In the past five years, having come through the break-up of her marriage and a diagnosis with cancer, the novelist Cathy Kelly has a new partner and a new home. "I'm a fixer," she tells Donal O’Donoghue when they met on the eve of the publication of her latest novel.
"Oh, I’m a fixer," says Cathy Kelly, when I ask the novelist about the DNA of her latest book, The Island Retreat, which chronicles the adventures of a disparate group at a luxury rehab retreat in Corfu. "I want to fix everyone, which is one of my fatal flaws." How is that a fatal flaw? "Because you can take on too much stuff and that can be very draining. Nowadays, I’m much better at saying 'I have limited energy and I need to shut this down’".
Yet that idea of fixing was the seed of Kelly’s 24th novel, in which a once-famous therapist hopes to rediscover her mojo. I wonder if the writer, whose marriage broke up in 2020 and who was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2023, ever needed to be fixed herself?
"Of course," she says. "As a writer, you need to look into yourself, because how could you presume to write about the lives of others if you’ve never investigated your own life?"
We meet in a hotel in Stillorgan and spend the first ten minutes scouting for a suitable place to talk. As we traipse up and down corridors, the effervescent Kelly gives a running commentary on everything from the state of the weather to the almost overpowering floral scent that fills the air. She is wearing a necklace with an amber pendant and a miniature casket containing the ashes of her pet pooch, Dinky.
Despite a dodgy knee and other ailments, she is determinedly upbeat, occasionally putting on a funny voice or accent when recalling various anecdotes about herself. Earlier that morning, she had been painting shelves – "look at the state of my hands!" – installed by her partner PJ at their new home. Now she sips her coffee and rummages through her handbag for some sachets of sugar. "It’s my only drug," she says, and smiles.
Kelly lives in Bray, County Wicklow, with PJ and their pets: dogs, Scamp and Licky and cat, Juno. She’s still decluttering her new home, but some keepsakes are impossible to jettison. "I have boxes filled with the boys’ school copybooks with their stories and drawings and artwork," she says of her 22-year-old twin boys (with John Sheehan), Murray and Dylan.
Murray, who is studying women’s fashion wear, and Dylan, a student of biochemistry in Trinity, are both doing great, she says. How is she doing? "I’m good, but the thing with cancer is that you’re waiting to hit the five-year mark, which is a key milestone. I was diagnosed in July 2023, so it will be the summer of 2028. I’m not on any medication because the medication I was on gave me suicidal ideation, and that was no fun. I have check-ups every six months, all is going well, but that five-year thing is such a big deal."
‘Attack each day with enthusiasm,’ the motto of one of her characters in The Island Retreat, is something Kelly also likes to abide by. "I do like to attack each day with enthusiasm, but a lot depends on my energy levels," she says. "My big line when times are tough is to ask, ‘Did anybody die?’.
And if nobody died or is dying, then things aren’t that bad. I think that’s a very post-cancer belief for me, as the stakes have now changed. I wasn’t always like that, but isn’t age brilliant? Well, there are many negatives to ageing, but the positives are that you can see what’s all around and you think, ‘We can get through this’.
Of course, there’s much pain in the world, as in Sudan, where I was supposed to travel to last year (Kelly is a UNICEF ambassador), but if you’re living a reasonably OK life, well, don’t sweat the small stuff."
There are sections in The Island Retreat that suggest a writer who knows her way around a counselling session.
"I’ve had therapy," says Kelly. Did that make it easier to write those scenes? "No. I had desperate trouble trying to make it work because the therapy I’ve had has been long-term rather than just one week, which is a very short time to fix people." She has not had therapy for several years.
"I had a wonderful therapist, whom I did contact after I got cancer, saying, ‘This is very hard’. Now I think it would help me to go back and see her. But I couldn’t have got through cancer without my family, my boys and PJ. And yes, there were days, lying in bed feeling so appalling that you think, I’d like to be dead, and maybe I will be dead. In those moments, you’re on your own. But in those moments also, I said to myself, ‘I have the strength to do this.’"
More than two years on, the world looks different. "I’ve come out the other side of cancer a different person. I like to think I could cope with pretty much anything. The only thing I could never imagine is the death of my children. That’s something I cannot ever write about in my books."
She writes about most everything else – divorce, addiction, suicide, depression, regret – often spiced with humour. In The Island Retreat, we meet Grazia, a trophy wife of a business magnate, who "could be howling with inner pain, and her face would show the faintly surprised look of the heavily enhanced."
Has Kelly ever considered such enhancements? "I have had Botox in the past, and it was great, and years ago I thought I might get my eyes done, but it could all go horribly wrong," she says. "So no, I won’t be going the way of Grazia. I’d like to be able to move my face."
Elsewhere in her novel, Kelly writes about the formative teen years of one of her characters. Did her experiences with Murray and Dylan help in writing those scenes? "No. I went back to my old teenage years and mined that experience," she says. "I was clever in school, even though I didn’t believe I was back then. I wasn’t happy and realised years later I was suffering with depression, totally unmedicated. But that was a totally different time.
"I loved English and had this wonderful English teacher for the Inter Cert, and my essays were read out but my Leaving Cert was not so good. And so, not the happiest years of my life, but college (Journalism in Rathmines) was so liberating after those years in a convent school."
It was Rathmines that shaped her path in journalism, working as a film reviewer (and agony aunt) with the Sunday World newspaper before becoming a full-time novelist.
Unlike Keera, the heavily inked Pop Princess in The Island Retreat, she has no tattoos. "I once thought I’d like to get a tattoo, maybe a small one," she says. "But you’d be afraid that tiny little dolphin would one day grow into a great big blue whale." Also, unlike Keera, she has never taken any illegal substances.
"I’ve never taken drugs, but Keera was great to write because of her complexities, numbing her pain with alcohol and drugs. I was always very straight with my boys on such matters. I believe you’ve got to arm them with all the information. I told them that no matter what happens, they could come to me and talk about it. We’re very close."
Last time we met, Kelly said she’s always calm in a crisis. Is that still the case? "My calm in a crisis is a front as inwardly I’m quaking," she says. "It’s like ‘What can I do now?’"
Cathy Kelly is a fixer, but ever striving to fix herself, too. Writing helped her recovery. "When I was going through chemo, there was a time I wondered if I would ever come out of it, let alone write," she says (Sisterhood, her first novel post-diagnosis, was published in 2024).
"I cannot ever imagine not writing, and I see myself as a little old lady in her 80s working on yet another book (she still has plans for a crime thriller and a children’s book). I’m 60 this year, but it’s not a big deal.
"My best friend, Emma (Hannigan, writer), never made it to 60 (she died at the age of 45 in 2018), so it’s a privilege to be still here. The birthday celebrations will be low-key, and there’ll be no party because that would involve tidying the house. And while I hope to be around in 20 years' time, I just don’t know. Cancer brings that uncertainty home to you. But I’m still here, and in way, that’s a little miracle."
The Island Retreat by Cathy Kelly is published by HarperCollins
