A great honour
Cathy Kelly and me own the same jumper (from TK Maxx, if you’re interested). It’s always important to find common ground with your interviewee but at the stage, speaking with the bestselling author is simple. We launch into a conversation about online shopping, the joy of the aforementioned TK Maxx and which colour nails suit us best.
Because the best kind of interviews are those which feel like a conversation you’d have with a friend. We’re meeting to discuss The Family Gift, Cathy’s 20th novel and one that she ‘really loved.’
“People always say, ‘What’s your favourite book?’ and it’s usually the one you did last because you’re so connected to it, although I have a very soft spot within me for Once Upon a Lifetime. I loved it. Granted if you handed it to me, I’d say, ‘Oh, I’d change this, I’d change that,” she laughs.
“Whenever the boys are writing something, they give to me to read and I find the mother hat drops and the editorial hat goes on. They’re saying, ‘Will you stop doing that?’ while I’m saying, ‘Would you do this?’ Now I’m only allowed to read, I’m not allowed to editorialise.”
The Family Gift focuses on Freya Abalone, whose life is stretched through family and work, never mind Mildred, the name given to her inner critic who is only too delighted to inform her of her shortcomings. Powerful topics – IVF, marital issues, relationship woes – are covered in Cathy’s quintessential way and it’s definitely a book that only further endears her to a reader.
“I have an inner voice and I felt everyone does, so I thought, let’s just do it,” she says of Mildred’s inclusion. “it suddenly seemed the most obvious thing to do because it can seem so paralysing. It’s the voice that wakes you in the middle of the night to tell you of all the things you’ve done wrong.
“If you had a friend who spoke to you the way your inner voice can, you would think they’re not a friend and not want to see that person again.”
Plus, her inclusion was fun to do, says Cathy.
“I took out a lot of Mildred but I swear to god, Mildred needs her own book. She’s a stand-up comedian. There’s a part of me that’s a stand-up comedian and Mildred was coming out that way.
“In my family, we are funny. My mum wasn’t well recently, nothing serious, and we went to the doctor and the two of us are laughing. Even when we’re in the doctor’s we’re like a double act. She went to an appointment recently and I couldn’t go with her and it was a lovely doctor who I particularly like and I said, ‘We have such fun with him,’ as he takes jokes and runs with them. It gets you through. It’s a lovely coping mechanism; it’s not ‘I’m going to avoid this thing,’ you know absolutely fair and square what’s happening but you’re approaching it in the right way.
“It must be genetic. They talk about the Famine gene, all these different genes but we must have the humour gene. What is it, is it living on an island and always having to get on with other people and being the person in the classroom who was picked on and turns it into humour? Even when I’m meetings in the UK for example, I can’t help it, I do funny. Every once and a while I do serious,” she adopts a very straight expression, “and suddenly everyone is ‘Oh no! We’re in trouble now.’”
In The Family Gift, Freya has undergone a traumatic incident but, like many can appreciate, doesn’t feel she can burden her family with how she’s feeling. Cathy speaks about the areas that were most difficult to write.
“I think the idea that she had gone through something that had traumatised her and she didn’t talk about it. You can safely say that was an analogy of something that happened to me, something that I didn’t talk about [Cathy was sexually assaulted in her twenties]. It’s very, very different in that she felt a victim of a crime and she could eventually get help for that. There are so many people who are victims of crimes who don’t get help or can’t get help. They feel they can’t, they feel it’s not a crime, they feel it’s their fault, ‘I woke up this morning.’
We chat about the ‘wonderful’ Louise O’Neill and her book Asking For It.
“Such a brilliant name for a book and such a brilliant book,” says Cathy. “That’s it: asking for it by very virtue of being there at the time and not being able, for a variety of reasons, not be able to react.”
It’s not a big jump for our chat to turn to social media, the good and bad thereof. Cathy speaks about the MPs in the UK who were subject to the most horrendous social media comments of a sexually violent nature, because they didn’t want Brexit proceeding.
“Social media is this scary thing,” she says. “It is wonderful, it’s glorious, it connects people who have never been connected, it gives rise to important things but at the same point there are complete nutbags out there with free rein to say what they want.”
Her 16-year-old twins Dylan and Murray have ‘very limited’ social media.
“Everything they have is private and must be asked to join. Ever since they were knee high to a duck, the ex-journalist in me, I would explain there were a lot of weird people out there.
“They are so educated on sex, drugs, rock and roll that they could probably give the lecture themselves. They’ve aware of what is out there. I’ve said, ‘If you’re ever sitting messing on your phone and something weird comes up, bring it to me. We’ll get rid of it together and we’ll talk about it.’”
She recounts clicking onto a website only to discover it had been hacked and was now showing pornography.
“I was going, ‘In what universe is that a sensual thing?’ It looked like two sides of pork banging against each other in an abattoir,” she laughs.
We also chat about the advent of unsolicited images of peoples’ genitalia that many receive through their social media channels (there’s a sentence I never thought I’d write).
“When I worked in the Sunday World and I worked in an agony column, there was a certain amount of the normality peoples’ nether regions was a big deal for men and it is, ‘is this normal?’ This was in the days before mobile phones so I guess if you wanted a picture, you needed a polaroid, and people would send in drawings,” she remembers.
Back on to books towards the end of our conversation and Cathy talks about how ‘gorgeous’ it is to have a fan fill her in on their love and appreciation for her novels.
“It’s so gorgeous, when you get someone who’s said they’ve been going through a really hard time and how a book helped them, it’s just so beautiful to feel that sharing experiences is so powerful. I get a lot of, ‘I’m getting this for my birthday,’ or ‘My husband knows, when he sees one of your books, he has to buy it.’”
The line between author and reader is blurred.
“And that’s the plus of social media, you get that connection, they can talk you. They must think I’m terribly boring though because I’m saying ‘just back from a walk,’ I’m still wearing my tracksuit bottoms.
“They want to see the person behind the book. I’m so boringly normal. It’s just this idea of you living in an ivory tower, I wish, I really, really wish it!”
Twenty books in, Cathy hopes that she’s more mature than when she started, and able to reach and entertain people.
“It’s staggering but it’s a great honour as well,” she says. Her goal is to ‘connect, to know we’re not alone.
“When I’m writing, I write for the same reason that I read: because the stories are coming out and somewhere in the back of my head I know it’ll reasonate with somebody. I just wanted to do one, but twenty. It’s completely amazing.
“We all have a [inner voice] Mildred but you can control Mildred the older you get, ‘Shut up, Mildred, I’ve had enough of you now.’”
The Family Gift (Orion) is available now
