Novelist Cathy Kelly is selling her home, downsizing for the next act in a busy life. But her cancer diagnosis has affirmed that nothing can be taken for granted. Donal O'Donoghue visits her at home in Co Wicklow.
"I planned to start a new book on the first day of my chemotherapy," says Cathy Kelly. "I brought my laptop into hospital with me, but it didn’t quite work out like that." The Irish novelist, who has published 23 novels since her 1997 debut, Woman to Woman, has always believed in making things happen through hard work and ambition. She is also a realist.
"There is so much of life that you can’t control, and cancer teaches you that," she says. "One minute you’re pootling along and then this happens." She was diagnosed with breast cancer in July 2023. "I’ve always been good with accepting things that happen," she explains, "because sometimes you don’t have control over them. Yet I will always say stay strong and keep going because what else can you do? Life is a series of stepping stones and if you don’t keep stepping on those stones you just fall into the pond."
It's unlikely that Cathy Kelly will ever fall into the pond; she moves too nimbly and doesn’t carry regret. But in recent years she has been through the mill. In 2020 her marriage to John Sheehan ended, with the subsequent divorce taking a toll. Then came that cancer diagnosis, caught in the early stages, but requiring two surgeries and chemotherapy.
There were other complications, but the novelist, who has lived with depression since her teens, and has two auto-immune diseases (vitiligo and chronic fatigue), strives to stay positive, buoyed by a dark sense of humour that also threads through her fiction. "The last two days have not been great," she says when we meet at her home in Co Wicklow. "But that’s probably because of the work of cleaning up the house ahead of the sale."
It’s a glorious spring morning when I visit Kelly at home, the views beyond a tree studded with video cameras. After 22 years here, she is moving to a more urban location with her partner PJ Davies, her two dogs (Scamp and Licky) and her cat, Juno.
A few days before we met, the house was put on the market.
"We spent an insane weekend fecking out stuff," she says, although it transpires a lot of the stuff was 'fecked out’ into the garage. Now Cathy is worried that any potential buyer opening the garage might discover sights unholy. But she doesn’t dwell on this, there are more important things in life. "The hardest part about leaving is that the boys grew up here but that’s the same for many people who downsize," she says. "And just look at this place: it takes an age to hoover!"
Cathy Kelly (58) might not have an empty nest – her dogs bowl giddily about the house as we talk – but twins Murray and Dylan are away at college (Murray is studying fashion in London, Dylan is doing biomedical science in Trinity). The three are very close. Cathy says that she talked about everything with her boys when they were growing up: no subject was taboo.
She’s confident that they are ready for whatever the world might bring, yet like every mother, she worries. Not least because she also has GAD (Generalized Anxiety Disorder). Yet her dark humour sustains her even as she pours her energy into extracurricular activities and charity work. She’s a goodwill ambassador with UNICEF Ireland and does voluntary work with ARC Cancer Support Centre.
At one point, PJ pops in to make himself a cup of coffee. "Anyone else want one?" he asks. Cathy hands him her mug, as today is one of her low-energy days and another caffeine boost is required. It’s only then that I notice her mug with its cartoon image of a rabbit reading Watership Down and saying, ‘F*cking Hell!’
It’s aged and chipped, but Cathy loves it. "It’s so funny because that book was terrifying," she says, a fizzing foil to the more laidback PJ. They knew each other for years, but it was only after her marriage ended that they got together through a mutual love of books. PJ lectures in business ethics. "A bit of an oxymoron," he jokes, before we talk about the couple’s epic motorbike ride through Morocco last November, another tick for the bucket list.
Last year, when I asked if cancer had crystallised the brevity of life, Kelly countered that such awareness was nothing new. "When I had my boys, I became aware of my mortality, realising that I now needed to be there for them," she said then. And yet the cancer diagnosis has changed her. "Absolutely," she says now.
"It’s like that saying by Confucius that we have two lives and the second begins when we realise we only have one! It’s that ‘Oh sh*t!’ moment when you realise that this is it. A cancer diagnosis is a life diagnosis, and you also must prepare for the possibility of it coming back and how you deal with that. But I’m a realist and that keen awareness of your mortality I see as a gift, as your priorities are all about the people you love and nothing is left unsaid."
She might be petite, bubbly and funny, but Cathy is also tough, with a resilience that came to the fore in the wake of her diagnosis. "I’ve always known I’m resilient," she says. "During the very bad days with the chemo treatment, you go into this animal state where you’re just about surviving. That was weird. And horrible. But I was also able to talk about it, and not everyone can do that.
"When I was very sick, reading about other people or talking with people on the ARC Cancer Support Centre video links was huge for me because you’d read or hear from these people saying how crap it was but that now they were doing well. You need people who can talk cancer and that’s so powerful when you feel your own body and mind disintegrating."
Now there are good days and bad days, regular check-ups and scans, but no medication. Other issues manifested in the wake of her cancer, including connective tissue disease. "One in 5,000 people have it, so guess what?" she says with a wry smile. "It means that you’re very bendy and is bad for the joints but sure that will be great when I get back into doing the yoga."
Her mother, Gay, who stopped by on Mother’s Day, found it hard coping with the cancer diagnosis (Cathy has two siblings, older brother Fran and younger sister, Lucy). "Especially when I lost my hair. I cut it myself, gave myself a buzz cut. It was a fun thing to do, although the rest of them thought it was a bit sad. I looked like a very sick person with a bald head for the first time. And in the middle of it all, my new book came out."
Sisterhood, published in paperback last month, is her 23rd novel. "Everyone is saying it’s number 23 so it must be," she says. Is she working on anything new? "Of course I am," she says, but is unable to say much about it, only that the first draft is due to be delivered to the publishers this month and that the plot involves therapy. Didn’t she also say she wanted to write crime fiction? "All my life I’ve wanted to write a thriller. In fact, I’ve started one, but it has to wait until I finish this one."
While none of her 23 books have been adapted for the screen, she came close with her fourth, Someone Like You. "All this stuff was happening and then nothing," she says. "So now I’m saying jack sh*t until I’m sitting in an actual cinema watching an actual film of one of my actual books."
And then it’s time to go. Outside, we look down from the house to the views below, a place of memories and moments. We walk past the closed garage ("better not look in there") and talk of brighter days ahead. That new novel coming in 2025, a new home, and the second life of the only life we get.
I ask her how she might feel if she was unable to write again. She never really answers, instead saying how she loves doing creative, crafty things like knitting and crotchet, and that she’d like to do more TV (she was on Dancing With The Stars, walked a chunk of Kerry for Tracks and Trails). But for the next month, Cathy Kelly has a book to finish, a house to sell and a life to live, one stepping stone at a time.
I leave her with a hug and all those hopes simmering.
Sisterhood by Cathy Kelly is published by Harper Collins and is out now in paperback.
