The Honey Queen (50 page)

‘In the world of journalism, they want you to be rivals,’ Kelly says. ‘When I was a journalist, that was the vibe, and it was so toxic – they wanted you to be aggressive, to beat others to stories, to do them down. But that’s a horrible way to live your life. It took me a while, after I had got out, to say to myself, “That isn’t who you are, you don’t have to be like that”.’

As for rivalry: ‘The pie is infinite,’ Kelly says, meaning that she does not jealously guard her share. ‘There’s no point in saying, “I hate so and so, because she sold so many copies”.

‘Marian is a mate, and I love her to bits. I’ve read her new novel, and it’s amazing – she’s just brilliant. She’s just so funny and gifted, an amazing diarist of life and how human beings feel. Nobody can do what she can do. Even her newsletter is brilliant: I can have been talking to her the day before, and the newsletter pings in and I’m so excited to see it.’ Browsing in an airport bookshop recently, she noticed that a novel by Patricia Scanlan was at number one in the shop’s bestseller list, and texted Scanlan with the news.

Kelly’s generous attitude to other writers extends to mentoring those at the starts of their careers. One of them has been Emma Hannigan, who began writing after she had been diagnosed with breast cancer, which has since returned seven times but is now in remission. ‘I’m very proud of her. She hasn’t really broken over here [in Britain], but she should.’ Kelly has been known to rearrange bookshop displays to give Hannigan’s novels more prominence. ‘I would NEVER do that with one of my own books,’ she adds.

Of course, there are many people who want Kelly’s advice and help. ‘I never mind,’ she insists. ’I love helping people, and I’m always there to help new writers. I’m a huge believer in mentorship.’

Does she never regret her reputation for being helpful? ‘There have been occasions when people have stuck manuscripts in my letter box,’ she concedes. ‘I’m getting better at drawing boundaries. About two years ago, I got a part-time assistant, Sarah, who deals with these enquiries, and sometimes she will say, “Cathy is really busy”. It works out ok. I’m not bombarded.’

No writers enjoy criticism, and aspiring writers can take it particularly hard. How does she give advice? ‘I think you have to be honest but not devastating. In the beginning I’d work quite closely with people. Now there are websites like Authonomy [run by HarperCollins] where people can get a lot of feedback. You do have to be frank, to a point.

‘But when people get referred to you by someone you know, you’re in trouble. I remember this lovely woman, and she had this massive manuscript. I said to her, “This is about eight books, and they’re all different, and they’re all glued together, and you need to do x, y, and z”. And she’d say, “Oh no, but I love this bit”, and I realised she wasn’t hearing anything I was telling her.

‘About a year later, I got a letter from her saying, “Nobody is interested in my book, what do I do next?” What do you say? And there was a friend of a friend who emailed me – I was actually cross about this – and her email was so badly written, with random capitals all over the place. So in a case like that, you just have to say, “Go away”, as nicely as you can.’

It’s not as if Kelly has an excess of time on her hands. She is a mother of twins, and lives with them and her husband, former Sony Music Ireland Managing Director John Sheehan, in County Wicklow. She produces a book a year, and goes on regular publicity tours – last year, she went to Canada, and this year she has been in Australia. She also travels as part of her work as an Ambassador for UNICEF, for which she has visited Rwanda and Mozambique, highlighting the charity’s ‘Unite for Children, Unite against AIDS’ and ‘Schools for Africa’ campaigns. Her fellow ambassadors include Rory McIlroy, Liam Neeson, Stephen Rea, Gabriel Byrne, and Pierce Brosnan.

‘I feel like a big sponge for pain,’ she says. ‘The genocide museum in Rwanda: oh God, I can’t begin to tell you about it. There was a children’s room... I’d always had it in my mind that I wanted to visit Auschwitz, but now I know that I couldn’t do it, because Rwanda was too much for me.

‘Then you go to Mozambique, and see a clinic with mothers and their babies sitting outside in the sun. Pick five of those babies, and one will be dead before his or her fifth birthday.’

How she writes

Many of us, given Kelly’s home life, might be inclined to enjoy it to the exclusion of experiences such as these. She and Sheehan have been together since roughly the time when she started writing, but they got married only a couple of years ago – after their six-year-old twin boys had started asking them when they would. The family lives with three Jack Russell terriers. Kelly describes her writing routine: ‘Before I had children, I would spend about eight hours a day at the computer, and I probably wrote less. Now, I take the children to school, come home, maybe have some breakfast, flip through the papers, hug the dogs about 800 times, and put on the washing.

‘John and I share a study. That’s fine, because I was raised in a newsroom where you write no matter what’s going on. But about a year ago I changed one of the bedrooms into a study, with no internet access, just books and pictures of things I like and of my family, and candles – Marian sent me a lovely candle recently. The internet had become so intrusive when I was working downstairs – you’d think, “I wonder if so-and-so’s got back to me?” It’s really a very bad way to write. So I might spend a few minutes on urgent stuff downstairs, and then I go upstairs, and work there, with breaks for tea or coffee, until the boys come out of school. I rarely try to write after that, because I never wanted the boys to think that my work was more important than them.

‘School holidays are hysterical. In Ireland, they’re three months. I have a Brazilian girl who comes in – well, she’s not a girl, she’s 30, but she’s so much younger than I am. [Kelly is 45.] Sometimes I’ll have a blast of work at the weekends if the boys are away on a playdate. But I love having the children in the house, being with them and doing things with them.’ A favourite game involves making up stories: ‘One of the boys will say, “The Pacific Ocean and China”, and the other, “A banana and a computer”, and I have to make up a story with all those things in it.’

After 14 novels, she is still sometimes prey to the insecurities she felt when starting out. ‘There are many days when I think, “This is cobblers, and I should delete it all”. And I feel dispirited and that I’ve failed. At those moments, you long to be in a 9 to 5 job, where at the end of the day you turn off your computer and that’s it. There are lots of days like that. But so much of the time I love it. I feel so lucky to do this amazing thing.’

Interview with Nicholas Clee, first published in New Books magazine, September 2012

www.newbooksmag.com

By the same author:

Woman to Woman

She’s the One

Never Too Late

Someone Like You

What She Wants

Just Between Us

Best of Friends

Always and Forever

Past Secrets

Lessons in Heartbreak

Once in a Lifetime

Homecoming

The House on Willow Street

Christmas Magic
(Short Stories)

The Perfect Holiday
(Quick Read)

Copyright

HarperCollins
Publishers

77–85 Fulham Palace Road,

Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by HarperCollins
Publishers
2013

Cathy Kelly asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Source ISBN: 9780007373659

Version 1

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical,dpg now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.