Novelist Karl Geary charts the plot-twists of his own life story

It doesn't tell us that Geary now lives in Glasgow. That he lives with his wife, the Scottish actor Laura Fraser and their daughter Lila. That he is also an actor. And sometime businessman. It doesn't mention that as a teenager he turned up in a photograph beside a topless Madonna in the pop star's infamous Sex book. It doesn't mention that he knew Jeff Buckley or that there was a time a guy put a gun to his head and said: "Give me your money."

About that. "I had only been in New York a short time," Geary explains. "It was a street I shouldn't have been down anyway. And it was utterly pathetic what I had in my pocket. I didn't have two matching socks at the time. I emptied everything I had. A lighter, 45 cents and a Walkman."

The mugger, understandably, was not impressed. "He looked at me and he very gently tapped me on the face and he goes, 'I'm very disappointed in you'," Geary recalls.

This was back in the 1980s, when New York was a wild place. Wild enough for Geary to be mates with someone called Johnny One Eye, so called because, Geary tells me, "his brother had knocked his eye out in a fight".

When Geary told Johnny One Eye about his run-in with the gunman, Johnny suggested the Irishman had been lucky. "Because he didn't shoot me?" Geary asked. "No, because he didn't have a knife." Johnny One Eye replied. "If he'd had a knife he would have cut you for kicks. Big thing to pull the trigger."

This, by the way, is the last story Karl Geary, tells me this afternoon. There have already been a few.

Geary, speaks in a soft Irish accent, even though he left Ireland aged 16, almost 30 years ago. He's returned there now, on the page at least in Montpelier Parade. The story of a teenager called Sonny, it's a coming-of-age tale set in suburban Dublin told in the second person that takes in brickies and butchers, class, sex and death. Four-and-a-half years' work distilled down to a quiet, dark, spare, vivid 232 pages. "Most of the editing for me was about scraping back," he says. "It's almost like clearing rubble."

His publisher has high hopes for the book. Geary is just thrilled it exists. "It's very moving actually," Geary suggests when I set my copy down on the table in the Hotel du Vin at One Devonshire Gardens in Glasgow where we meet. "I've written all my life. This isn't my first novel. It's the first time I've been published.

"By the time you get to this," he says, indicating the pristine slim hardback in front of us, "there have been so many versions but there's something very different about a hardback. You're putting yourself beside what I think is for me the most interesting form of art available. And you're looking at thousands of years of it and this is a small tiny stone you're thrown in the puddle.

He smiles. "It's cool. It's a lovely feeling."

He, his wife and daughter have lived in Glasgow for just over a year now. He's fond of the place. Indeed, a visit to Glasgow's Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum some 10 years back provided a form of inspiration for Montpelier Parade.

"I came across a Rembrandt stuck down the back," he recalls. "It was a painting called The Carcass Of An Ox. Phenomenal painting in that Rembrandt, painterly way. But it's almost like looking at Dante's Inferno. You have this almost crucified carcass and you go, 'Who cuts the meat? Who eats the meat? We ate the meat?'

"It really had this profound effect on me and I think I must have stored it away because when Sonny arrived he arrived both in the second person and working in a butcher's shop."

Geary is 44. Did he need to be in his fifth decade before he could write this novel? "I think I did. Some people are really bright young. I wasn't. And it took me a long time to just be able to sit. Sitting's hard. It's really tricky."

Montpelier Parade is fiction. Sonny's sex life, Sonny's failings are not Geary's. But the world he is describing is the one he grew up in. And one he left at the first opportunity.

"The 1980s in Ireland were brutal. It was a dreadful time. When I left in 1988 the interest rates were, I think, in the mid-20s. It was a rotten time. You had Trinity graduates flipping burgers. I had a learning disability so I didn't do well at school anyway. So I left and I was delighted to leave."

Were his parents, I wonder? What must it be like seeing your 16-year-old son, the youngest of eight, disappear to another continent? They can't have been thrilled. "I'm sure they weren't and I'm sure for any parents losing a son or daughter at any age to emigration is not ideal. You have to put it within the context of the 1980s. I've a 16-year-old son [from a previous relationship]. I wouldn't let him near the dishwasher. But that's the world today. And thank God. Isn't it great?"

Anyway, when he left for New York he got lucky. He had a number for a friend of a friend who turned out to be the aforementioned Johnny One Eye. Johnny ran a bicycle messaging company and gave Geary a job even though it turned out the teenager wasn't very good at it – even when his bike hadn't been stolen (a weekly experience). "It was a very rough time. It was a very dangerous place."

"The other side of that," he adds, "was it was desperately creative. Tons of artists, poets and musicians. This great clan of lunatics knocking about the place and they were fantastic to be around.

"It was very welcoming and it allowed you to look around and go, 'Oh my God there are these other possibilities and these other ways to be. Every conversation would nearly end with someone throwing you a book and going, 'Jesus, you've got to read that.'

"And at that time people didn't have that firewall around them. So you'd be sitting there getting your bread and milk with everyone else. Lou Reed would be there or Allan Ginsberg. Those guys were just knocking around the neighbourhood."

Who was the 16-year-old boy who washed up in the East Village then? "I think I was desperately curious. I had some adventure. I was a nervous kid in some ways but I must have had some curiosity about the world and how it operates."

He didn't stick it as a bicycle messenger. There were other jobs. Building sites and the like. But he ended up working in a Zydeco club in midtown where he ran into a guy who was opening up a cafe "in this sh***y little place on St Mark's Place," with a stake of $11,000 and no alcohol licence.

That "sh***y little place" turned out to be the Sin-e and Geary ended up running it, the first of a number of venues he'd run. St Mark's is one of the legendary hipster streets in New York and in its time Sin-e became hipster central. Passing British and Irish musicians would pop in and play. He remembers Sinead O'Connor duetting with Marianne Faithfull there. "And if you weren't there you missed it. Nobody had cameras. We ran that for a good seven years which was pretty remarkable."

Geary would go to the cafe in the morning, have a nap in the afternoon and then come back before closing the place in the early hours of the morning, at which point everyone would troop across the street to a place called Stingy Lulu's where all the drag queens hung out for breakfast.

"Then you'd walk out and someone would have been shot up the street. There were a lot of junkies around. The crack epidemic was in full swing. Aids was enormous. A lot of people we knew just didn't make it for all those reasons."

Sin-e was also the place where the late Jeff Buckley got his start. "He played every week there for over a year. He was always brilliant but you knew he was working out his thing. There'd be three, four people watching him some nights. There'd be no interest. He was doing his apprenticeship.

In 1993 Buckley recorded his EP Live At Sin-e in the cafe. "I think he insisted on it," suggests Geary. "He knew the room so well. He felt comfortable there. He felt safe. He was a very nervous performer. He was very shy."

Within a year Buckley would release Grace, become a young meteor and soar before drowning in the Mississippi River in 1997. "Someone was telling me he'd be 50 this year. That's amazing, isn't it?"

Buckley wasn't the only one getting noticed though. I need to mention the name Madonna to you, Karl. "I figured you would," he says unhappily. "It's one of the least interesting things I get asked about the most."

For those who don't remember, in 1992 the most famous and at the time lusted after pop star in the world teamed up with photographer Steven Meisel to release a book of photographs entitled Sex, which came in a sealed envelope. If you still have a copy you will find inside a picture of a long-haired teenage Geary kissing a topless Madonna.

"When I was young I was androgynous-looking," Geary says now. "I was a good-looking kid if that's your thing. I was approached a lot to take photographs because of the way I looked. And most of the time I turned them down."

But this was Madonna and even if her world wasn't the East Village world he lived in he was suitably intrigued to say yes. "It seemed like an interesting thing. I didn't really give a lot of thought beyond that."

He doesn't now. The experience was, he says, "as sterile as the photograph looks". And involved just a couple of hours of his life.

But he keeps getting asked about it. He once said it was like being in bed with the Coca Cola Company. "And I wasn't joking. You have Madonna and Steven Meisel running around going, 'Aren't we pushing the envelope?' Then you look at the photographs … Isabella Rossellini also had the same impression of the book. It's not sensual. It's not erotic. It's theatre. Everyone's dressed up – or not dressed up – with nowhere to go.

"And actually what you have is corporate exploitation of third-wave feminism. But the book itself is kind of bland."

When Geary was approached to appear in a little indie vampire movie directed by Michael Almereyda he was happier with the result. "Michael was doing a film called Nadja, which I think is a terrific little film. He wanted to tip his hat to Bram Stoker who was born in Dublin and I think I might have been one of the only Irish guys in the neighbourhood. And it was the most gorgeous experience.

"But then I didn't work for three years. I had to go and train and work out how to do it."

He has eked out a screen career over the years with parts in the likes of Sex And The City, Ken Loach's Jimmy's Hall and Hysteria – The Def Leppard Story. You may have seen him in the recent indie film I Am Not A Serial Killer (his wife is in that one too).

But acting doesn't seem to be his favourite thing. "I don't have the same feeling for it as a real actor does. I'll be f***ing shot by my agent for saying this, but the way it works for me, I'm always a second or two behind myself. That's a terrible way to work."

Still, it was through acting that he met Fraser, the star of Breaking Bad and recent BBC1 drama The Missing. They met on a film he had written called Coney Island Baby (based on an abortive novel he had tried to write in his 20s). "I wrote it and she showed up. Great."

I'm presuming Fraser had something to do with the decision to move from New York to Glasgow. "Well, she certainly had a big part in the conversation. And actually it's been great. It's been a treat being here.

"I get up very early and then I work for several hours, then I rewrite in the afternoon. But the bits in between – when you're walking around getting your milk – just to have someone comment on, 'Yes, it is raining again' is f***ing great. I really missed that being in New York for so long."

New York is not the city he once knew. "Unrecognisable," he says. "And not for the better. It's much more expensive now. The demographic is singular. It's become white upper-middle class. And I'm not knocking that. It's a terrific thing if you can pull it off. But it's not the most interesting demographic. And when that's the only voice in the room …"

So here he is. Writing. Writing about the things that occupy him. "We start out on these different projects and they always become the same thing. You're always trying to get at the same stuff. And I don't think your subconscious cares about how this stuff comes out. As long as it's coming out."

And for him what is it that keeps coming out? Sex and death? "Well, I've tried one. Narrowly avoided the other. Sex and death are huge. But sex and death are not enough to get you through a book. You have to deal with other things. The real stuff underneath. And then you're into grief and you're into longing and desire and the inability to communicate."

The latter is not a problem he seems to have. Karl Geary was born in Dublin. Montpelier Parade is his first novel. That's just the start of it.

Montpelier Parade by Karl Geary is published by Harvill Secker, £12.99.