MY YEAR OF LIVING BRAVELY: author Dervla McTiernan’s shock year of highs and lows

As Dervla McTiernan’s dreams were about to come true, a shock diagnosis threatened to destroy everything.

It was a Friday morning and Dervla McTiernan was supposed to be taking her two small children on a holiday. Instead, she was sitting in her car outside a GP’s office in Perth with her heart in her throat. In one hand, she held her phone, and an email that could make all of her dreams come true. A literary agent loved the sample she’d read of Dervla’s first novel and wanted to see more. In the other hand was a piece of paper representing a threat that could smash everything to a thousand pieces – a list of neurologists her doctor had urged her to call immediately to remove the large tumour that had just been detected in Dervla’s brain.

“The doctor had said, ‘You have

a brain tumour and it’s big and it’s serious and you need to get it out, basically now,” she says.

That moment in the sun-baked Perth car park was far from any future Dervla had ever imagined for herself. She grew up in Ireland’s cool, green, coastal city of Galway, which is where she set her compelling debut novel. She and her husband Kenny had left their home after the global financial crisis crushed the Irish economy.

They travelled halfway around the world to start afresh. But the day in the car park in mid-2016 represented the end of another kind of journey. The move to Australia had inspired an act of bravery – Dervla had always wanted to publish a book and after arriving in Perth had dedicated herself to writing every night. Eighteen months of labour had resulted in her first work of fiction, but towards the end of the project she was being plagued by headaches.

Now, the dream of seeing her work published was tantalisingly close.

And yet so far. The tumour could blind her, or even kill her. “I think I went into denial,” Dervla says.

She drove home to tell Kenny what the doctor had said. Hearing the news, his eyes filled with tears, but Dervla couldn’t believe the prognosis.

“I said, ‘Look, we don’t need to worry. It’s cracked. It can’t be right.’”

The GP Dervla had seen was not her usual doctor, and she was sceptical about the cavalier way the news had been delivered. She emailed the medical report to her sister – a doctor – to get a second opinion. Then she took her children Freya and Oisin on their longed-for holiday. When Dervla’s sister called from Ireland, the news was bad. Scans had revealed a large tumour wrapped around Dervla’s pituitary gland. It was pressing against her optic nerve. The tumour wasn’t cancerous but it needed to be removed or it would continue to grow and eventually calcify.

“They used to say it’s a benign tumour in a malignant location,” Dervla says.“I was thinking, this must be an episode from The Truman Show. My life was too boring so they’ve decided to throw in a few juicy things.”

Dervla had always harboured a secret dream of writing a book. But as it always does, life got in the way. She studied diligently, trained at a big UK law firm, then, aged 26, opened her own firm in Galway. She embraced the work but the hours were punishing. And they didn’t let up when she became a mother.

At one point, she was running an urgent case at the commercial court of the High Court while still breastfeeding her first-born.

“Mum had Freya in a hotel down the road so I could run back and breastfeed,” she says. “It was just stupid, when you look back. But those were the decisions you make.”

And then the global financial crisis hit. “A lot of my clients lost literally everything,” says Dervla. “The practice was struggling. I was pregnant, and I said, ‘I can’t do it again’.”

A REVELATION

Dervla and Kenny took a leap of faith and moved to Perth, where Kenny urged Dervla to pursue her writing dream. “The global financial crisis was such a wake-up call. Kenny and I both felt we played by the rules and it didn’t work,” says Dervla. “Now we can do it our way.”

She laughs. “At first, I was so bad and I was writing so slow.” But she persevered, pushing on through the doubt. After six months, came a revelation – the writing process clicked and she found herself on a roll.

“It just becomes so rewarding in and of itself. It was the missing piece. It was the bit I needed. Once I broke that barrier I would have kept writing for the rest of my life because it just makes me happy. It makes me fulfilled,” Dervla says. When she was satisfied with her manuscript, she sent off the first three chapters to a literary agent and got on with life. It wasn’t until the fateful Friday morning that she heard anything.

So there Dervla was in the car park that was also a fork in the road of her life. Things got worse when the first surgeon Dervla saw told her the tumour was inoperable. “Everyone had said ‘It has to come out’, and now someone was saying ‘I don’t know if it can’,” Dervla says. “He would have had to do a craniotomy and move my brain. He thought it was too high risk, even though I’d already been told this tumour is going to keep growing.”

Luckily, the surgeon had a colleague, Dr Stephen Lewis, who had developed a new method. Stephen and his brother Richard performed the surgery together using a technique that involved going up through the nose in what’s called the transsphenoidal approach.

Ten days later, Dervla checked out of hospital. She was recovering at home when email arrived from her literary agent asking for a chat.

“I had Kenny prop me up on the couch,” says Dervla. “You don’t want the first conversation you have with an agent to be, ‘I’ve just had brain surgery, but you can really rely on my writing’.”

Six publishers vied for the rights to publish The Ruin – which follows

Irish detective Cormac Reilly as he investigates the links between two deaths that occurred 20 years apart. When The Weekly met with Dervla, she had just submitted the manuscript for her next book and is already planning more. With everything that has happened she has barely had time to reflect on what she has achieved.

“It hasn’t sunk in and I don’t know if it ever will,” Dervla says.

The Ruin by Dervla McTiernan, Harpercollins Australia, RRP $32.99, is out now.

“The doctor said ‘you have a brain tumour and it’s big and it’s serious’.”