The actor turned novelist on creating authentic working-class characters, swapping Dublin for New York aged 16, and why sewing is like writing
Before making his literary debut in 2017 with Montpelier Parade, Irish-born novelist Karl Geary spent more than two decades acting and screenwriting, with credits including Coney Island Baby (starring his wife-to-be, Breaking Bad’s Laura Fraser), The Burrowers and an episode of Sex and the City. (Just don’t ask him about his shirtless appearance in Madonna’s 1992 coffee-table tome, Sex.) Now 50, he’s back with a second book, Juno Loves Legs, a piercing platonic love story whose misfit protagonists careen into young adulthood in 1980s Dublin, where he himself grew up.
How did the new novel start for you?
With Juno’s voice and this line: “Dear Legs, it’s not gone my way.” She’s a bit of a bully – she elbowed and kneed her way in, screaming to be heard. I was writing a totally different book set in New York, but once I had her voice it just flatlined on the page.
