normal rules of what might happen become slippery, and the possibilities bigger. The strange news of the whale in the Thames spoke to that.
Evenings and Weekends shows just how hard it is getting to live in London. Ed and Maggie’s Hackney flat is covered in black mould. Phil is getting kicked out of the warehouse where he’s made a home. Do you think London will be able to hold onto that feeling of possibility and adventure that makes it such a fun place to live?
Oisín McKenna: There are big changes within the social and cultural infrastructure of the city, and many cities around the world, making it more difficult for interesting types of culture to propagate here. It’s a foreclosing of certain types of fun, adventure and romance in favour of something more insipid and dull. It does limit that exciting feeling, but it’s also true that lots of generations have seen this happen before and managed to be resilient to the change, and maintained the character and excitement of London. But yeah, it does feel as though a lot of the changes happening at the moment are unprecedented.
I found it so moving in the book the way the characters continue to grasp towards happiness despite how hard it’s getting to achieve. Ed and Maggie want to make a new life in Basildon. Rosaleen becomes better friends with Joan despite their age and the news of her illness.
Oisín McKenna: That’s something I really wanted to capture in the book: people trying as best as they can to improvise a happy life in the face of huge political, social and economic pressures. Happiness is being crowded on all sides by things that might reduce it or undermine it. I wanted to look at what happens in that impasse when people have to make these improvised life decisions which may or may not be right. I wanted to let characters have these moments of triumph despite all of those pressures.
Evenings and Weekends is out now. Oisín McKenna will be speaking at the Margate Bookshop on June 6 and at Bookhaus Bristol on June 12