Taming 7
Taming 7
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summaries & Analyses
Author Insights
Quizzes
NEWReading Tools
Chloe Walsh on Taming 7
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A pen instead of a razor bladeThe Boys of Tommen series did not begin with a publishing deal or a plot outline. It began in a hospital ward in 2005, when a fifteen-year-old Walsh had no psychiatric bed available to her anywhere in Ireland and nothing to work with except paper and a pen.
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.
What Walsh wrote in that ward was not a romance novel or a planned series. It was a single manuscript under a different title, with a single character named Bev who carried the weight of everything she was trying to process. Gibsie, the protagonist of Taming 7, did not arrive as a separate invention thirteen years later. He was already there.
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.
The original manuscript held all of them at once, undifferentiated. The series is, in a structural sense, the slow unpacking of that first desperate document.
Writing functioned for Walsh not as ambition but as replacement. She has been precise about what it replaced.
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 frames the entire Tommen project not as craft but as confession. That framing is not metaphor. She means it literally, and the distinction shapes how the books read: the messiness, the repetition, the emotional escalation across volumes are features of a diary, not failures of editing.
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.
Walsh has described her method in one sentence, and it doubles as the only craft principle she publicly claims. Every structural choice in the Tommen books, including the alternating first-person POV between the two leads she uses across the series, flows from this single governing idea.
They say write what you know, and that’s what I’ve done. I’ve written my pain onto the pages.
On the question of which characters earn their own books, Walsh has described treating reader demand as a genuine input rather than a marketing calculation. In an answer on Goodreads that addressed a different series, she put it simply. The principle is consistent with how Gibsie’s book came to exist: after Redeeming 6, readers voted overwhelmingly for his story to come next.
I guess it depends on how many of my readers would like a story about them.
The personal thread
Speaking from inside the diagnosisWalsh has been publicly specific about her own diagnoses in a way that is unusual even among authors who write about mental health. The list she gives is not background color. It is the credential she offers readers who might recognize their own lives in her characters.
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 these characters. In these characters, I found a way to speak out, and share my pain with people in my situation.
The childhood voicelessness Walsh describes is specific to being a survivor in a culture where certain kinds of harm were not spoken about. She wrote the Tommen books, including Gibsie’s, partly to produce the signs she wishes adults around her had known to look for.
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... 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.
What she wants us to sit with
He was comic relief until he wasn’tWalsh ends her author’s note not with a summary of themes or a note on the next book. She ends it with four sentences addressed directly to the reader she spent the whole series writing toward.
Please know that you are not alone. I see you. I hear you. Me too.
The last two words do the most work. Walsh is not positioning herself as a guide who came through something and now offers wisdom from the other side. She is placing herself beside the reader, in the same category, without resolution.