Saving 6
Saving 6
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Chloe Walsh on Saving 6
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A pen instead of a razor, a ward instead of a psychiatric bedThe Boys of Tommen series did not begin as a publishing project. It began in 2005, when Walsh was fifteen and confined to a children’s hospital ward in Ireland because no psychiatric bed was available for her. She picked up a pen not to write fiction but to survive, and the pages she produced then became the raw material that, thirteen years later, would be shaped into the Tommen books.
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 document was not called anything resembling its eventual form. Walsh wrote it under the title “Finding Bev,” and Bev was a single figure holding everything Walsh needed to put somewhere outside herself. Over the following decade, that one character fragmented and dispersed across the Tommen world, with Joey Lynch, the central figure of Saving 6, emerging as one of those fragments.
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.
Joey Lynch in Saving 6 is the boy who holds his siblings together while barely holding himself together. Knowing he started as a fragment of a fifteen-year-old’s private reckoning changes how his silences read.
Walsh is careful to frame what she hoped the book would do beyond her own release. The material, she acknowledges, is not easy, and she anticipated it would not reach every reader. What mattered to her was that it reached the readers who needed it to name something they already knew.
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.
How she wrote it
Writing from the inside of what she knewWalsh does not describe the mechanics of drafting and revising Saving 6 in the available sources. What she does describe is the epistemological position she wrote from: she was not researching trauma and addiction from the outside. The conditions the book depicts are conditions she has lived, and she names them directly.
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.
The quote names Lizzie Young, a character who appears later in the series, but the self-disclosure Walsh makes here applies to her relationship with every character she built from that original hospital document, Joey included.
Walsh set the Boys of Tommen series across a span of fifteen years, from 1992 to 2007, which maps almost exactly onto her own childhood and adolescence. She describes the choice as deliberate rather than incidental, framing the pre-smartphone era as something the book can offer readers as texture.
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.
The personal thread
Voiceless at fifteen, speaking nowWalsh draws a direct line between what she could not say as a child and what the book is now saying on her behalf. She was in a children’s ward, not a psychiatric unit, which meant her crisis was visible but her experience of it had no institutional language or space. The book, written decades later, is in part her attempt to supply that language.
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 series, Walsh says, is her diary. That word carries weight: not a novel dressed up as memoir, but a place where her own survival story lives. She connects the act of writing directly to staying alive, and then turns that connection outward toward readers navigating the same terrain.
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.
What she wants us to sit with
Two audiences, one bookWalsh closes her author’s note by addressing readers who may recognize themselves in Joey or the other characters not as a general encouragement but as a direct statement of solidarity. She has named her own diagnoses and her own history, and the note ends by making that collapse between author and reader explicit.
Please know that you are not alone. I see you. I hear you. Me too.
Walsh also writes with a second audience in mind: the adults in a struggling young person’s life who may not know what they are looking at. Saving 6 depicts abuse and addiction inside a family home, and Walsh frames the book as a possible tool for recognition, not only for survivors but for the people around them.
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 is explicit that the books are intended for readers eighteen and over, despite being stocked in some contexts as YA. That age gate is itself an argument: the content is not softened, and she does not want it to be.