![](\"https:\/\/i.dailymail.co.uk\/1s\/2023\/12\/12\/16\/78864523-12850239-image-a-6_1702398492548.jpg\")
<\/p>\nWorse, I was heartbroken over the end of a relationship. We had been on and off since August 2000 \u2013 the very week my debut novel was published \u2013 but things had now, definitively, ended. I had started taking antidepressants and was mixing them far too often with alcohol.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I\u2019d 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\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n
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,\u00a0settled my pint on the table and started talking.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
I didn\u2019t give anyone a chance to reply. Instead, reaching into my bag, I found the shop keys and threw them on the table. \u2018It\u2019s all yours,\u2019 I said to no one in particular, standing up and putting on my coat. \u2018I\u2019m done. I quit. I\u2019m out.\u2019<\/p>\n
I emailed my manager to tell her that I was resigning with immediate effect. One angry monologue \u2013 that probably could have earned me a scholarship to Rada \u2013 and seven years of my life came to an abrupt end.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Having gone from school to university to a master\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
I went on long walks and swims. (Trust me, until you\u2019ve plunged into the Irish Sea twice daily in winter, you don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
It took most of that year for me to rebuild my life, but\u00a0only a few weeks to recognise that there was only one thing that truly made me happy \u2013 writing \u2013 and that I couldn\u2019t abandon it, even if I\u2019d hit a roadblock. And so I returned to work on my rejected third novel \u2013 Crippen \u2013 and by the end of the year, I had sold it to Penguin.<\/p>\n
As Christmas approached, I moved back to Dublin, healthier, happier, and committed to never letting things slip from my grasp again.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Of course, for anyone with family, friends, jobs and responsibilities, it\u2019s difficult simply to walk away from life\u2013 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\u2019s 20 years later now and I\u2019m certain that everything I\u2019ve achieved since then depended on me taking that time out to focus entirely on myself.<\/p>\n
When I returned to Dublin in 2003, I focused on writing novels and started teaching creative writing at the Irish Writers\u2019 Centre, while reviewing books for The Irish Times.\u00a0I 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:\u00a0The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas.)<\/p>\n
I never again entered the doors of the shop I had left \u2013 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\u00a0there deliberately to lay those ghosts to rest.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Like Willow in Water, we have to understand that sometimes, in order to be happy, it\u2019s necessary to leave the familiar behind. I still do it. Every year, on 27 December\u2013 once Christmas with my family has come to an end \u2013 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\u2019m working on and, again, I walk, I swim, I read and I write.<\/p>\n
Some would call what I did in 2003, and what Willow does in Water, \u2018running away\u2019, 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
Water by John Boyne is published by Doubleday, \u00a312.99; Earth; Fire and Air will follow at six-monthly intervals. To order a copy for \u00a311.04 until 31 December, go to mailshop.co.uk\/books or call 020 3176 2937. Free UK deliveries on orders over \u00a325<\/p>\n