Lisa’s glorious rise to the top
‘When I was a child I didn’t think, “I want to be a writer” because I thought I already was one...’
feel very much that to be a writer is a personality type; it’s a way of looking at the world. And I think you’re born thinking a certain way or looking at it a certain way. I think writers are born. That’s not to say that it’s not a skill that has to be learned and honed, but the idea of me wanting to do it as a career, it never really came up that way. It was just a case of me going, “Well, I have to write to make sense of things”.’
She was constantly writing as a child – even designing covers – and as she got older, she penned a diary that was consumed voraciously by her friends. She began an arts degree in English and Geography at UCC, though she never completed it. ‘I had no idea what I wanted to do, so I took a year out and ended up meeting my husband – and that was the end of that,’ she laughs.
Her husband John worked in hotels, so they moved around a bit. Her daughter, now 14, began school in Cork and Lisa worked as a receptionist in the construction industry – which then began to falter, something she describes as ‘quite scary’. And as Lisa puts it, as the economy went down, so did hotels. John’s not working at the moment – but Lisa explains: ‘He’s at home with me and kind of supporting me, and by supporting I mean making a lot of tea for me and listening when I go on endlessly about my work and my characters! He is quite literally a captive audience.’
Lisa says her next books will feature some of the characters introduced in The Glorious Heresies, and will again be set in Cork. ‘Maybe when I’m incredibly rich and I have a house in Fiji, I’ll worry about Fiji – but for now I’m focusing on Ireland,’ she says.