Claire McGowan: Growing up with a profoundly disabled brother in 1980s Northern Ireland put an enormous strain on my family

The bestselling author on her experience of growing up with her younger brother David who has a rare chromosomal disorder and how it inspired her latest novel, This Could Be Us

Claire McGowan says her childhood was ‘completely overturned’ when David was born. Photo: Donna Ford

Tanya Sweeney

Claire McGowan doesn’t remember life before her younger brother David was born. But, as she says herself, his arrival when she was two years old “completely overturned” her childhood.

“Two years old is a very impressionable age to be suddenly kind of side-lined because there’s such an urgent problem to deal with,” McGowan says over a Zoom call from her home in London. “I think I didn’t realise for many years that what happens to you at that particular age can be extremely damaging.”