The Good Life
John Connell’s journey from darkness to light started when he decided to return to the family farm ... and ended up saving a stranger’s life
falling in love with life again. Someone, he adds, who is able to be vulnerable and silly in an open and mindful way, with the rhyme and rhythm of nature providing a foundation to the day-to-day world view.
“It was a great time,” he says. “People seem to like this book because it is the universal human story — from darkness comes light. On and off, it was about four years.
“My health is great now, but I take care of it. I work at it every day. It’s about having a relationship with yourself and being able to love yourself.
“I had to change everything about myself and how I viewed the world, which is why I have the long hair, the beard. That’s the outward reflection of the inward journey.
“I started working out, running, eating really healthily, going to bed early. I stopped drinking, which was a big thing.
“I take care of animals, and the best way to be a good human is to be a good animal. Take care of yourself and put the right stuff in for the head and the heart.”
Connell grew up with his brother and two sisters in the village of Soran, near Ballinalee, Co Longford. Before purchasing the farm and going full-time, his father was a carpenter and businessman, while his mother runs her own Montessori school. He was a shy child, he says, chuckling at how talkative he has since become. He was also prone to taking life “a little bit seriously”, and while studious, he claims to have not wholly enjoyed the school environment. It was his headmaster in primary school and a teacher in secondary school who fostered an interest in the written word via introductions to Kavanagh, Heaney, McGahern and O’Brien.
“They made me realise you could be a rural Irish person and have something to say,” he says. “Growing up, I always thought you had to be in a city to make it and be a hotshot academic and all that. The truth is that we all have a rural past in this country”.
Connell took this misconception about stories needing cities to third-level studies. He expressed an interest in writing and film-making, but his mother suggested journalism would be something that could position him close to those vocations but also provide him with an income.
He transferred from his course in Dublin City University to Australia as part of an exchange programme before getting a scholarship to study in Sydney.
There, Connell met a professor who once again provided inspiration.
“He changed my life,” he says. “I got into making documentaries, proper investigations. When I was 21, I spent a couple of months in the Northern Territories, working on Aboriginal human rights, and did a big radio documentary on that. It won a Walkley Award in Australia and then all these doors started to open and I started to realise that this was a really exciting career.”
In tandem with the investigative journalism, Connell began writing prose.
His first short story had a livestock theme and came out of a bout of homesickness he experienced. After being published in a college anthology, it was singled out for special applause by a literary critic in an Australian newspaper.
A fortnight later, aged 22, he had a book deal.
It was several years later, in 2015, that debut The Ghost Estate, a recession novel in the vein of Donal Ryan, would be released by his publishers Down Under.
More importantly, it was during a six-month spell back in Sydney to promote the book that his path crossed that of Vivian, his first love. It had been a few years, but another of Connell’s reconnections ended up taking place.
“We were together for four years when we were young, and then we broke up due to my health issues,” he says. “When we met again, I was still a bit shaky but able to stand on my own two feet again. I didn’t need her in that obsessive loving way.
“She came to the book launch and we’ve been going out since, long distance, flying here and there to meet each other.
“Vivian is the woman who reads everything I write, but also the woman who gives me strength and support.”
Now engaged, Connell feels like his fiancee was put back in his path for a reason.
“What’s meant for you won’t pass you by,” he says. “I do believe in the hand of God, and I had to go through the dark night of the soul and earn a bit of grit. She and I had grown as people. The relationship is you, your partner and the relationship — there’s three things in it. The first time around, we were in love with life, whereas now we’re in love with each other. I’m lucky to have her.”
In the spaces between its passages of intimate pastoral meditation, The Cow Book’s historical examination of our deep relationship with our bovine friends reads like a history of conflict, both with and over these important creatures.
Farming life has become a cipher through which Connell has come to better understand friends, neighbours and family. Looming over the lot, it can sometimes feel, is his father, with whom the book tells of more than one clash. He agrees.
“The big thing is that my father and I are of the same personality,” he says. “I remember an old woman said to me, ‘You’re like two bulls in a field — there can only be one’.
“He’s a great storyteller, and probably everything that I am as a writer is from listening to him growing up.
“We had a tough time, but we came to understand each other, and it was through him and mum supporting me when I was ill that allowed me to get better. They helped me stand on my feet again.
“The other thing is that anyone who’s a farmer who reads the book will know there are rows on a farm — it’s a very normal thing. Sometimes they’re over nothing and sometimes they’re over something important. Fathers and sons on farms around the world regularly have different ideas about things.”
A very exciting chapter in Connell’s rebirth is now set to commence with The Cow Book hitting the shelves.
A North American distribution deal has been signed while, another memoir is on the cards, this time exploring the post-colonial experience via his love of running.
And there are other projects in the works, including writing for stage and screen. The difference now, however, is that unlike all those years ago in the frantic milieu of Australian city life, he’s taking it one day at a time.
“Coming through the darkness has allowed me to embrace all this exciting stuff with the book and say, ‘Yes, it’s great but it’s not the end of the world if it doesn’t work out either’.
“People come to me sometimes and ask me how I found this peace or how I got so wise.
“It was hard-won — I always say that I only got wise by making mistakes. It comes across as wisdom, but it’s just living.”
❝ My father’s a great storyteller ... all that I am as a writer is from listening to him