While aspiring novelists are gritting their teeth at the notion that a 21 year old could scoop one of the best book deals in history, we parents are looking at Cecelia Ahern with a different agenda. How did her parents do it? Here is a young woman, growing up in the public eye, the child of separated parents, with all the other social pressures that attend adolescence, and she has come up trumps.

Whatever about Cecelia's own considerable talents, there was some awfully good parenting going on there. Her mother wisely let her sit up all night and write. She told her to keep going and gave her confidence. Cecelia's father, too, seems to have been an inspiration - reading between the lines.

The plot tells the story - a woman who feels she cannot cope with practical issues, has a joke with her young husband that were he to die, she would be at sea. Then he does die. So he leaves her a series of letters, one for each month of her first year of mourning, telling her what to do. It's a terrific allegory for what parents give their children. Children internalise their parents' advice. When one parent leaves the family home, it can be experienced as a kind of death by children. Internalising the "absent" parent becomes even more important. Your parents are always voices in your head. When they are positive voices, you do well. That's the lesson from Cecelia Ahern.