Author Sinead Moriarty is looking radiant. Arminta Wallace finds out what's behind the glow.
'Hello, I'm Emma. Used to be a normal, happy, level-headed person. I had a great husband, lovely friends, a job I enjoyed and a very lively social life - until I decided to have a baby and turned into Kathy Bates in Misery." Given the opening sentence of her début novel The Baby Trail, I sit somewhat apprehensively in the Shelbourne Hotel, half-expecting Sinead Moriarty to come hurtling in, fling herself into a chair, order a pot of green tea and launch into a lengthy rant about luteinising hormones and low sperm counts.
But Sinead Moriarty is not Emma. In the first place, as she points out with her almost angelic smile, The Baby Trail is a novel, not a memoir. "It's not an autobiography by any stretch - though the idea for the book did come to me when I started trying to get pregnant, and found it to be a lot more complicated than I'd thought it would be," she says. And in the second place - is that a bump she's carrying beneath her smock, or . . .? She smiles again; and this time there's a definite hint of radiance. It is indeed a bump; the baby is due at the end of October.
A happy ending proves rather more elusive in the book. Emma's increasingly desperate attempts to conceive involve adopting a diet of vegetables and tofu, doing handstands after sex, keeping a stern eye on her husband's activities in the shower and poking about her lower regions, getting up close and personal with discharges most women would rather not know about. However, the tone of The Baby Trail remains resolutely light-hearted - many of the episodes are laugh-out-loud hilarious - which, as Moriarty explains, was exactly what she wanted to achieve.
"Some of the treatments in the book are ones that I experienced, some of them aren't. I never had IVF, for example; I never had a laparoscopy. But even when I was going through some fairly unpleasant tests I always kept my sense of humour. In fact, I think it probably kept me sane. I had read all these books about what you should eat and how you should do yoga and all that sort of stuff, but I hadn't come across anything that dealt with the whole thing in a humorous way. Not by making light of it - just by poking fun at some of the slightly more daft aspects of trying to conceive. The best humour often stems from despair. I was sitting in the hospital one day, surrounded by women who all looked equally stressed-out, and I thought, 'My God, I should write about this - and I should make it funny'."
Didn't she have doubts about sharing those personal experiences with a potential audience of millions? Fiction or not, some of this stuff is seriously intimate, isn't it? She nods. "Absolutely. I'm a very private person, so writing the book - and knowing that if I was ever lucky enough to get published, the question would inevitably arise about the parallels between the story and my own life - was quite a worry."
And it is, of course, a novel; written while Moriarty was living in London - she has since moved back to Dublin - and working as a journalist with trade magazines. "I've always wanted to have a book published, and had been tinkering around with writing short stories and bits of novels and stuff for about three years, but I knew that I needed a fresh angle on the whole 'Meeting Mr Right' thing that other people had done so well. And like everything in life, at first I didn't see it because I was so immersed in it. My subject was staring me in the face the whole time."
She joined a creative writing course in Maida Vale which was, she says, "hugely helpful". "I'd never shown anybody anything I'd written before, and this was nerve-racking; everybody brought in a chapter of whatever they were writing, and read it, and people made comments." By the time I'd written half of the book my teacher suggested I should send it off - she felt really strongly that it had a very good chance of getting published."
And now it's in the shops, and Moriarty is to be a mum. She flashes another angelic smile. Glow, be damned: this woman is positively radiating. "It has been an amazing year," she concedes. Is that the end of madcap Emma and her pre-natal mayhem, then? Is it heck. "I've just completed the sequel, actually," says Moriarty with a grin which could melt chocolate.
The Baby Trail, by Sinead Moriarty, is published by Penguin Ireland at €10.35