Star of the day, RTE Guide
16 December 2009
Even a crackling phoneline can't dilute Patricia Scanlan's energy. It feels as if the best-selling author is right there in the room with you, chatting about childhood Christmas puddings ("did you lick the spoon too?"), her love for Vanity Fair magazine (she has an annual subscription) and why people feel the need to take their Blackberries with them on holiday.
Pretty quickly you see where the Dubliner gets her ideas for her novels. Big themes are threaded through the pages of her latest, Coming Home. The novel taps into the banking crisis, bereavement, Christmas and finding Mister Right, all over an eventful Christmas period. "I wrote that from bitter experience", she says of the bankers and laughs. "I write about what's happening in real life." Even so, this latest tome was somewhat unexpected.
Last year, recovering from surgery, Scanlan was intent on completing the trilogy that began with Forgive and Forget and Happy Ever After, but her editor, in an unprecedented move, asked for a book that was 'an antidote to the recession'.
She initially agreed ("under the influence of the drugs after the operation") and then baulked. Christmas, once a time of great happiness, now carried its own burden. "My mother passed away two years ago and Christmas is all very different now", she says. "It is almost something to be endured in a way." But it was too late. The principal character, Alison, had entered her head and was not budging. "I then thought that my late mother would like this book", she says and so Coming Home was born.
"Sometimes it's how you deal with things that have happened to you as much as what has happened", she says. This could be Scanlan's philosophy. For 17 years, she worked as a library assistant with Dublin Public Libraries. She was based for most of the time in Ballymun, where a pioneering outreach programme gave her the chance to visit older people in the community, a sort of books on wheels service.
"That was probably the thing that gave me the most satisfaction of anything that I have ever done", she says. "I would drive around in an auld car that was falling to bits and I had this trolley with three little shelves. In fact that's how I did my back in, I think." Scanlan suffered severe back pain for a long time, so bad that she wrote four of her novels in bed. But following an operation in 2005, in which she had titanium screws put into her back and was encased in a cast, she is now as close to being OK as possible.
Scanlan's first novel, City Girl, was published in 1990. "My advance was 150," she says, before adding, "pounds that is. Back then I couldn't afford to give up work as I had a mortgage to pay". That debut was a best-seller and heralded a new wave of Irish women writers (Cathy Kelly, Marian Keyes, Sheila O'Flanagan), and in 1994, with an ever increasing literary workload and its attendant publicity, Scanlan left the libraries to write full-time. Since then there have been more than a dozen best-sellers and apart from the novels, she also taught creative writing and started Open Door, a series of literacy books published by New Island that includes other well-known authors like Roddy Doyle, Maeve Binchy and Nick Hornby. "I'm trying to organise a new series now", she says. "All the Irish royalties go to a charity of the author's choice."
The joint eldest (she's a twin) of six, she recalls a very happy Dublin childhood, living on the northside of the city just off the Ballymun Road. Her father, Patrick, a former lighthouse-keeper, is still alive, but her mother, Bernadette, died in May 2007. "I still can't believe that I'm talking about her in the past tense", she says. "She was a wonderful mother, very loving and very independent minded. My mother's great advice to me was 'love many, trust few, always paddle your own canoe'. We were very close and I just miss that terribly. But I do firmly believe that this is only part of our lives, this time here on earth; that we go back to where we came from. I feel her very close to me and sometimes I get just the scent of her perfume. I do feel her spirit very close but the sad thing is that I can't get a physical hug."
Is there a significant other in her life? "How do they put it down the country?" she says. "You can say that 'I'm spoken for'. She laughs. "I love that old fashioned way." In a funny way, even with her chattiness and warmth, Patricia Scanlan is also a private person. She prefers to keep talk of investments (and she did lose a packet on Anglo Irish and related shares) and her mum's life off the page. She has a mobile home in Wicklow (no email, no landline, no Blackberry) which is her refuge. She limits her TV watching (Come Dine with Me, Grey's Anatomy, Frasier), otherwise she wouldn't write a tap.
She is currently stoking up her new novel, the delayed final part of that trilogy. There is no title as of yet. "Maybe 'Bugger Off I've Had Enough'", she laughs. "One of the characters in the trilogy is pregnant and someone recently asked me if she had had a boy or a girl. I said that I didn't know yet. I reckon that she has been pregnant about three years now."