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| She was born in the West of Ireland in 1963. I was a month overdue and I often wonder what my life would have been like if I'd been born on time. How being a dynamic, sunny Leo, instead of a critical, crap-in-bed Virgo would have been. But we will never know. She was brought up in Dublin, and then she spent her twenties in London. When I left school I went to college, got a law degree, then put it to good use by going to London and getting a job as a waitress. Eventually I upped and got respectable and got a job in an accounts office, where I worked (I use the term oh-so-loosely) for a long, long, long time. I thought I'd be there forever, that I'd end up as a desiccated, bad-tempered, old bag who lived with a one-bar heater and forty cats. That small boys would throw stones at me. What I certainly had no notion of doing was becoming a writer. She started writing in 1993 and her first book Watermelon was published in Ireland in 1995. I decided to send my short stories off to a publishers. So that they'd take me seriously, I enclosed a letter saying I'd written part of a novel. Which I hadn't. I had no intention of so doing, either. I was much more into the instant gratification of short stories. But they wrote back and said, send the novel, and for once in my self-destructive life I didn't shoot myself in the foot. I wrote four chapters of my first novel Watermelon in a week, and was offered a three-book contract on the strength of it. Since then she has become a publishing phenomenon. In November 1996 I was finally able to give up my day job and become - allegedly anyway - a full time writer. Except that almost from the moment all my time was free to write with, I began to try and distract myself and do anything but write. I'm up and down the stairs, checking to see if the post has come. (Even after it already has.) I pray for the phone to ring, I make appointments for root-canal treatment and toy with the notion of scrubbing the kitchen floor. Anything other than switch on the computer. Of course, once I start it's not so bad, I always find. Her books are an unusual blend of comedy and darkness and cover subjects like depression and addiction. Okay, so a book about someone with depression doesn't exactly sound like a laugh a minute, but in my experience the best comedy is rooted in darkness. All five of my books are different but share a common theme of people who are In The Bad Place, and who achieve some form of redemption. I've been In The Bad Place myself many's the time, which wasn't very pleasant while it was happening but has since come in very handy for writing about it. Her books are published in 35 countries worldwide and have been translated into several different languages, such as Hebrew and Japanese. And that's about it! To sum up I can't cook and I'm addicted to shoes, handbags and white magnums. All quite normal, really. |
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Photo © Neil Cooper