An Interview with Writer Dan Sheehan

How Dan Sheehan Got His Eyebrow Scars:
1st scar—His Friend Trevor Stabbed Him With a Broken Crutch
2nd scar—Jumped by Teenagers Near a Train Station in Dublin
2nd scar reopened—His Brother Swung at Him with a Coffee Mug

I’d been impatiently awaiting Irish writer Dan Sheehan’s debut novel, Restless Souls, since reading a piece that touches on his first job in the US: a prolonged and painful employment at a bar in Times Square. His writing contains just the balance of comedy and poignancy I gravitate toward. And while I’m susceptible to ruining my own experiences with unreasonably high expectations, Restless Souls exceeded all anticipation. It’s a road novel, a comic novel, a war novel, and a mystery novel framing a character-driven story full of so much pathos it’s hard to think of any other relatively short book that covers as much ground and as many emotional registers as it does.

When Dan entered my apartment, he took a dog-lover’s moment to engage my 85lbs. pit bull mix (whom he’d never met) with some light wrestling. I hadn’t done the week’s shopping yet and offered Dan the only comestibles I had in the apartment: red wine and cashew cookie Larabars. He’d never had a Larabar before and ended up eating three of them during the course of our conversation.

—Karim Dimechkie

I. Repressive Effusion

THE BELIEVER: I swear I’m not texting, I’m just looking for the Dictaphone on this thing and—oh, I found it. It’s actually been going. I guess it’s called Voice Memo.

DAN SHEEHAN: I think it was called Dictaphone before.

BLVR: Dictaphone is definitely the better word. Okay. Your book covers a lot of territory. There are three countries, four or five time periods, two different characters’ first person perspectives, and somehow it’s all inside of 248 pages without feeling rushed or incomplete. Did the book change length at all while working on it?

DS: The book did go through some pretty sizable alterations over the course of the first few drafts. The largest was definitely this one hundred-page central section set in New York which I cut because, fun as it was to write, it didn’t move the plot along a single step. It was sort of a comic interlude where the characters wandered around the city getting up to various madcap hijinks, but really it was just me proving to myself that I could describe New York with a local’s eye. I’d only lived here about a year by then, and I think it was important that I felt like I had a handle on the city, or at least my small sections of it.

BLVR: It’s not an easy line between plot-efficiency and fun details....