Keeping 13
Keeping 13
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Chloe Walsh on Keeping 13
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A hospital ward, a pen, and no other way outThe Boys of Tommen series did not begin as a publishing project. It began in 2005, in a children’s ward in Ireland, where Walsh spent six months on round-the-clock suicide watch at fifteen because no psychiatric bed was available in the country. What she wrote there was not a novel in any commercial sense. It was the only form of release she had.
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. 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.
That first manuscript carried a different title and a different character at its centre. For thirteen years it remained in that form before Walsh eventually mapped its people onto the Tommen world. Shannon Lynch, whose story drives Keeping 13 and whose survival under a violent father is the book’s emotional spine, is the direct descendant of that earliest draft.
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.
Walsh has described the act of writing not as craft in the usual sense but as the thing that kept her alive. The gap between the 2005 manuscript and the published series runs to over a decade, and the books that emerged carry the weight of that distance.
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. 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.
How she wrote it
Life before smartphones, and the cost of looking awayOne of the most deliberate structural choices Walsh made for the series was its era. Placing the story across 1992 to 2007 was not simply a nostalgic gesture. Those years map directly onto Walsh’s own adolescence, the same period in which she first drafted these characters. The pre-smartphone world the series inhabits is the world she was actually living in when the writing began.
Set during the timeframe of 1992 to 2007 in the fictional town of Ballylaggin, the series is 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.
Where the era choice anchors the setting, Walsh’s approach to subject matter defines the register. Her self-written author biography frames what she does not as genre romance but as a body of work built on material that tends to go unspoken. The rawness readers encounter in Keeping 13 is a function of that stated intention, not incidental to it.
Heavily influenced by her own real life experiences, she pens tearjerking, and often harrowing narratives, giving another perspective to, often, unspoken everyday issues.
The darkness in Keeping 13 is load-bearing. Domestic violence, child neglect, and the failure of institutions to protect children are not background texture but the central matter of the book. Walsh has described that content as purposeful, positioned against a specific silence she observed in the world around her.
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.
Walsh’s account of the series’ emotional ambitions situates Keeping 13 within a broader project. The phrase she uses, “dives headfirst,” signals a refusal of distance. The book does not approach its trauma from a safe remove, and Walsh has framed that as a deliberate feature of the series at large.
Capturing hearts around the world with its unbridled emotional content, and realistic characters, Boys of Tommen dives headfirst into real-life issues and trauma, with relatability and rawness.
The personal thread
Voiceless at fifteen, writing at fortyWalsh has named the specific population she was writing toward when she put the most difficult material into the book. The target is not a general readership but a particular group: people who already know what it is to survive what Shannon Lynch survives, and who have never encountered their own experience given space on a page.
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. 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.
Her author’s note closes on three short sentences that function as a direct address. They are not a summary of the book’s themes. They are spoken to the reader Walsh most wanted to reach, the one who might not know there is anyone else who understands.
Please know that you are not alone. I see you. I hear you. Me too.
What she wants us to sit with
What hides behind closed doors, and who pays for the silenceWalsh has been explicit that Keeping 13 carries an argument, not just a story. The book’s most difficult scenes are not present for effect. They exist because she believes the harm she depicts is happening at scale, and that the cost of not depicting it is the perpetuation of a silence she experienced as a child.
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.
The series asked Walsh to do something specifically uncomfortable: to write her own pain with enough clarity that readers who had lived it would feel seen, while also giving readers who had not lived it a way in. Her description of that work as a form of speaking out locates the books in a tradition of survivor writing rather than commercial genre fiction.
In these characters, I found a way to speak out, and share my pain with people in my situation. They say write what you know, and that’s what I’ve done. I’ve written my pain onto the pages.
The final image Walsh returns to across multiple statements is the most compressed version of what she wants readers to carry away. It is not about the romance, or the Irish setting, or the era. It is about what it costs a person to survive something alone, and what it means to be told afterward that someone else survived it too.
Please know that you are not alone. I see you. I hear you. Me too.
For a book-club room full of readers who came to Keeping 13 through TikTok or a friend’s recommendation, those four sentences are the instruction Walsh left behind for what to do with the feeling once the last page is turned.