The I'm Grand Mamual: A stunning guide to taking life in your stride

By PJ Kirby and Kevin Twomey

PJ Kirby and Kevin Twomey are two Mammy's boys from Cork who are always up for a skit.
In The I'm Grand Mamual, they take well-worn expressions that their mams have always said, and share hilarious and heart-warming stories from their lives where these sayings have rung true – from schooldays to holidays, coming out to going out, and sustainable thrifting to end-of-night shifting.
The I'm Grand Mamual is a big-sisterly companion for taking life in your stride. Mam might always know best – but Kevin and PJ will show you the rest!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gill Books
• Release date: Oct 12, 2023
• ISBN: 9780717198887

PJ Kirby

Cork-born PJ Kirby and Kevin Twomey are co-hosts of popular weekly podcast I’m Grand Mam, which has accrued millions of listens to date. As well as being podcasters, the pair have also written two comedy shows, Pure Brazen (2019) and Glory Holy (2021), that have toured the UK and Ireland to sold-out audiences. They have been featured in many publications, including the Irish Times, Irish Examiner, Sunday Independent, Grazia, Vogue and GCN. They’re also no strangers to TV, regularly appearing on The Late Late Show, Ireland AM and The Six O’Clock Show. PJ currently lives in Dublin and Kevin is still in London, but there’s no separating these two; more often than not, you’ll find them together, working on their next project.

Book preview

  ONE  

Growing Up Gay

‘To each their own.’

NUALA KIRBY

PJ

The Big Big Movie made me gay

It’s a Saturday night and I’m just after hounding down a plate of chicken nuggets and chips chased with a pint of milk, the only type of meal I would eat that year. I’m the youngest of seven and was a picky eater as a child so I think my parents were just like, Feck it, let him eat nuggs for a year, we’re wrecked from raising the rest of them. We’re hurrying to wash our plates and get the microwave popcorn ready before the Big Big Movie comes on RTÉ. (This was before you could pause or record the telly, so timing was crucial.) After losing a fight with my sister Lindsey for the good seat, we settled in and the film began. This week it was The Full Monty. If you don’t know the plot, it’s basically about a group of lads forming a striptease group after being laid off from the factory they all worked at. A vintage Magic Mike, if you will. Bit of a riskier choice for RTÉ, and I was definitely too young to be watching it, but here we were. Girlies, my little adolescent heart was up to ninety. I was weak for the lead, Gaz, and once they started stripping in the Garda outfits I didn’t know where to look. It was all very innocent of course, but that strange feeling would pop up every now and then going forward. When I looked at the packaging in the male underwear department, when Syed and Christian kissed in Eastenders, one time in Costa del Sol when I saw two men holding hands. I’d get giddy butterflies in my stomach that I knew I had to hide. I knew I couldn’t be gay, you see. Even though I wasn’t completely sure what gay meant, I just knew it was a bad thing used to insult someone. To laugh at them. So, I pushed these feelings down and learned to ignore them. From then on, I knew I had a secret that nobody could find out, so I put measures in place to make sure it wouldn’t happen. Maybe that’s why gays are so good at PR, because we’ve been spinning the truth since we could talk.

A packet of Tayto Cheese & Onion crisps. The packet shows an animated potato wearing a suit. The packet reads cheese and onion at the top and the original Irish crisp at the bottom.

Growing up, we’d spend Friday nights in The Residence Bar across the street from my gaff. All of our neighbours would be there with their kids so it was perfect because my mam and dad could have a few drinks with their friends while the kids were kept entertained by the touch machine in the corner as we drank our body weight in rasa. My friend Jordan’s parents owned the bar, so he could snake us a few packs of Tayto on the sly, which was fab. You could also get a stunning toastie, and I’m sorry now, but every bar should be legally required to have a toastie maker on the premises, in my opinion. Anyway, we would be having the time of our lives but, at a certain point in the night, I’d have to get strategic. The older men would be after having a few scoops of stout by now and political correctness would go out the window. I don’t even think we knew what being PC was back then. They would go from a terrible joke about women in the kitchen to a racist one before coming for the gays. The limp wrists would come out, and they would parody the camp man who cuts their wives’ hair. I never understood the joke. I just knew I never wanted to be the punchline, so I kept the head down.

A half-full glass of rasa with ice cubes and a straw.

Barbies, bisexuals and Britney

I’d hide any behaviour that could be seen as gay. I’d play Barbies with my neighbour Sarah but carry them to her house in a Dunnes Bag for Life so nobody could see them. Looking back, obviously I know that playing with Barbies doesn’t make you gay, but back then I felt like anything that fell outside of what ‘normal boys’ do needed to be done away from the public eye. Eventually, hiding these parts of myself became second nature – and I was actually unreal at it. Sure, I’d slip up a little from time to time and have to talk my way out of why I knew all the words to

‘Oops! … I

Did It Again’ by Britney Spears, but that’s where having sisters came in handy. Like, I only watched Sabrina the Teenage Witch because Lindsey liked it, obviously.

It’s difficult to explain, but as I came into my teens I pushed that butterfly feeling so far down I forgot about it sometimes. Like a messy pile of clothes you shove under your bed. You know it’s still there but it doesn’t cross your mind as much. I kissed girls and had girlfriends that I fell in love with, but not the passionate, free-flowing love that I know now. It was more like the love you would have for a best friend. As I grew older, I would hate when these annoying butterflies would come back. I remember one morning I woke up from a dream where I had a big ride of a boyfriend and we were just kissing on a couch for the whole thing. I went and looked at myself in the mirror with tears in my eyes, so angry with myself for having these feelings. The urge came over me to punch the mirror and watch my reflection shatter, which, looking back on it, is ridiculously dramatic and so camp that I should have accepted my fate then and there. Honestly, though, I was nowhere near ready to address my queerness, and who could blame me? Homosexuality was only decriminalised in Ireland the year I was born but, although it was legal, everyone wasn’t running to buy rainbow flags to hang outside their windows.

When I moved to London to start dance college at 20 years of age, I was still in the closet. During orientation, my jaw was on the floor, girls. Every letter from the alphabet mafia was in the room with me. Lesbians, gays, bisexuals, trans people and everything in between sang and danced around the halls of the academy in Angel. The butterflies were back, but I felt less of a need to push them down. I wasn’t ready to let them fly out of the closet, but it was a welcome relief not to have to shoo them away. I was in the academy for roughly three months when I got a call from home that my dad had had a fall. I was rushed onto the next Ryanair flight back home to be by his side. When my sister was also called back from Australia, I knew that it wasn’t looking good. The next few days were a bit of a blur but, basically, my dad was in a coma and it was only a matter of time before he went. We lived in the hospital for those few days. Time stopped for us, but the world kept going. One day, Lindsey and I went for a walk in Wilton Shopping Centre to have a break from the sanitised hospital hallways, and we hated everyone that walked past us. ‘How dare they be having a laugh shopping when our dad is dying a couple of metres away?’ I said, half-joking but also kind of serious. For them it was just a normal day but for us our world was changing forever. Anyway, if I threw you a dirty look in Wilton in 2013, I apologise, but we were going through it.

It’s now or never

The time came to say our goodbyes and we all took turns of going into the room. For some reason, I was by myself. Nobody trains you how to say goodbye to a parent, so I was a bit awkward. Everyone kept telling me that hearing is the last sense to go so he would be able to hear what I’m saying. I started with the usual checklist: You were a great dad, I love you, will miss you, etc. But then I felt like I was acting, reading a monologue of what a son should be saying to his dad, so I started to speak about whatever popped into my head. I talked about the time we spent together as he drove me to rugby, having chats both shallow and deep that I’ll always remember. About how he used to always grab my mam in the kitchen for a dance and how I romanticise the memory by setting it at golden hour. He’d spin my mam around and they’d laugh as she stumbled over his feet. As I was telling these stories, I could feel the butterflies bubbling up inside me. Tell him. It’s now or never. Hearing is the last to go. Before I knew it, I blurted out words I thought would never come out of my mouth: ‘I’m gay, Dad.’ Panic ensued and I started to ramble. ‘I’m gay and I wasn’t going to say anything. I actually was never going to come out. I’m not sure why I said it. I suppose this whole experience is making me think life is too short and, in the grand scheme of things, who I hook up with shouldn’t really matter. Jesus, I shouldn’t be talking about hooking up, but here we are. So, yeah, I’m gay and I hope you still love me.’

Now, I don’t know what I expected to happen next. He wasn’t going to spring out of the bed and be like, Werk, bitch, let’s grab some brunch, but I was just sitting there in silence, sweating. I could hear my heartbeat in my ears as I kissed him on the forehead and said ‘I love you’ for the last time. Cue my journey of navigating grief and coming to terms with my sexuality. The vibes were on the floor, girlies. Losing my dad really did change the way I viewed the world. It’s difficult to explain unless you’ve lost someone so close to you, but I don’t think you ever truly heal from a loss like that – you just learn how to live with it. You also learn to see it in other people and they see it in you. They just get it without having to put words to the feeling. It’s shit, but as B*Witched said in their 1998 smash hit, ‘c’est la vie’. As life moves on, you learn how to look back on the memories you have with them and smile. It still hurts, but I think it helps to tell stories about them so their memory lives on.

After that, it was time to come out to people who weren’t walking towards a bright light.

Fingers crossed they’ll be more receptive. Bleak, I know but if you don’t laugh you’ll cry. Anyone who’s ever come out knows you have to do it like a million times and it’s exhausting but, considering that my first one was the most dramatic thing in the world, I tried to make the other ones as light-hearted as possible. Having a few drinks in my sister Elaine’s garden, I said to my mam, ‘Jesus, did you hear who came out as gay?’ When she turned to me and said, ‘Ooh, who?’ I threw in, ‘Me!’ – which in hindsight was probably a bit too casual. She then added that she was okay with it as long as I was happy. My mam was actually giving a performance that would have swept the Oscars if caught on film. In years to come, I’d find out that she struggled to come to terms with the fact that I was gay. She worried, as most parents do, that life would be more difficult for me. I’m grateful that my mam drew upon what I can only assume were childhood drama lessons in that moment, though. I don’t think I could have taken anything but complete acceptance from the one parent who could respond to me. My heart goes out to members of the queer community who aren’t as lucky.

Another one of my – should we call them outings? – was when I was watching a film with my besties, Dylan and Jordan. A gay couple came on screen and I said, ‘Oh, there’s me!’ and then I basically ran out of the house before they could respond, only for us to meet up later and me to get slagged – not for being gay but for being pure weird and awkward about it.

Coming out became so tedious that I seriously considered renting a billboard in the middle of Cork City that would read, ‘PJ Kirby is a flaming homosexual’, followed by ‘Form a queue, boys’ and my mobile number to make use of the exposure.

Lost in London

Twenty-one, back in London, lost: those were the vibes. I didn’t feel at all stable. I wasn’t dealing with my grief. I dropped out of dance college and tried to navigate the gay scene in London. Grindr was downloaded, my hair was bleached and I’d bought my first douche, even though I didn’t know how to use it yet and definitely just gave myself the runs. I’d go to random hook-ups and try my hand at dating, living my big, gay Sex and the City fantasy. There were about two to three years of me as a baby lamb learning how to walk. Dancing in Heaven nightclub, riding boys I’d never see again and having a summer romance with a guy from Vegas. Throughout this time, the majority of my friends were straight and, although I loved them, I longed for a group of friends who understood what it was like to be a big