Binding 13
Binding 13
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Chloe Walsh on Binding 13
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A pen instead of a razor bladeThe manuscript that became Binding 13 was written not at a desk but in a hospital bed. In 2005, fifteen-year-old Chloe Walsh spent six months confined to a children’s ward in Ireland because no psychiatric bed was available for her. The document she produced there was the earliest form of what would eventually become the Boys of Tommen series, the multi-book universe built around the fictional Cork town of Ballylaggin.
The concept of what the characters go through in the Boys of Tommen was something I fleshed out in 2005 at the age of 15 when I spent six months in the children’s ward on 24/7 suicide watch.
The ward offered no psychiatric treatment, only containment. Writing became the only available channel for processing what had happened to her, and the document she produced there was entirely personal: thoughts, memories, and a version of her own experience set down under the title Finding Bev.
At the time in Ireland, there was no available bed for me in a psychiatric unit. I was in third year of secondary school, and trying to come to terms with what had happened to me. All I could do was pick up a pen and paper and write down my thoughts, my memories, my truth.
Walsh has described the book’s dual purpose plainly. She wrote it for two audiences whose needs pull in opposite directions: those who already know Shannon Lynch’s situation from the inside, and those who have never had to.
I felt voiceless as a child, and I hope this book resonates with some of the survivors and shines a light on the stigma around both bipolar disorder and the horrendous atrocities inflicted on children.
For everyone outside that experience, the book is a different kind of argument: that the violence Shannon endures behind her front door is not exceptional but common, and that readers who finish the book and return to their own lives might recognize it when they see it.
How she wrote it
One character fractured into fiveThirteen years separated the ward document from the 2018 publication of Binding 13. The most consequential decision Walsh made in that interval was structural: the single character called Bev, who had held all of Walsh’s experience in the original manuscript, could not carry it all as a single fictional person. Walsh distributed her across the series instead.
Originally, it was called Finding Bev. Thirteen years later, Bev in that original book became Lizzie Young from Tommen. Bev became Shannon Lynch. Bev became Gibsie and Joey, too.
Shannon received the abuse and survival narrative at the center of Binding 13. Joey and Gibsie carried other dimensions of the original document. Lizzie Young, who does not appear until much later in the series, holds still another part. Each became a more focused study than a single character could have supported.
Walsh set the series across a specific window: the fictional Cork town of Ballylaggin between 1992 and 2007. The pre-smartphone era was not chosen for nostalgia alone. Shannon Lynch’s father controls her access to the outside world, and that control depends entirely on her having no phone in her pocket and no quiet channel to anyone who might help.
The books are filled with warm nostalgia, and emphasises on life before smart phones and technology, giving readers, young and old, a realistic insight to life as a teenager in the early 00s.
Walsh has been insistent about how the books are categorized, correcting a common misreading that has followed the series since it was picked up by a mainstream publisher. The characters are teenagers, which pushed the book toward YA shelving. Walsh has always positioned it elsewhere, and the distinction matters for what readers bring to it.
All of Chloe’s books are intended for mature readers of 18 years and above. Chloe’s self-published work has always been categorized as new adult and contemporary. The topics of conversation in these stories are NOT suitable for younger audiences. The first four books in the Boys of Tommen series were self-published and marketed for adult readership only.
The personal thread
Tommen as diaryWalsh has not described Binding 13 as autobiographical in the conventional sense. She has described it as something more total than that: not a book drawn from life but a life project, one that began as a survival mechanism before it became a series.
Writing saved my life. I replaced a razor with a pen, and found a way to release the pain inside of me in a healthier way. I found peace. I found an escape.
The series name and the fictional town of Tommen are public-facing labels, but Walsh has been direct about what they actually constitute for her. The framing she uses is not creative or commercial but confessional.
Tommen was and still is my diary. It’s my own survival story, one I hope helps others trying to navigate their way through their trauma.
What she wants us to sit with
Writing the pain so someone else sees itThe book ends without fully resolving Shannon’s situation, and Walsh has been specific about why the darkness is not softened. The violence in Binding 13 is written for the reader who looks up from the page and recognizes it in someone they know. Walsh has described what she hoped parents and people in Shannon’s orbit would take away.
It is my sincerest hopefulness that I have provided a possible insight into these topics, and offered parents and guardians potential signs to look out for going forward.
Walsh wrote the book knowing it would not find a universal audience. She has been clear that the controversy is a feature, not a problem to be managed: the discomfort the book produces is the argument the book is making.
The story is controversial, and won’t be for everyone, but I wrote it with the intention of shining a light on what’s happening behind closed doors in, unfortunately, too many homes around the world.
For readers who arrive at Binding 13 because Shannon Lynch’s experience mirrors their own, Walsh closes her author’s note with the most direct possible statement of intent. It is addressed to them specifically, not to the general reader.
Please know that you are not alone. I see you. I hear you. Me too.
She has also said: “They say write what you know, and that’s what I’ve done. I’ve written my pain onto the pages.” That is not a craft philosophy. It is a description of where the book came from and, by extension, what it asks of the reader who picks it up.