The day I broke free: John Boyne reflects on how he walked away from an unhappy life- and discovered his true purpose

In early 2003, I was a few months away from my 32nd birthday and felt more lost than I ever had in my life. I’d published my first two novels and, while they’d received good reviews, they hadn’t sold well. A draft of my third book had just been turned down by my then publisher. It seemed as if my career was over before it had even begun.

Worse, I was heartbroken over the end of a relationship. We had been on and off since August 2000 – the very week my debut novel was published – but things had now, definitively, ended. I had started taking antidepressants and was mixing them far too often with alcohol.

I’d spent the past seven years working in a bookshop in Dublin. It was normally a sanctuary in times of trouble, but almost a year earlier I’d been promoted to assistant manager and an unfortunate sequence of events left me and a colleague in charge of a staff of 40. The pressure became too much.

Payday was 20 January and, after I locked up the shop, a group of us went for drinks; we were all, myself included, unaware that I had already served my last customer. We sat in our usual booth and, as the beer flowed, my colleagues began complaining about their salaries, berating head-office policies and slating the customers. I grew angry and frustrated and, without planning to, settled my pint on the table and started talking.

I told my colleagues how their incessant complaining made working in the shop a nightmare. How I hated the fact that, when I walked through the doors in the morning, I couldn’t even get my coat off before one of them attacked me over something trivial. I called them out on their laziness, their bullying and (for the boys) their misogynistic treatment of any new female staff member. I asked them why, if they hated their jobs so much, didn’t they just quit? I carried on for about ten minutes without a break and, when I was finally finished, I was greeted with total silence.

I didn’t give anyone a chance to reply. Instead, reaching into my bag, I found the shop keys and threw them on the table. ‘It’s all yours,’ I said to no one in particular, standing up and putting on my coat. ‘I’m done. I quit. I’m out.’

I emailed my manager to tell her that I was resigning with immediate effect. One angry monologue – that probably could have earned me a scholarship to Rada – and seven years of my life came to an abrupt end.

My childhood summer holidays were spent in Wexford, on the Southeast coast of Ireland, and they remain among the happiest days of my life. So, within 48 hours I relocated there, using my savings to rent a house on the beach. It was enormous. Four bedrooms, a large attic space, acres of land, greenhouses, even an orangery. And, amazingly, it was cheap as chips. Suddenly, I was lord of a manor, albeit with no one to wait on me.

Having gone from school to university to a master’s degree to the bookshop, it was the first time since the age of four that I had no routine. This was scary but enormously liberating.

I went on long walks and swims. (Trust me, until you’ve plunged into the Irish Sea twice daily in winter, you don’t know what cold is.) I made some friends through a local bookshop. They wondered what had brought me there but I tried to remain mysterious, not wanting to discuss the past. It was an opportunity to reinvent myself, and the new friends allowed me to be whoever I wanted. We drank, talked, went to local gigs and had fun. There were no agendas. No dramas.

It took most of that year for me to rebuild my life, but only a few weeks to recognise that there was only one thing that truly made me happy – writing – and that I couldn’t abandon it, even if I’d hit a roadblock. And so I returned to work on my rejected third novel – Crippen – and by the end of the year, I had sold it to Penguin.

As Christmas approached, I moved back to Dublin, healthier, happier, and committed to never letting things slip from my grasp again.

We live in a world where everything we do is played out for an audience. Social media puts us on display, like mannequins in a shop window, affording us little chance of privacy. When I went to Wexford in 2003, however, that toxic wasteland had yet to be invented. I could go off the radar in a way that would be impossible today. It gave me the space to read, write and think about my future without interruption. I was solitary but not lonely.

Of course, for anyone with family, friends, jobs and responsibilities, it’s difficult simply to walk away from life– but it can also be crucial in times of crisis. I look back on that year in Wexford and can recognise how important it was. It’s 20 years later now and I’m certain that everything I’ve achieved since then depended on me taking that time out to focus entirely on myself.

When I returned to Dublin in 2003, I focused on writing novels and started teaching creative writing at the Irish Writers’ Centre, while reviewing books for The Irish Times. I was building my life around words. (And, only four months later, an image would pop into my head of two boys sitting on either side of a fence at a concentration camp. It was the start of the novel that changed my career and life: The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas.)

I never again entered the doors of the shop I had left – until the morning of my wedding, in February 2015, when it was no longer a bookshop but a record store, and all the ghosts of the past had evaporated. The ceremony was taking place only a short walk away and I went there deliberately to lay those ghosts to rest.

My new book, Water, is the first of a quartet of novellas that will collectively be titled The Elements. Following a traumatic moment in her life, the narrator Willow, like me, also flees Dublin but, in her case, she travels to an island off the West coast of Ireland, needing time and space to consider her part in disturbing events that have torn her family apart. As I wrote it, I drew deeply on my own experiences in Wexford all those years before.

Like Willow in Water, we have to understand that sometimes, in order to be happy, it’s necessary to leave the familiar behind. I still do it. Every year, on 27 December– once Christmas with my family has come to an end – I board a flight for Australia and remain there, travelling around my favourite country, until the end of March. I bring the draft of the book I’m working on and, again, I walk, I swim, I read and I write.

Some would call what I did in 2003, and what Willow does in Water, ‘running away’, but I prefer to see it as running towards something. Towards a clearing of the mind and a future that might not be there if we don’t take the time to be alone and appreciate life. To block out the noise. To embrace solitude and the beauty of your own existence. Perhaps running away for a time is the only way to find your way home.

Water by John Boyne is published by Doubleday, £12.99; Earth; Fire and Air will follow at six-monthly intervals. To order a copy for £11.04 until 31 December, go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937. Free UK deliveries on orders over £25

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