When she got married last year, Cathy Kelly could not have imagined how her life would change. Donal O’Donoghue meets the best-selling writer at her Wicklow home
It’s a sunny day in Wicklow. The hills are alive, the lambs are frolicking and Cathy Kelly, best-selling author and non-stop dynamo, is full of the joys of spring. And why not? The Dubliner, who sells books by the shed-load, is back on top with her latest paperback, Homecoming. Business is good – she even has the builders in to add another wing to her home, where she lives with her husband, John, and their twin boys, just outside the pretty village of Enniskerry. From the living room, you can see the sea, a blue line on the horizon, and the future is bright (certainly a lot brighter than what’s in store for those frolicking lambs). Not only is Homecoming flying off the shelves, but Kelly herself is flying around the world: last November a book tour of Australia, this week a publicity jaunt to Canada.
She answers the door cradling one of her three Jack Russell terriers. Dinky had been set upon by her two sisters, Scamp and Star (named by the twin boys, Dylan and Murray) and now needs some TLC. No better person than Kelly. She is as bright as a fully-lit Christmas tree and just as much fun. “Would you like a bun?” she asks, placing a box on the table. “I made them myself and they came out a bit weird but they taste OK.” Then she sits down, ever so briefly, before scuttling off to silence the radio and check on the washing machine. When she is isn’t writing or with her two boys, she’s painting (a colourful abstract that looks like a Rorschach test hangs upstairs) or involved in charity work (she is a UNICEF ambassador) or doing a million other things. No wonder her forearm is in sling. “Repetitive strain”, she says.
But what’s Cathy Kelly really like? I bat a few CK lines from recent newspaper articles at her. ‘Just a Hippie at Heart’? “Oh, yes”, she says. “I’m a total hippy. I do yoga and I like crystals, man, and I have a brown suede jacket and a cowboy boots and I wear jeans 90% of the time. But I like rock ’n’ roll music more than I like hippy music.” ‘Terrified of bad reviews’? She shakes her head. “Not really but a bad review does wreck your buzz for that moment.” What about: ‘The term romantic novelist doesn’t sit easy with Cathy Kelly’? “I prefer contemporary female novelist because I so do not write about romance”, she says. “And I’m not romantic. However I did win the Romantic Novelist of the Year Thingy in London years ago. That was lovely but I do not consider myself a romantic novelist.”
The avowedly unromantic Cathy Kelly grew up in south Dublin, sandwiched happily between younger sister, Lucy and older brother, Francis. Her mother, Gay, was a teacher and is now doing Trojan work with St Vincent De Paul and her dad, Paddy, who worked as an insurance salesman, died some ten years ago. After school (favourite subjects? “Art and English”), a career in fine art briefly flared. “I was OK technically but I don’t think I had the spark and I didn’t have the confidence”, she says. She got into the journalism course in Rathmines through the back door. After she failed to make the short-list, she returned to the CAO options. Law was a brief consideration. “God, what a crap lawyer I’d have been”, she says, thinking aloud. Then someone dropped out of the journalism course and she was in. “Totally mad”, she says. “I might never have become a writer if I had not gone to journalism college.”
For five years, Kelly worked as an agony aunt with The Sunday World, having cut her teeth writing features on social issues. But it was her work as ‘Dear Cathy’ that gave her a firsthand understanding of the human condition. “It was like a PhD in people, getting all those letters”, she says. All grist to the fiction mill but before she published her first novel, there were two honourable failures. The first time was in college when she teamed up with her mother to write a bodice-ripper in the Mills and Boon style. “Funnily, it didn’t work”, she says and laughs. Her second stab at a novel came in her early days with The Sunday World. After work, oiled with a few drinks, she’d let it slip that she was thinking of writing a book. Her news editor hooked her up with an agent. She toiled away at a historical thumper (“a clogs and shawl novel”) but it foundered on the rocks. The third time she kept schtum.
Kelly wrote after work, tapping out another life in the wee hours. That debut, Woman to Woman, saw daylight in 1997 and for eight weeks perched loftily atop the Irish best-seller charts. But the writer’s joy was tempered by two things: discovering a malignant tumour on her hip (it was successfully removed) and, more traumatic, her father’s deteriorating health. “My dad developed Alzheimer’s in his 50s”, she says. “It was a very slow and painful condition. We kept it from him because we thought that was the right thing to do. We’d say ‘oh no, you’re fine’ but secretly we were very worried. He used to get upset because he couldn’t read and he became obsessed with money which was probably reverting to family financial worries from the early days. Sometimes in the middle of the night he would get up and try and go ‘home’, where home was his parents’ house in Cabra. So personally, I’m a fan of euthanasia – I don’t ever want to be that person.”
Two novels later, Kelly left the day job but becoming a mum at 37 changed everything. Her twin boys – Dylan and Murray – became the centre of the planet. “Yes I did always want to be a mum”, she says and then anticipates the next question. “So why did it take me so long? It was just the way it happened and I happened to be older. I was in the Rotunda and I was the older mother. I didn’t think 37 was all that older but everyone else thinks it’s old. But it was the most life-changing thing imaginable. I have always been very maternal and suddenly I had these two amazing children and I just fell in love with it. The boys sometime ask me, ‘what was the important day in your life?’ and I’d say, ‘Of course the day I had you’. And they’d ask: ‘But what of the day you met dad or the day you married dad?’ And I’d say, ‘Yes of course darling, those days too!’”
After some 13 years together, and six or so years after the birth of their boys, she and John Sheehan (former MD of Sony Music Ireland) finally tied the knot last year. Why so long? “John had been married before and has a family but I don’t know why we didn’t get married sooner”, she says. “I was never a marriage-y person, I was never that girl, the Wedding Barbie. So I was perfectly happy for us to carry on the way we were. Then the kids started asking, ‘when are you getting married?’ and that’s why we did it eventually really.” They were married on March 25, 2010: a quiet registry office affair in Wicklow with family and friends, followed by a party that evening in Powerscourt. “Marriage is lovely and I’d never have thought it would change”, she says. “I was able to buy a Valentine’s card that said ‘my husband’ on it.”
Cathy Kelly is 44, but looks a decade younger: “Polyfilla” (as she refers to her make-up) or not. I had read somewhere that she was fascinated by the concept of aging. She looks perplexed. Would she ever consider cosmetic surgery? “I have these big eye bags here”, she says. “But I’d be terrified that it would all go wrong and I’d end up looking like this!” She stretches her skin theatrically. “What I think is sad is that older people are not respected enough. There’s this culture of youth and a specific sort of beauty and how the fashion industry is obsessed with that. Older people have so much more to give, says she who is now 44! I’d like to think that I would grow old gracefully.”
We part as we arrived amid a helter-skelter of excitement and plans and the fact that Kelly still hasn’t packed for her imminent trip to Toronto. No fear. The woman is unstoppable. Her 13th novel is due at the publishers in March 2012, but this autumn sees the arrival of her inaugural short story collection. “I’m on a total short story buzz right now”, she says, sounding like someone who thrives on buzzes. Her ambition to pen a screenplay has crucially progressed: she has downloaded a how-to programme. “I’ll try it”, she says with a laugh and a so-what flourish. “It might be desperate but I’ll give it a go. I also started work on a children’s novel some time ago. I read a bit of it for the kids and they were like, ‘We don’t know if we like that!’”
