Releasing 10
Releasing 10
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Chloe Walsh on Releasing 10
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A pen instead of a razorThe Boys of Tommen series, which spans six books and years of Walsh’s publishing career, did not begin as a publishing project. It began as the only available outlet for a fifteen-year-old in a children’s ward with no access to a psychiatric bed. That context, West Cork, 2005, the Irish mental health system unable to place her, is what the author’s note names before anything else about the story.
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.
What she wrote in that ward was not yet Releasing 10 or any other book readers would recognize. It was a single manuscript called Finding Bev, and Bev was less a character than a container for everyone Walsh would later need to become. The Tommen cast did not arrive fully formed; they fractured out of one original figure across thirteen years.
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 is precise about what writing did for her in those months. She does not describe it as therapy, a hobby, or artistic ambition. She describes it as a substitution, one coping mechanism replacing another, and the language she uses is blunt about what she was substituting.
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.
How she wrote it
A diary that became a seriesWalsh’s author’s note does not describe a drafting process, structural decisions, or editorial revision. What it describes instead is the governing principle that made all of those decisions downstream: the entire series was conceived as a personal record, not a fictional one. That framing matters for how the book reads, because Walsh is telling readers they are not encountering invented suffering.
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.
The write-what-you-know imperative is usually advice. Walsh restates it as a description of what happened. She was not choosing a method; she was reporting on the only source material she had access to when she first sat down with the story in 2005, and that source material was herself.
They say write what you know, and that’s what I’ve done. I’ve written my pain onto the pages.
Knowing the book’s origins shapes how a reader should approach the trigger warnings Walsh placed at its front. She published an extensive list, then addressed readers directly about what they were about to enter. The framing is careful: she is not dismissing vulnerable readers or daring them through. She is acknowledging that the book’s graphic content is inseparable from its honesty, and that honesty is not mandatory for every reader.
Please take note that this book is extremely graphic and distressing, and is not for everyone. It is important to protect your mental health and read over the trigger warnings. It’s okay to skip this story if it is too distressing for you.
The permission she grants here, to step away, is itself a signal about how she understood the book she had written. She did not produce it to be consumed. She produced it to be true.
The personal thread
Lizzie Young was always herselfLizzie Young, the protagonist whose story Releasing 10 follows to its close, did not come from imagination or craft research. Walsh names the specific diagnoses and experiences she carried into the character, making explicit what the book asks readers to hold: this is not a composite or an approximation of suffering, but a self-portrait given a different name.
As a person living with BPD, OCD, Social-Agoraphobia, PTSD, and a victim of childhood trauma and rape, I poured my heart and soul into Lizzie Young, finding a muse in her character and a way for me to find my own real life voice.
Walsh was a child when the experiences that shaped Lizzie’s story happened to her, and what she describes carrying out of that time is not only pain but an enforced silence. The book’s purpose, as she states it, grew directly from that silence. Lizzie speaks because Walsh could not.
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.
The shift from private record to published novel required something the diary form never had: an audience. Walsh describes the moment the characters became a vehicle for communication rather than only for survival. The move from writing for herself to writing for people in her situation is the distance between Finding Bev in the children’s ward and Releasing 10 in print.
In these characters, I found a way to speak out, and share my pain with people in my situation.
What she wants us to sit with
Not exceptional circumstances but ordinary doorsWalsh’s author’s note addresses two distinct groups of readers. For survivors, she offers recognition in the plainest possible register. She does not explain, qualify, or position herself as a guide. She simply names the three things she wants those readers to know she is doing.
Please know that you are not alone. I see you. I hear you. Me too.
For readers who are not survivors but who live with, raise, or work alongside children, Walsh has a different purpose in mind. She wrote the book with that second audience explicitly in view, and the word she uses, ‘insight,’ is specific: she is not asking those readers to feel the horror, but to recognize what it looks like from outside.
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.
The widest frame Walsh gives the book is not about genre, romance, or the Boys of Tommen series as a whole. It is about what the book was built to expose. She is deliberate that the abuse depicted is not unusual or hidden in extraordinary circumstances. The word ‘too many’ does the argument’s work.
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.
Because the book is graphic in its depictions of abuse, Walsh addresses the question of intent directly. The author’s note distinguishes between portrayal and promotion. She anticipated that the book’s unflinching content would prompt the question, and she answers it before a reader can ask.
This story is no way attempting to glorify the horrendous abuse of the characters, but to shine a light on the harrowing reality for so many.
That distinction, between illumination and glorification, is the ethical argument the book stakes everything on. Whether a reader finds it convincing is one of the more serious questions a book club can sit with.