WITH HER mass of curly red hair, pale complexion and green eyes, it's easy to see why people assume the best-selling author Maggie O'Farrell – who recently won the Costa Novel Award 2010 for her fifth book, The Hand that First Held Mine– is Irish.
And, in fact, she is – technically, at least. O’Farrell was born in Coleraine, Co Derry, in 1972, but within two years the family had decamped to Wales, before moving to Edinburgh, where she spent the rest of her childhood. Today, Scotland is the place O’Farrell calls home.
She has never been back to the North. There was some disapproval, apparently, when locals discovered that her Quaker parents hadn’t baptised the infant Maggie. But she’s promised her seven-year-old son Saul (middle name Seamus) a trip to the Giant’s Causeway, since he’s fascinated by the Finn McCool story.
The family returned to the Republic every year, however, to visit friends and relatives of her Dublin-born father, spending summers in Dingle, Connemara and Donegal. “My parents always kept Irish literature and legends alive for me,” says O’Farrell. “The joke in the family is that Dad’s bedtime stories were always Irish folk tales.”
These stories stayed in her mind becoming the “bedrock” for her creative imagination, she says.
Sipping herbal tea in an Edinburgh cafe, O’Farrell seems open and engaged, pleasantly self-deprecating and down-to-earth. There’s no arrogance, no pose of ponderous intellectualism with her. A mother of two, she cheerfully tells anecdotes about her children, how Saul came up behind her when she was working at her desk and placed a cardboard box on her head, “to stop you thinking, Mummy”.
She laughs and squirms with embarrassment at the thought of coming across the stash of poetry she wrote years ago, before she took up novel-writing.
“I don’t know if I gave poetry up, or it gave me up. What happened was that my ex-boyfriend’s mother gave me one of those massive old Apple Macs, and I just sat down and started writing fiction.”
O’Farrell is watchful yet poised. You sense there is a cool, appraising intelligence at work behind the smiles and laughter. This is a woman who knows exactly what she is doing, and how to do it very well.
O'Farrell has a knack for balancing critical and commercial success: her books are just as likely to be ecstatically reviewed in Heatmagazine as they are in the Times Literary Supplement. A former journalist, she specialises in a form of fiction best described as "domestic Gothic" – mystery tales where fate and coincidence shatter the smooth surface of everyday life. Her legions of fans often describe rushing home to finish her books, desperate to know what happens in the end.
Not everyone is a fan of her style. Novelist and critic Julie Myerson has railed against the elaborate descriptions she sometimes uses, and another disgruntled reader has dismissed it as “Mills and Boon trying to be deep”.
Nonetheless, since her first novel, After You'd Gone, O'Farrell has been widely acknowledged as a deft practitioner of smart, suspenseful women's fiction, a kind of latterday Daphne du Maurier. The Hand That First Held Mine, while exploring broadly the same territory, represents a move towards a more substantial, more ambitious, literary approach.
Taking the form of two narratives, the book cuts between the 1950s – the story of Lexie Sinclair, a wild young graduate who escapes dreary rural Devon by running away to London with an urbane and charming magazine editor who happened to be passing in his car at just the right moment – and present day London, where Finnish artist Elina and her husband Ted are suffering from the disorientation of early parenthood, not to mention the trauma of a botched Caesarean section.
SO WHAT WAS HER INSPIRATION for the novel? “I’d seen an exhibition of portraits by John Deakin [a renowned photographer in 1950s and 1960s London, and a friend of Francis Bacon] in the Dean Gallery in Edinburgh. I was mesmerised by them, and I kept going back and buying postcards of the images. I’d already been thinking about a story in which a young woman runs away to London, so it was a kind of airbrushing in reverse. This character was lurking, and through these Soho street portraits she was able to emerge.”
O’Farrell’s real forte is birth and motherhood: the confusion, the frustration, the exhaustion, the jolts of deep, searing love. For instance, describing Elina’s infant son Jonah breastfeeding, O’Farrell says that he “begins to suck, with the absorbed air of someone getting down to business, his eyes moving back and forth, as if reading an invisible text in the air”.
Anyone who has ever breast-fed a child will nod in recognition of that image. But O’Farrell is keen to emphasise that her writing is not autobiographical. “I did keep diaries of my own emergency Caesarean, and I drew on these when I was writing. So it’s my own experience, yes, but seen through a prism.
“Fiction for me is an escape, an alternative existence, so I wouldn’t want to re-create my life on the page. There are elements of my life that filter into my books, but they are usually recast and redrawn and re-imagined to such a degree as to be unrecognisable to me or anyone else.”
O’Farrell has also written openly and movingly about her problems with secondary infertility, and subsequent IVF treatment, when she and her husband, the writer William Sutcliffe, were trying for a second child. Iris, her daughter, is now one.
Her subject matter may be rooted in female experience, yet she dislikes the idea of women's writing. It's the only time in our conversation that a touch of froideurcreeps into her voice.
“I don’t understand the gendering of writing. Why should childbirth be seen as a purely female subject? I wouldn’t ever choose a book on the basis of the writer’s gender, and I don’t think any reader decides on that basis either. ‘Women’s writing’ tends to be a term used by men. It’s not something I engage with.”
Far from the pram in the hall proving a hindrance, O’Farrell says that having children has had a beneficial effect on her work. “With young children, you write when you have half an hour. Time at my desk feels like an indulgence, a treat. I find the whole process of writing hugely enjoyable. It’s satisfying, like a puzzle that needs to be solved.
“Children are good editors. I don’t mean they get out the red pen, just that I have less time to follow up every whim, and I cut less from my books than I used to.”
All the same, she’s an inveterate re-writer, drafting each novel as many as 18 times, and she often leaves writing the opening until the end. “I find beginnings pretty hard, so I do them last.”
While she certainly knows how to construct a rollicking page-turner, O’Farrell’s greatest gift is for close observation and exquisite detail, a talent she developed at a young age.
“When I was eight I had an illness – a form of encephalitis – and I was off school for two years. I had to learn how to walk again, and I spent a long time in bed. Being an ill child is similar to the position of the novelist. You listen to everyday life going on all around you, but you’re not part of it. It turns you into an observer.”
O’Farrell is already at work on her next novel. All she will say is that it’s weather-related, and that it deals with the experiences of second generation Irish immigrants. She’s nowhere near giving it a title. Like the beginning, that will be added last: “It’s like naming a baby. You have to see the whole thing first before giving it a name.”
O'Farrell's tips for aspiring novelists
Read. Keep reading. Don’t stop. And don’t worry too much about starting your novel at the beginning. A blank page can be terrifying, and nothing will give you writer’s block faster.
Start in the middle, or wherever you want. Build up a solid word count – keep going, and don’t look back. It gives you something to work with.
Take advice. Give the manuscript to as many people as you can. You might not always like what you hear, but you need someone to be honest.
