Cappagh GAA club in Co Kildare boasts a young author among its ranks. Louise Nealon (for it is she) has recently signed a book deal for her début novel, Snowflake, which will be published next year. Louise spoke to fellow-Kildare person Ray D'Arcy on Tuesday about her book deal, how people with mental illness are failed by the system and playing corner-back in Cappagh's intermediate club championship-winning side.

Louise won the Seán Ó Faoláin Short Story Competition in 2017 and that led to her getting a literary agent, Marianne Gunn-O'Connor, whom she describes as "a magical person".

"She has been a really positive force in my writing life that I really needed, to be honest. But I always thought she was – I always suspected that she was kind of like an invisible friend. And it was only when my dad talked to her on the phone that I was like, 'Ok, she's a real person. This has actually happened.' "

Snowflake is a fictional story, but Louise has drawn on a lot of her own experience with depression in writing it. She states in the promotional material for the book that, "There is a buffer of silence around mental illness that psychiatry has failed to penetrate". Ray asked her what she meant by that. She told him that it goes back to her late teenage years:

"I went to Trinity first and then I dropped out because I really wasn't feeling well. I didn't realise that I was depressed and I wasn't diagnosed with depression for a couple of years. So I was kind of lost and on my own."

When she was finally diagnosed, Louise was put on medication and she started seeing therapists. Therapy has been a bit of a mixed bag, though, she's met with some very good therapists and then, she say,s some therapy has not been so great.

"So I always felt like I was kind of feeling around in the dark trying to manage my mental illness and the only times that I felt that fog around it, or the mist around it, was lifted, was actually when I was in the world of a book."

Louise describes the way she feels when she gets lost in a good book as being a relief; she forgets who she is and what's going on in her life and gets totally wrapped up in another person's – a fictional person's – life instead. Her GP recommended she read Marian Keyes, "as an example of a person who struggled in their 20s and early life and she went on to have a successful career". Louise looked up interviews with Marian Keyes and then read her novels and laughed so much.

"There've been so many other writers, Irish and international, that have just been such an inspiration to me and they're the ones who've really helped me through a difficult time, even if they don't know it."

You can hear more from Ray and Louise's chat, including how Louise's entire household went into mourning when Ray left The Den, as well as more details about Snowflake, on Tuesday's show here. And you can read Louise's prize-winning short story, What Feminism Is, here.

If you have any issues with depression or mental health, you can access services to help here.

Niall Ó Sioradáin