‘It's a very hard time to be young': author John Patrick McHugh on male adolescence
'It's a mad way of being, adolescence,' says Galway writer John Patrick McHugh. 'Sometimes I think I'd love to do it again and then I think of the stress of being a 14-year-old and how bad you can feel and I'm glad it's over.'
McHugh has hit zeitgeist gold with his debut novel, Fun and Games. 'It's a really tough time,' says McHugh, now 33, of male adolescence, the subject of his novel. 'I can't imagine what it's like to do it now with internet and phones because curating your life for an outsider's perspective is an awful way to live.'
We're in a coffee shop in Galway's west end, a suitably hip location for such a vaunted young writer as McHugh (The Observer anointed him one of their Best Debut Novelists of 2025).
Fun and Games is freighted with the most treacherous of teenage landmines – sex-related public humiliation, loss of face, sporting competition and enough insecurity to sink a ship. The book begins with its protagonist, also called John, who has recently earned the nickname Tits thanks to a naked selfie of his mother that has been circulating the small island where he lives. It's the perfect entry point into the crucible of male adolescence.
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McHugh wanted to be brutally honest about adolescence. 'I read coming-of-age novels and thought, That's not what I went through. I didn't drink red wine, you know, I drank Buckfast,' he says, laughing. 'I was interested in exploring that and I hadn't seen it for my generation. I wanted to get into it. I wanted to show masculinity, and youth, as raw as I could.'
I didn't want [my characters] to be these macho silent boys. They do love each other
—
McHugh on Fun and Games
McHugh has written about the subject of male adolescence before, both in personal essays and in his 2021 collection of short stories,
Pure Gold
. In fact, two of the characters, along with the island setting, already appeared in a short story in Pure Gold, although McHugh says they are different characters in the novel. He says he wanted to be honest about the kind of insecurities young men and boys struggle with.
One striking aspect of the book is its exploration of negative male body image, something McHugh himself experienced as a teenager. 'I was always a big guy. I was overweight when I was eight, nine, 10 ... and that complex has always stayed with me. I'm sure weight issues were way more common than I thought. I'm sure I'm not the only one who never wanted to take off their shirt, but it was never talked about ... I remember being very frightened about being overweight, very worried about it. It affected me. It was tough. I played sports and I still had that fear of taking off your shirt, showing your body. I think it's natural and it's hard.'
He sees teenagers now in the gym, and is conflicted about the focus on sculpting bodies. 'A part of me is like, fair play, but another part of me is like, you're 15 or 16, have fun, don't worry about this. It's a very hard time to be young, and I know this is a trite example, but Instagram is so fake. The things you see there are lies, and yet you see them as if they're truth, and your idea of what's good is messed up by these mirages.'
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John Patrick McHugh: Maeve Binchy, Lenin and me
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He wrote about his own teenage issues around body image for the Stinging Fly, in which he described going so far as to make himself sick after eating. 'Thankfully it wasn't destructive. It wasn't an everyday thing.' While the book is full of humour – much of it linked to the all-consuming goal of divesting oneself of one's virginity – it also offers a heart-rending insight into the fragility and insecurities of young Irish men.
While sex is at the fore of the book, male friendship and love are at its heart. His description of how young men express their love for each other in the absence of the ability to express that love verbally is very skilfully done. Does he think not being able to talk about things is a problem among young men?
'I didn't want [my characters] to be these macho silent boys. They do love each other and have affection for each other and they'd go to war for each other and yet they are also incredibly cruel to each other and to other people, and yet they're also self-conscious. Male friendship is very interesting to me because it's so dramatic. Boys don't talk to each other for months and then one small apology and they're back being best friends. Those hysterics of masculinity are so interesting to me – the love at the heart of it. Boys get really intimate and touchy-feely with each other when they're drunk, or even just having a good time, or in sports, that comes into it too. I did talk to my friends about heartache and stuff like that. They were stilted conversations but they were still conversations, and there was an arm around the shoulder.'
As much as the book is about the male experience, it also has some intriguing female characters, including Amber, John's sort-of girlfriend, and his mother, Yvonne, of the selfie infamy. In her determined and unashamed pursuit of her own passions (among them a brilliantly specific passion for painting pictures of elves and gnomes) she acts as a foil to the boys' extreme anxieties about expressing their individuality.
'I wanted to get as close to the bone of what peer pressure and social order can do to a boy, how wobbly it can make him in terms of how he views women as a result of that.' In the book John worries a lot about what people think of him, to the extent that he is willing to sabotage his own happiness for peer approval. 'John is riddled with social fear, and what people think about him – what do people think of his mother, what does the manager think of him in GAA, what does Amber think, what do his friends think. One of the hardest things about being a teenager is being able to say I am who I am, which is a really powerful and brave thing to do, and sometimes it doesn't happen for people until their twenties, thirties or forties.'
I loved the Beano and Captain Underpants. I wasn't reading Tolstoy when I was 12
He says his character is an insecure, frustrated guy. 'I'd like to think at heart he's a good guy but he is someone who lashes out and does things that hurt people because he fears the boys. That hierarchy of who's number one is so pronounced in secondary school and you don't want to be near the bottom.'
Much of this ranking is sorted out through sporting prowess. When John and his friends aren't vying for dominance in the sexual arena, they are competing for a spot on the senior Gaelic football team (McHugh himself played the sport), and almost as much of the book's disappointment, passion and heartache takes place on the pitch as it does in teenage bedrooms.
McHugh grew up in Cork, moving around a lot because of his father's work in the bank, before the family returned to Galway and settled there when he was 12. Unusually for a writer, he didn't harbour childhood dreams of literary greatness. 'I loved the Beano and Captain Underpants,' he says, laughing. 'I wasn't reading Tolstoy when I was 12. I was reading the things you're meant to read. Being a writer was never in my sphere. I never thought that was a path for me even though I loved English and writing essays.'
When it came to choosing a degree, he opted for a then-new course in NUI Galway, BA Connect with Creative Writing. On his first day of class he felt out of his depth. When asked what his favourite novel was, he said The Witches by Roald Dahl. 'Shocking,' he says with a laugh, before adding, 'It is a great book.' He learned discipline from the mentorship of writers such as Mike McCormack and he has also taken an applied MA in creative writing at the University of East Anglia and an MFA in creative writing at UCD.
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Sally Rooney and John Patrick McHugh at Cúirt festival
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He hasn't started work on his next novel yet but says there will be one, and when it is ready he has a crack team of some of the best writers in Ireland to critique it. When McHugh was an aspiring writer in his twenties, Thomas Morris, then editor of the Stinging Fly, put him in touch with a few other young writers who were also trying to write in a serious way. That group included Sally Rooney, Nicole Flattery and Michael Magee, among others.
'Sally's a wonderful person so we just became really good friends,' he says. 'The same with Mickey and Nicole. I think Tom put us together because he knew we were serious. I didn't get published again for another three or four years. I'm thinking now: How did I get the confidence? I think it helped to have that group with whom I could exchange work. I look back at that time and think wow, fair play, we stuck at it, we did it, you know. Sally is still the person I share work with, and her success is unbelievable. Irish writing in general inspires me. I think we're so good.'
Fun and Games is published by 4th Estate
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Fun and Games Author : John Patrick McHugh ISBN-13 : 978-0008517342 Publisher : Fourth Estate Guideline Price : £16.99 John Patrick McHugh's first novel begins with a teenage boy and a teenage girl, alone in the woods on a summer afternoon, engaging in what puritanical educators used to call 'heavy petting'. 'His finger was burrowing inside her. They were kissing and then they were doing this. He was the horniest, he was seventeen.' The scene is a tease, in several senses. Neither boy nor girl at this point get anywhere, so to speak ('My arm's gone dead'). And the unwary reader is led by such an overture to expect from Fun and Games a comedy about the squirm-inducing hopes and humiliations of teenage sexuality, in the vein of Martin Amis's The Rachel Papers or the TV series The Inbetweeners. But this isn't at all what Fun and Games is up to. To begin with, more than 100 pages pass before we get another sex scene – though, of course, like the teenagers we're reading about, we keep fruitlessly expecting one. The book's viewpoint character, in whose company and consciousness we spend a chunky 390 pages, is John Masterson, who is in the middle of his 'pivotal' post-Leaving Cert summer. The year is 2009. John lives on an island off the coast of Mayo. He hangs out with the lads (Rooney, Studzy), and works shifts in the local hotel restaurant, the Island Head. He has been freshly called up as half-back for the local senior Gaelic team. The girl in the woods is Amber, who also works in the hotel restaurant. Amber is 19 and appears to John's gauche male gaze enigmatic to the point of impenetrability. Will they? Won't they? [ 'It's a very hard time to be young': author John Patrick McHugh on male adolescence Opens in new window ] This is very familiar material. But the contemporary Irish novel that Fun and Games might most closely remind you of is Louise Kennedy's Trespasses , another novel that takes a suite of apparently familiar characters and a bog-standard narrative framework and subjects them to intense pressures of empathy and perception in order to produce something luminous, a carefully fashioned object. Which is to say that McHugh is no mere grey stenographer of middling provincial dreams but a stylist, a shaper of the world in prose. READ MORE Like all beginning stylists, he has his ascensions and his wobbles. But when he's good, he's great. More or less the first thing we hear about John's mother, Yvonne, is that a private photograph texted to her illicit lover has done the rounds of the whole island. Here's John's reaction: 'He had studied his mother's tits. Much like any milfy duo obtained from the internet – fingertip nipples, blue veins etched like lightning bolts – but devastatingly his mother's. John hated her, and the whole Masterson family, and for a time everyone alive.' 'Milfy duo' is good – perhaps a tiny bit too good, actually – but it's the adverb, 'devastatingly,' and the rueful retrospection of 'for a time everyone alive' that bumps this particular riff up into a space above mere cringe comedy. Here is McHugh's method in miniature: the prose fireworks are almost always at the service of the book's large project, which is to use the resources of a tightly curbed irony to usher us into the mind of a young man who doesn't yet know how to be in the world. More gorgeous touches: the 'blemished cotton' of roadside sheep; John's conception of having a future at all is 'The wrong shape, like the plug sockets in Spain'; of a local girl: 'Her mother was from somewhere not Ireland'; on the ways in which the ambient culture finds its way into your mind: 'A yellow-reg zoomed by and John thought, passively: English wanker'; a drunk John tries to express his anger: 'it was hard to fully recall the intricacies to why John was so in the correct'; a joint, burning, is 'gold, apricot'. Also remarkable is that Fun and Games is unapologetically and prismatically about being a heterosexual teenage boy: ashamed of your constant horniness, finding the remarks of women completely baffling, discovering genuinely meaningful forms of physical expression out on the pitch with the other lads, wanking over classical paintings when nothing else is available, fretting about your body more or less exactly as young women do (preparing for a night out, John inquires of his friends, 'And I don't look fat, do I?'), McHugh renders with pointillist care John's inner and outer worlds, until the character stands clear. It isn't perfect. It's too long. It veers too thoroughly away from the dangers and rewards of opening out into other minds, other worlds. There is a sense that this big talent, first time out, has bitten off slightly less than it can chew. Next time, I suspect, things will be different. In the meantime, here is a first novel by a writer with gifts to spare. Kevin Power is associate professor of literary practice in the School of English, Trinity College Dublin
