Cathy Kelly - Busy Woman

Cathy Kelly’s latest book Other Women may have been written during the pandemic lockdown but life on the pages is normal, or as normal as it can be for women hiding secrets. She talks to Carissa Casey about staying focused in crazy times and why she’s now allergic to pandemic fiction.

Cathy Kelly’s latest book Other Women had a rough start. She began work on it before the pandemic hit and, when it did, she found it next to impossible to write. “I’d come in to the office and just look at it,” she says.

Instead of writing, she took to crocheting. “I used to paint, so I order wool the way I order paint – ‘oh that’s a lovely ochre colour’, ‘that’s nice dusty yellow’. So I ordered all this fluffy wool to crochet a blanket with flowers in this particular pattern. When the wool came, all I wanted to be doing was my crochet. I was obsessed,” she admits.

“I think we were all so scared. During those early times, there was just so much fear in the air.”

In between visits to the supermarket, sloshing Dettol about her home – “the place stank of Dettol” – and making her own hand sanitiser, Cathy crocheted “little pretty colouredy things”. “It was my escapism,” she explains.

Thankfully for her legion of fans, she called a halt on the crocheting. “I can be very hard on myself,” she says. “I just said to myself ‘stop this messing around, write the book. You have a deadline.’ So I got it together and wrote it.”

Once she got writing again, the story proved to be a lovely escape. It focuses on three very different women, each one written in the first person. Sid is spikey and fun but “you get a sense that she’s been hurt in some way because she has all these defence mechanisms pinging up all over the place. If she could have a moat around herself she would.”

Marin seems to have the perfect marriage, two lovely children, a beautiful home and a successful career as an estate agent. “But she feels, like so many of us do, that something about her is wrong. If she had the right clothes, she’d be right. For some people, it’s lipsticks or perfumes. Maybe with men it’s cars. Marin goes into Brown Thomas or somewhere like that and finds herself buying two of the ‘perfect’ white t-shirt. Or the ‘perfect’ trench coat. She’s really caught up in this.”

Finally there’s Bea, whose husband died ten years ago and is focused entirely on raising her son. “She puts everything into her son. It’s at a point where he wants to know more about his father. She hasn’t told him enough because she thought that was the right way to do it,” explains Cathy.

While clearly disciplined – she’s written 21 best-selling books - there’s also something charmingly distractable about Cathy. Mid-way through describing Bea, she notices, via our Zoom link up, that we own the same cushion and the conversation segues easily to a shared obsession with cushions. 

“In one of the un-lockdowns,” she tells me, “I was in Dunnes and saw these pink velour cushions and I thought ‘I’ll get these now.” She feigns a demented addict voice. 

“But they (the cushions) are actually solid lumps. There’s no sitting on them or lying on them.”

We go back to her latest book. Was she tempted to include anything about the lockdown? “No,” she states baldly. “And I never want to. You don’t read a lot of books about the Spanish Flu, books specifically about Spanish Flu. People didn’t write about it, because it was just too horrific. Before this, I would have been interested in books about pandemics. I’m interested in the science of pandemics but I’m not at all interested now in fiction about pandemics.”

Like the rest of us, she was living the nightmare. With the book underway, she began to adapt to the newly restricted world. “I started getting very organised with dinners. I’d do a plan – the sort of thing I’m always saying I’m going to do. That cut down on supermarket visits and it was lovely to sit down in evening and chillax. Then I’d Zoom with my brother and sister in UK. My mother lives on her own, not too far away and I was able to see her,” she says.

Was there anything about the lockdown she found hard? “Oh all of it,” she announces. “I put up a good front but I found it very difficult.” She talks about her two sons, who were both in transition year, missing out on a stay at a seal sanctuary and being cut off from their social networks. 

“I get very anxious and stressed. I think you can be anxious and stressed and also laugh. I do a good impersonation of looking fine. I found it all incredibly stressful. I’m addicted to the news, so every day I’d listen to figures and it was terrifying. There was no vaccine then. It was just hideous.”

She misses her Pilates class and meeting friends for coffee, but she is not one for night-time socialising. “Somebody very wise once said, ‘you can have two of three things - social life, career and children’. You only get to have two of them. I put everything in to my children. When they were very young, you had to be there. Because I was working, I wouldn’t have been out very much at night. I would never have been ‘oh it’s Friday night, where are we going?’.”

As a family, they’d go out every couple of weeks for a meal. She loved having coffee with a friend and people watching. “Or I’d go down the village and talk to everyone and hug everyone. That’s gone,“ she says. “I miss the spontaneity.”

Recently in a supermarket, she found herself smiling at a baby. “I was wearing a mask and trying to smile with my eyes. The little kid was smiling back and I said to the mother, ‘it’s so hard when they only see you in a mask’. And the mother said, ‘it’s all she knows’. The baby was about 18 months so yeah, all she knows when she goes out are people wearing masks.”

For downtime, Cathy walks and does meditation. “Meditation is huge for me. I’ve meditated for years. I’d do yoga and started going to evening classes. The boys were older and didn’t need me for their higher level maths! I was loving that. So I always did a bit but recently I joined a meditation thing. It’s with Deepak Chopra, who just has the most amazing voice. I don’t need a voice. I can just sit there and do it. But if your mind is belting along, it’s great to have a voice there,” she says.

She’s already started work on her next book. “After I bring the boys to school, I get straight into work. There’s no futtering around. I have an overdeveloped guilt thing in me, which hoping to have removed some day. If I’m not working or productive, I feel there’s something wrong.”

“When you’re a writer published in different countries, there’s always something coming in that you have to do - be interviewed or write a piece. So I’ll have my main job and three other little jobs. Then there’s social media. I like social media but it is a full time job.”

She also keeps up to date with events in some of the world’s most troubled places, in her capacity as Ambassador for UNICEF (the United Nations Children’s Fund). 

“It’s ten years since the Syrian war started,” she says. “Back when I could travel I’d see first-hand what war does to people. You’d see a malnourished kid and think you were looking at a four year old. But actually, they were nine. Malnourishment stunts growth and it stunts brain development too.”

“Then there’s the whole issue of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). I was talking to a doctor recently about Syria and Syrian refugees. I said ‘at least 75 percent of Syrian children have PTSD’. And the doctor said, ‘only 75 percent?’.”

“The Syrian crisis has been the biggest refugee crisis since the Second World War. Look at how we’ve created direct provision, put these people in a box and deny them the right to do basic things like cook for their children?.”

Ireland is wonderful in terms of philanthropy, she says. “We’ve always punched above our weight in terms of donating money. But in terms of taking people in, we’re not great.”

She hasn’t been on a trip for a few years but the last one still stays with her. “It was to a refugee camp in Jordan. It was actually the fifth biggest city in Jordan. People living in tents – you were lucky if you had a pre-fab. Everything – water supply, education, medical treatment, babies being born, all the normal things of human life – it was all happening in a camp.”

“The pandemic has hit Jordan hugely. It’s just a never ending circle of pain.”

With the world economy taking a hit from the pandemic, she’s concerned that funding for underdeveloped countries is going to slow. “It’s going to take a long time to get those funds back,” she says.

Meanwhile, she does what she can, highlighting the issues as often as she can.

What of the blanket she was crocheting at the start of the pandemic? “The colours I liked best were all in a fluffy wool, which I didn’t think was a problem but it actually is. It’s very hard to crochet in fluffy wool - just saying! So I have some of the squares done but it may take some years to finish.”

Which all bodes well for the reading public.

Other Women by Cathy Kelly is published by Orion Fiction and is available in both print, e-book and audio.