*This posts contains spoilers for Mayflies*

Mayflies by Andrew O’Hagan

Andrew O’Hagan’s Mayflies is a beautiful exploration of friendship, life and death. It truly is a privilege to meet Jimmy and Tully on their journey through Irvine, Manchester and Switzerland. The first half of the book explores their coming of age as they make a pilgrimage to Manchester with their group of friends. O’Hagan perfectly captures this defining moment at the cusp of adulthood. There is an innocence at this time, however O’Hagan also hints at darker early experiences that have shaped the characters of both Jimmy and Tully. In the second half of the novel, the pair reunite in Ayrshire and Tully tells Jimmy of his terminal cancer and shares his plans to take control of the final few months of his life and make plans for his death, seeking the assistance from his closest friend.

Mayflies is by no means an easy ride, it deals with terminal illness and assisted dying. At the heart of the story is the friendship of Jimmy and Tully. The book is a celebration of life – of Tully’s life and how he wanted to live his life his way, to the fullest but to ultimately take control of his final days and to die on his own terms. Tully is a fascinating character and will form the focus of this psychological formulation.

Tully Dawson – A Psychological Formulation

To explore Tully’s journey, I have used a Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT) based approach. This is a formulation I have used previously on my blog but I have updated this and added other important elements to hopefully better capture the intense vigour for life and fun that Tully has, despite the devastating news of his cancer diagnosis.

Formulations are often focused on an individual’s difficulties with the hope of understanding the nature, sources, maintaining and alleviating factors for their difficulties. This approach is incredibly helpful as a Clinical Psychologist working clinically with people to help an individual make sense of their experiences, plan therapy and find ways to overcome the current difficulties they are facing. This can therefore be a good method to explore how Tully is likely to make sense of his terminal illness and how the events in his earlier life may have shaped his approach to this news and increased proximity to death.

In addition to this threat based and difficulties focus, I have incorporated ways to balance the formulation, to explore Tully’s numerous strengths, supports and helpful strategies he has for navigating life. I believe this is a better way of capturing both the light and dark that Andrew O’Hagan so beautifully manages to encapsulate with Tully Dawson. This balanced CFT formulation is based on the work of Paul Gilbert and has been adapted from the book Compassion Focused Therapy – Clinical Practice and Applications, edited by Paul Gilbert and Gregoris Simos and published by Routledge in 2022.

Notes on writing this post

I read Mayflies at the end of 2022. In December 2022, BBC premiered Synchronicity Film’s moving adaptation of the book directed by Peter Mackie Burns with the screen plan written by Andrea Gibb. Both Tom Glynn-Carney and Tony Curran’s performances of Tully were incredible and did the character and novel proud. It was a truly wonderful production of an unforgettable book.

As with all my formulations and psychological explorations of characters, this is speculative and based entirely on my own understanding of the novel. A good book will make you think about your own life, the people and relationships that shaped you and if we’re lucky enough, your very own Tully Dawson, that friend who defines your life. That’s the magic of good story telling and often we find our selves reading through the lens of our own experiences. When done right, this allows us to connect to the character on a deeply personal level. As such, we each might take something different from a book and a character but I hope that this psychological exploration of Tully Dawson is interesting and does justice to such a uniquely brilliant character.

Resources

Mayflies explores important but difficult subjects. I have included resources for support for anyone whose life may be affected by cancer or mental health difficulties in the UK:

https://www.macmillan.org.uk/cancer-information-and-support/get-help

https://www.samaritans.org/