NAHANT — Terrence Murphy, who is originally from Nahant and now lives in Brookline, launched his second novel “Almost Island,” which tells the story of a retired doctor moving back to his hometown and struggling to juggle aging, retirement, and the lingering wounds of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) after serving in Vietnam.
For Murphy, the topics of the novel hit close to home. He drew from his own past as a veteran and doctor for the story and spoke with The Item on Tuesday morning, where he went into detail about his background and what compelled him to write.
“My father and my mother’s family was from Lynn, so my roots run very deep… I was an English major at Harvard University then later attended the University of Virginia Medical School,” Murphy said. “In college I started writing and got attracted to medicine, where I did a lot of volunteer work.”
After his time as a student, Murphy noted that he and several others went into practicing medicine at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Boston, where they worked together for 40 years.
“I was doing that and wasn’t writing for years. I retired about two years ago and started writing again… I wrote my first novel — which I completed back in 2012 — which talks about the sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church,” he said.
He continued, explaining in his own words what the story of his second novel encompasses.
“The story is about a doctor who has retired and been through a lot of changes in life. His health is not that good, and a few other problematic things happen to him… He decides to move back to his hometown to take it easy and slow down in order to enjoy his retirement in a quiet setting,” he said.
However, Murphy added that it “doesn’t work out that way,” noting that “a lot of trauma from his past comes back.”
“He’s faced with a lot of difficult and frightening events when he returns to Egg Rock, and being a Vietnam veteran also plays a huge role in the book,” Murphy said. “It also covers the effects of the Vietnam War on others, not just the narrator… The war is really the principle driver of the plot.”
Murphy elaborated, saying that “it seems odd to be on an idyllic peninsula and have all that happen,” but he noted that the effects of war can be seen everywhere.
It took roughly six years of work to reach the finishing point of “Almost Island,” according to Murphy, who said it was a “very long process.”
A lot of it, he said, was sorting through his own memories and feelings about the war: “It was long and difficult in the beginning to get the story straight… The narrator is sort of speaking for me, and I had to work on getting the tone and message correct.”
The number one takeaway for readers, he said, is that “war is never pretty.”
“It leaves scars, and the ill-effects of war can be felt for generations. Not only for the direct victims, but the indirect victims, too… I think that’s the message that I really want to have people understand,” he said.
Other points he tried to echo were the themes of aging, retirement, and looking back on life as the narrator deals with an illness, which he felt “gives a sort of poignancy” to his work.
