You’ve got these huge sexual transformations happening, but if there are no girls, obviously all the energy is just going to be turned into brutalizing whoever is smaller than you. My school was a boys’ school there were no girls, so life really felt kind of pointless in that regard. You’re completely dependent on your parents, you have no money, and your day is mapped out for you from beginning to end. You’re caught in this double bind: You’re struggling to establish your own identity, and at the same time you have absolutely zero of the tools that you need. I think being a teenager is really, really hard. So if you weren’t any good at rugby, then you sort of didn’t really have any kind of standing in the school. They would make you play it until you were about fifteen, no matter how incredibly pointless that was. It was a big rugby school, and I was incredibly bad at rugby. But there was such a limited view of the world. There were much nerdier kids in my school, and they would draw more of the fire, but I could see it going on around me. I wasn’t bullied or anything I wasn’t brutalized in any way.

But other than that, it wasn’t hugely autobiographical. I went to quite an illustrious school in Ireland called Blackrock College, and Seabrook College, the school in the book, physically resembles the school that I went to. Recently, Murray spoke to me from his home in Dublin.ĭid you draw any of the characters and themes from your own experiences? Were you bullied at school? Set at an Irish boarding school, the darkly comic tale (Skippy actually does die in the first chapter) is populated by a sharply drawn cast of confused, self-destructive teens and self-involved, irresponsible adults. Paul Murray’s second novel, Skippy Dies -recently longlisted for the Booker Prize-is more than six hundred pages long and tackles subjects ranging from string theory to World War I.

Skippy Dies by Paul Murray