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Lapsed Protestant
The Lapsed Protestant is the work of non-fiction.
168 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2006
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October 16, 2025
If you have any interst in Ireland you must read this book. As to Why I refer you to the following article/interview with the author from the Irish Independent when the book came out:
"MAYBE the myth of Adam and Eve should be abolished. Most especially in Northern Ireland. Why? Because it probably gave generations of Catholics and Protestants what they perceive to be the right to play God and boot people out of their own personal Garden of Eden.
At least that's the surreal notion novelist Glenn Patterson and I joked about towards the end of this interview.
"Then again Patterson's new collection of articles and essays, Lapsed Protestant, as with his five novels, strongly suggests that for much of his life he himself has been fundamentally a dislocated soul attempting to relocate himself geographically, politically, emotionally and spiritually. In fact, at one point that struggle was so overwhelming it led to a nervous breakdown.
"Either way, Glenn certainly remembers the moment he got the boot from his Garden of Eden and which made him realise the age of innocence was over.
"It was 1969. Glenn was eight at the time, the youngest of four brothers growing up in a Protestant housing estate "just outside Belfast", and at one point during August he heard gunfire in the night.
"The next day he read in the Belfast Telegraph that a boy not much older than himself had been shot dead "sheltering" in his bedroom. Welcome to the Troubles.
""And welcome to Belfast," he responds, sitting in the Merrion Hotel. "Because before then you were conscious of your surroundings but didn't know exactly where you were - and, actually, as a child all my references were fairly global, John Newcombe, Wimbledon, all that. So the first thing I remember, outside my family, that is Belfast-specific is that boy being killed."
"Two years later Glenn's "pretty mixed" housing estate and others nearby began to be demarcated along sectarian lines. This directly affected his adolescence as his "catchment area", in terms of love and sex and romance, grew gradually more restricted, limited to local girls. Even so, in Lapsed Protestants, Patterson reveals that the eve of July 12 "exceeded even New Year's Eve in its potential for licence" and that he'd "cruise the bonfires looking for Twelfth kisses". Or more.
"One night a girl even let him slip his hand down her "high-waister trousers" - where he kept it "motionless" for five minutes. And for those who don't remember high-waister trousers this was, believe me, an act of physical dexterity that could seriously have damaged Patterson's wrist!
""And you had to work for some considerable time, didn't you?" he muses, laughing at the memory. "First there was one button to get past, then two and definitely if the girl wanted to halt your journey or even snap your wrist all she had to do was lean forward!
""But I still ventured forth, after the kiss, because I'd been wondering: 'Well, what'll I do next?' You'd almost be thinking: 'God, I wish this was over!'"
"Was either party aroused?
""I'm pretty sure I was!"
"So Glenn wasn't interested in whether or not the young girl was?
""In a reconstructed Belfast I would be!" he jokes. "But in those days that question was clearly of secondary importance to me. Maybe that's why I don't remember us ever doing even the kiss thing again!"
"Nevertheless in his book Glenn claims he fell in love nearly 50 times before that magical night at the age of 17 when although "not completely legless but still drunk" after watching Northern Ireland "perform their annual feat of losing to England in the British Championship", he looked up from his will-I-ever-get-home resting place on the tarmac of Malone Road and realised "the world's most beautiful girl was peering down" at him.
""From the ground I said to no one in particular: 'That's the girl I love' and the girl smiled, becoming even more beautiful," he writes, "and that was it, my heart was lost."
"Sadly the intensity of Glenn's feeling for the girl he identifies only as 'M' finally made her father ban him from seeing her and this then led to Patterson going off his food and sitting up half the night drinking on his own.
"Yet Patterson insists that the fact that M was a Catholic and he is a Protestant was "not a factor" in her father's decision.
""No, it was the intensity of my feelings that frightened him, and now that I myself am a father of two daughters I understand better where he was coming from on that," explains Glenn, whose two daughters are aged five years and five months respectively.
""But, as I say in the book, I did love M with all my heart, and despite her dad banning me on occasions we still stayed together for four years."
"It's hardly surprising that Glenn loved M so much. Indeed, even though she was only 14 when they met this clearly was a remarkable young woman who "mocked the extremes of Ulster loyalism and Irish republicanism" in a way he'd never heard before and was scathing about anyone who went along with the crowd.
"In this sense she may have been the single greatest influence on Patterson's early life. M obviously was the kind of girlfriend every budding writer needs, because even though before meeting her Glenn had "thought about writing", it was she who inspired him to write love poetry - and, better still, mercilessly criticised his earliest efforts, when necessary telling him they were either too lazy, sentimental or simply crap.
""Actually, one line she'd always use is: 'People don't talk like that, Glenn, except in crappy Channel Four movies!'" he says. "But you're right, falling love with M did liberate me on so many levels. In fact it was the single most important thing that happened to me up until that point in my life.
""I had fallen in love a lot - though I am exaggerating when I say it was nearly 50 times - but with M this was the real thing, first love."
"It obviously was. Indeed when Patterson finished school at 18 he decided against going to university in England because this would mean leaving M. Instead he got a job in a bookshop and "made a failed attempt to start a poetry magazine".
"But those cosmic garden-wreckers hadn't gone away, y'know. On the contrary, one day Glenn was walking down the Lisburn Road - again, symbolically enough, on the 12th of July - met a loyalist parade walking the other way and immediately felt that their look said, 'If you aren't walking with us, you must be against us.'
"He had never before felt such hostility in Belfast or so out of step - in every sense. It also was around this time that Patterson at one point found himself facing a gang of Catholics in a local railway station and they asked him "what" he was.
"But Glenn was so scared that he couldn't speak - so they simply asked him to point to where he lived. "I pointed south. They lived north. They kicked my lights in," he says in Lapsed Protestant.
"So is it any wonder that not long afterwards he became "one of the countless thousands of people who left Northern Ireland during the Seventies and Eighties, hoping to make a life across the water - free from crap about Protestant and Catholic"? But did Glenn's finally leaving to go to university in England break M's heart?
""Probably, but in the end I got so sick and scared of Belfast I had to get away," he says. "Yet at the start I f**ked up, because I kept applying for university and she'd say, 'Don't go,' - so I didn't.
""And two years later, when I did go, I spent most of the first couple of weeks either pumping coins into a phone calling M or writing to her, even during classes, so I came back home and it was only then I realised I really was f**king things up and went back to university. Then a year later I fell in love with someone else."
"That relationship lasted "on and off" for 10 years, but in the end both were "really messing each other about", including being unfaithful to one another. Yet then Glenn met Ali - who subsequently became his wife and is the mother of his daughters - while he was writer-in-residence in her hometown university of Cork. "When I met Ali, bang, straight away I knew that was the love I'd been waiting for," he says. "That was 12 years ago. But around the late Eighties, before we met, I had published my first novel and came home to write my second novel and that's when I had some kind of nervous breakdown.
""It was like I'd gotten carried from my teens into my late 20s without facing a lot of stuff. Actually I don't know exactly what happened to me. I just know that I refused to go on medication - because I believed everything could be done through therapy - and I'm glad I didn't become part of the Prozac generation, because after a few months I got better.
""But what I learned about myself is that I can be neurotic and there are certain signs you are getting into a cycle of behaviour so I make sure to avoid those triggers. And there was a point in all that when I just didn't want to live."
"Needless to say, Glenn, after meeting Ali, not only wanted to live but also, as I say, committed himself to marriage - in a registry office because neither "practises" religion - and to creating a new life via birth and even to living again in Northern Ireland, all of which surely suggests that he has finally rebuilt a latter-day version of his original Garden of Eden.
""Well I do even have a garden myself now!" he responds, smiling. "And I agree in essence with what you are saying. Because at some point in the Nineties I realised everything that is really important in life has to do with trying to make a place for yourself, and I wanted my city back!
""So I set out to relocate myself, and that's what I write about in that 'I Am One of the People' piece in Lapsed Protestant. Like, who the f**k are you? You start out as a particular person and then, as life goes on, add layers to all that. So I wanted to get back to who I originally was.
""But then I became promiscuous in my identities! In other words, am I British? Yep. Northern Irish? Yep. European? Yep. Whereas before that, for too long, it was just 'Are you Protestant or Catholic, what street do you come from, are you A or B . . . '
""Well these days I'm not A or B!" In other words Glenn Patterson these days is the whole alphabet.
""Absolutely," he responds, laughing yet again. "That just about sums it up!""
"MAYBE the myth of Adam and Eve should be abolished. Most especially in Northern Ireland. Why? Because it probably gave generations of Catholics and Protestants what they perceive to be the right to play God and boot people out of their own personal Garden of Eden.
At least that's the surreal notion novelist Glenn Patterson and I joked about towards the end of this interview.
"Then again Patterson's new collection of articles and essays, Lapsed Protestant, as with his five novels, strongly suggests that for much of his life he himself has been fundamentally a dislocated soul attempting to relocate himself geographically, politically, emotionally and spiritually. In fact, at one point that struggle was so overwhelming it led to a nervous breakdown.
"Either way, Glenn certainly remembers the moment he got the boot from his Garden of Eden and which made him realise the age of innocence was over.
"It was 1969. Glenn was eight at the time, the youngest of four brothers growing up in a Protestant housing estate "just outside Belfast", and at one point during August he heard gunfire in the night.
"The next day he read in the Belfast Telegraph that a boy not much older than himself had been shot dead "sheltering" in his bedroom. Welcome to the Troubles.
""And welcome to Belfast," he responds, sitting in the Merrion Hotel. "Because before then you were conscious of your surroundings but didn't know exactly where you were - and, actually, as a child all my references were fairly global, John Newcombe, Wimbledon, all that. So the first thing I remember, outside my family, that is Belfast-specific is that boy being killed."
"Two years later Glenn's "pretty mixed" housing estate and others nearby began to be demarcated along sectarian lines. This directly affected his adolescence as his "catchment area", in terms of love and sex and romance, grew gradually more restricted, limited to local girls. Even so, in Lapsed Protestants, Patterson reveals that the eve of July 12 "exceeded even New Year's Eve in its potential for licence" and that he'd "cruise the bonfires looking for Twelfth kisses". Or more.
"One night a girl even let him slip his hand down her "high-waister trousers" - where he kept it "motionless" for five minutes. And for those who don't remember high-waister trousers this was, believe me, an act of physical dexterity that could seriously have damaged Patterson's wrist!
""And you had to work for some considerable time, didn't you?" he muses, laughing at the memory. "First there was one button to get past, then two and definitely if the girl wanted to halt your journey or even snap your wrist all she had to do was lean forward!
""But I still ventured forth, after the kiss, because I'd been wondering: 'Well, what'll I do next?' You'd almost be thinking: 'God, I wish this was over!'"
"Was either party aroused?
""I'm pretty sure I was!"
"So Glenn wasn't interested in whether or not the young girl was?
""In a reconstructed Belfast I would be!" he jokes. "But in those days that question was clearly of secondary importance to me. Maybe that's why I don't remember us ever doing even the kiss thing again!"
"Nevertheless in his book Glenn claims he fell in love nearly 50 times before that magical night at the age of 17 when although "not completely legless but still drunk" after watching Northern Ireland "perform their annual feat of losing to England in the British Championship", he looked up from his will-I-ever-get-home resting place on the tarmac of Malone Road and realised "the world's most beautiful girl was peering down" at him.
""From the ground I said to no one in particular: 'That's the girl I love' and the girl smiled, becoming even more beautiful," he writes, "and that was it, my heart was lost."
"Sadly the intensity of Glenn's feeling for the girl he identifies only as 'M' finally made her father ban him from seeing her and this then led to Patterson going off his food and sitting up half the night drinking on his own.
"Yet Patterson insists that the fact that M was a Catholic and he is a Protestant was "not a factor" in her father's decision.
""No, it was the intensity of my feelings that frightened him, and now that I myself am a father of two daughters I understand better where he was coming from on that," explains Glenn, whose two daughters are aged five years and five months respectively.
""But, as I say in the book, I did love M with all my heart, and despite her dad banning me on occasions we still stayed together for four years."
"It's hardly surprising that Glenn loved M so much. Indeed, even though she was only 14 when they met this clearly was a remarkable young woman who "mocked the extremes of Ulster loyalism and Irish republicanism" in a way he'd never heard before and was scathing about anyone who went along with the crowd.
"In this sense she may have been the single greatest influence on Patterson's early life. M obviously was the kind of girlfriend every budding writer needs, because even though before meeting her Glenn had "thought about writing", it was she who inspired him to write love poetry - and, better still, mercilessly criticised his earliest efforts, when necessary telling him they were either too lazy, sentimental or simply crap.
""Actually, one line she'd always use is: 'People don't talk like that, Glenn, except in crappy Channel Four movies!'" he says. "But you're right, falling love with M did liberate me on so many levels. In fact it was the single most important thing that happened to me up until that point in my life.
""I had fallen in love a lot - though I am exaggerating when I say it was nearly 50 times - but with M this was the real thing, first love."
"It obviously was. Indeed when Patterson finished school at 18 he decided against going to university in England because this would mean leaving M. Instead he got a job in a bookshop and "made a failed attempt to start a poetry magazine".
"But those cosmic garden-wreckers hadn't gone away, y'know. On the contrary, one day Glenn was walking down the Lisburn Road - again, symbolically enough, on the 12th of July - met a loyalist parade walking the other way and immediately felt that their look said, 'If you aren't walking with us, you must be against us.'
"He had never before felt such hostility in Belfast or so out of step - in every sense. It also was around this time that Patterson at one point found himself facing a gang of Catholics in a local railway station and they asked him "what" he was.
"But Glenn was so scared that he couldn't speak - so they simply asked him to point to where he lived. "I pointed south. They lived north. They kicked my lights in," he says in Lapsed Protestant.
"So is it any wonder that not long afterwards he became "one of the countless thousands of people who left Northern Ireland during the Seventies and Eighties, hoping to make a life across the water - free from crap about Protestant and Catholic"? But did Glenn's finally leaving to go to university in England break M's heart?
""Probably, but in the end I got so sick and scared of Belfast I had to get away," he says. "Yet at the start I f**ked up, because I kept applying for university and she'd say, 'Don't go,' - so I didn't.
""And two years later, when I did go, I spent most of the first couple of weeks either pumping coins into a phone calling M or writing to her, even during classes, so I came back home and it was only then I realised I really was f**king things up and went back to university. Then a year later I fell in love with someone else."
"That relationship lasted "on and off" for 10 years, but in the end both were "really messing each other about", including being unfaithful to one another. Yet then Glenn met Ali - who subsequently became his wife and is the mother of his daughters - while he was writer-in-residence in her hometown university of Cork. "When I met Ali, bang, straight away I knew that was the love I'd been waiting for," he says. "That was 12 years ago. But around the late Eighties, before we met, I had published my first novel and came home to write my second novel and that's when I had some kind of nervous breakdown.
""It was like I'd gotten carried from my teens into my late 20s without facing a lot of stuff. Actually I don't know exactly what happened to me. I just know that I refused to go on medication - because I believed everything could be done through therapy - and I'm glad I didn't become part of the Prozac generation, because after a few months I got better.
""But what I learned about myself is that I can be neurotic and there are certain signs you are getting into a cycle of behaviour so I make sure to avoid those triggers. And there was a point in all that when I just didn't want to live."
"Needless to say, Glenn, after meeting Ali, not only wanted to live but also, as I say, committed himself to marriage - in a registry office because neither "practises" religion - and to creating a new life via birth and even to living again in Northern Ireland, all of which surely suggests that he has finally rebuilt a latter-day version of his original Garden of Eden.
""Well I do even have a garden myself now!" he responds, smiling. "And I agree in essence with what you are saying. Because at some point in the Nineties I realised everything that is really important in life has to do with trying to make a place for yourself, and I wanted my city back!
""So I set out to relocate myself, and that's what I write about in that 'I Am One of the People' piece in Lapsed Protestant. Like, who the f**k are you? You start out as a particular person and then, as life goes on, add layers to all that. So I wanted to get back to who I originally was.
""But then I became promiscuous in my identities! In other words, am I British? Yep. Northern Irish? Yep. European? Yep. Whereas before that, for too long, it was just 'Are you Protestant or Catholic, what street do you come from, are you A or B . . . '
""Well these days I'm not A or B!" In other words Glenn Patterson these days is the whole alphabet.
""Absolutely," he responds, laughing yet again. "That just about sums it up!""
April 15, 2012
I picked this up at the American Conference for Irish Studies, as the title already had me snorting with laughter. I love things that make me smile sardonically, and this was no exception.
This is a collection of Patterson's various radio and print commentaries, roughly between 1994 and 2005. My two favourite chapters/essays were his comparison of Belfast in the early twenty-first century with Borges' "The Lottery in Babylon" and his near-final piece on diasporic themes. (In fact, I might have future students read the latter... hmm...) My best friend gave me a book of Borges' essays for Christmas this past year and now I feel torn as to what I should read first next: more Borges or more Patterson.
For those who know Belfast or who those need a primer, this is a great bird's-eye-view over several years of upheaval and change. Fat Lad and That Which Was are now definitely on my to-read list. Plus, laughter before going to sleep is always a good thing.
This is a collection of Patterson's various radio and print commentaries, roughly between 1994 and 2005. My two favourite chapters/essays were his comparison of Belfast in the early twenty-first century with Borges' "The Lottery in Babylon" and his near-final piece on diasporic themes. (In fact, I might have future students read the latter... hmm...) My best friend gave me a book of Borges' essays for Christmas this past year and now I feel torn as to what I should read first next: more Borges or more Patterson.
For those who know Belfast or who those need a primer, this is a great bird's-eye-view over several years of upheaval and change. Fat Lad and That Which Was are now definitely on my to-read list. Plus, laughter before going to sleep is always a good thing.
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