You never stop being the little sister. That’s what I think as I speak with Siobhan MacGowan, who is in her late 50s now, and four years younger than her brother, Shane. His presence has loomed large in her life – but now she’s setting out on her own.
This week Siobhan releases her debut novel, The Trial of Lotta Rae. Set in London in the early 1900s against the backdrop of the suffragette movement, it’s the story of a young, working-class woman who is raped by a wealthy businessman, and the consequences of the ensuing trial. It’s a haunting tale, verging on the Gothic. When Siobhan reveals her childhood literary idol was Charlotte Brontë, the influence is clear.
When I speak with her on Zoom, she is just back from a trip to her UK book printer. The experience was thrilling, and a long time coming. She has “been writing since the year dot”.
Siobhan and her brother Shane were born in southern England, the children of Irish parents. They spent many a happy summer in their mother’s childhood home in Tipperary, where Siobhan now lives.
After school, Siobhan worked as a copywriter and a freelance journalist, and began many writing projects in her 20s, novels and plays, but she says: “I couldn’t complete anything. In my 30s, I realised you can have a talent for writing, but you have to learn how to craft a novel. It’s like you can have a talent for music, but you have to learn to play the guitar.”
There were stops and starts and novels that didn’t get picked up. She had a children’s story serialised in the Nenagh Guardian. Then in 2017, her beloved mother Therese died in a car accident. “I did write during that time. I think it was more cathartic than anything else,” she says.
She never lost faith in her ability, however, thanks to a strange premonition.
“When I was a little girl, I had a vision of myself putting a book up on a shelf, and it had my name on the spine. I was only about seven. All the times that I was getting rejected, I just thought no. I couldn’t believe I’d have had that vision so young if it wasn’t going to happen.”
She began writing The Trial of Lotta Rae in 2018, drawn to historical fiction because of a long-held fascination with the turn of the 20th century when “all the bells were ringing out for this great new hope and great scientific advancement. Then, the great big stomping boot of World War I.”
She immersed herself in research, examining case law in the Old Bailey archives. But the shape of London as it’s described in the book came from her own heart and head.
The family lived in London’s famous Barbican Estate around 1971, when Siobhan was eight. She remembers well the Northgate area where much of the novel is set, the Whitbread Brewery she passed walking to school.
“I remember smelling the hops. It was very easy for me to put myself there.”
In the book’s acknowledgements, Siobhan writes about walking the streets of King’s Cross with Shane, “youthful and sprightly, serenading passers-by”.
“We used to sing Peggy Gordon, with Spider [Stacey, who co-founded The Pogues with Shane],” she says.
“I remember a dirty King’s Cross, where Shane and the band started. It was just so seedy in those days but you develop a kind of love for it, don’t you? Because it’s very real and very human.”
Siobhan grew up in a house full of books, her mother favouring Dickens and Hardy, her father, Joyce and Beckett. She was “obsessed” with the Brontës.
It sounds like an intellectual household, but she says it was more fun than that.
“We were very expressive. Dad really encouraged our Irishness and rebelliousness. Mum was very tolerant of it. Mum was warm and humorous. Dad had a cutting, acerbic Dublin wit. They didn’t really treat us as children. When we were a bit older, we’d be having a good laugh together around the dinner table.”
If there was a party going, her parents liked to join in. “Even when I was in my 20s, I would bring people home from the pub and Dad would be the last one standing. I remember him being in the doorway once, about six in the morning, me and all my friends were crashed out on the floor. The shadow of him with a drink in hand, [saying] ‘aw, you bores’.”
Her father Maurice is 92 now and lives 10 minutes from Siobhan in the ‘Dad Pad’. His sight is failing in one eye, but he is still a voracious reader, consuming books in Greek and translating them.
“They both encouraged us to do something extraordinary, if we wanted. They didn’t put any limits on us.”
Looking back now, Siobhan is glad she didn’t publish any work in her 20s, “because I don’t believe now what I believed then. My life experience has completely changed me.” She was “more spiritual, I probably had more faith in God”.
Richard Balls’s recent biography of Shane, A Furious Devotion reveals the extent of a younger Siobhan’s worry about Shane’s drinking and drug use, and how she sometimes intervened on his behalf. The title could well refer to her love for him.
“It was only the two of us, so I was very much focused on him and then he’d be focused on my reaction.”
Perhaps she wasn’t writing because her focus was elsewhere?
“I think that was probably my choice, though. I could say that I didn’t have time. It’s difficult. I think I felt a need to focus on what was happening with Shane, although he wouldn’t look at it that way. He was doing his thing but if you’re on the other side of it, you worry.”
There was a particularly tumultuous time in the late 1980s, when Shane’s drug use reached a crisis point. Siobhan was advised by doctors to have him committed. It was an incident that put a strain on their relationship.
“He probably regrets that I did it, because he’s coming from a completely different angle. But I can’t regret it because the doctor stood in my flat and said: ‘Your brother will be dead in six months if you don’t do something.’
“It obviously caused trouble. I know from his point of view, that wasn’t the right thing to do. I think now he understands it. It’s part of having a little sister who’s worried about you. She may or may not do the right thing for you.
“It took a long time to realise that everybody has their own life and their own journey. One of the things that really taught me a lesson was when some of my friends started dying in their 40s. One or two got cancer and were gone. They hadn’t done anything particularly outrageous.
“They hadn’t done huge amounts of drugs or drinking. It taught me a lesson. You’re going to die anyway, and Shane is doing alright to get to the age he has.”
Their lives were heavily entwined when they were younger. Siobhan worked for The Pogues from their Camden Town office, producing their fanzine and going on tour with them, before moving on in 1988.
She worked as an assistant to Van Morrison in the early 1990s, travelling with him in the US when he toured with John Lee Hooker – a “magical” experience.
Siobhan MacGowan in Dromineer, Co. Tipperary. Photo: Paul McCarthy
She toured as a musician herself for a period, releasing her own album Chariot, in 1998.
“I played a guitar, with ‘three chords and a version of the truth’, but really I was writing words to music. Shane loves those songs, but I didn’t like that lifestyle.
“It wasn’t me at all. It’s a bit of fun when you’re young, but that kind of heavy duty, full-on attention from people and you are the product... What’s really good about being an author is that the book is what people focus on, generally. When you’re a musician, people love your album and then get obsessed with you.”
She watched it happen with Shane, and then Van. “I’ve seen people struggle with it, let’s put it that way.”
As a younger woman, she protected her parents from the more negative aspects of Shane’s success.
“I did try to shield them. My 20s were not my favourite time because I was very soft. I wasn’t able for that kind of cynical life. There were a lot of agendas floating around. A lot of it has to do with trying to get Shane to do something, so you’d get protective about that. I’m not a big fan of celebrity culture. Shane isn’t either. We’d much rather be at home with a good book and a good drama.”
Reflecting on their similarities, they always shared the same taste in music, “we’re not musical snobs”, a similar “sarky sense of humour” and “an empathy for fellow human beings and not wanting people to be hurting”.
But where Siobhan likes order, “Shane has liked to walk on the wild side”.
“He may still like it, I don’t know. I like the world as it is, I don’t need to change it in my head. I do that when I’m writing, go into different worlds. I don’t need to take drugs. I get a high out of just life. He loves life too, but it’s just that one strand of the wildness and risk-taking in him is not there in me.”
“He’s my brother and I love him. You’re not in each other’s pockets but I think about him every day and hope everything’s OK.” And that worry that bogged her down? “I’ve let all that go. All that saviour stuff was not me.”
It was for her own sanity that she cut ties with “the music world, the drugs world. It’s not so much his world now either, he’s much calmer.”
As difficult as things ever were with Shane, there was no question that the family would ever fall out. “I do understand why people don’t talk to their family,” she says. “I’m sure for a lot of people it is absolutely the right thing to do. I don’t feel I’d be able to do it, no matter what happens.”
Her mother and father were the same. “There’s just no way we would call time on anything.”
She hasn’t written her memoirs just yet, but her extraordinary life finds its way into her writing. “I learned a lot of things that go into my books, about faith and about hard times, and overcoming them or not.”
Has Shane read her book?
“He has started it, but he wanted to listen to it on Audible. He likes listening to books now. He finds it relaxing. It would be great to see what he thinks of it. Some of The Pogues have, Spider and Jem [Finer]. They love it. I value their opinion.”
The next book is already in the works. She won’t say too much except that it’s set in Dublin in 1911. Given her productivity, has the MacGowan writing baton been passed?
“I’ll ask Shane that,” she says, smiling. “Maybe he’s happy to pass me the baton for the time being. Before lockdown started, he was recording some more and he has been writing. He doesn’t drink as much any more. He’s a mellow guy.”
What if the music came from the chaos and not the mellow?
“This is one of my bugbears. Shane would’ve written everything he’d written if he’d never taken a drug in his life. I don’t believe he needed it at all. That writing thing was in us from kids.
“In the car to Tipperary, we used to go in the back underneath the blanket. He would draw and write in his book and I would draw and write in my book. And we did that for hours all the way to Holyhead.
“He could’ve done everything great that he’s written without a single thing, I really believe that,” Siobhan says, defending her big brother to the last.
‘The Trial of Lotta Rae’ by Siobhan MacGowan is published by Welbeck, €18.20, and out on Thursday
