Write of Passage Edel Coffey
Edel Coffey worked as an arts journalist with the Sunday Tribune. She has since worked as a broadcaster with RTÉ Radio and as editor of the Irish Independent Weekend magazine and as Books Editor of the Irish Independent.
She lives in Galway with her husband and children. Breaking Point is her first novel.
How did the idea for Breaking Point first come to you?
I had been wanting to write about the challenges of our always-on modern culture – the relentless demands, tasks and pressure – when I heard a news report about a baby who had been forgotten in a car. I knew immediately that was something I wanted to include in Breaking Point, to highlight the kind of pressure-cooker environment we live in.
What is your favourite opening line of any novel?
‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.’ (Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier). It’s been filmed many times but no film has ever been brave enough to stick to the original story in the book. It’s a mesmerising book of moral ambiguity, one that blurs the lines between dream and reality, what’s real and what is not, the living and the dead.
Is there a book from childhood that has stayed with you?
The one that sticks with me, probably because it unsettled me so much, was a collection called Unfamiliar Marvels: The Golden Treasury of Children’s Literature, which was full of creepy fairy tales that didn’t culminate in the simplistic happy endings of children’s literature.
Which writers have most influenced you?
As a teenager I ploughed through the classics, including Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Kafka and Camus, which I think added a dark lacquer to my own writing style. As an adult, I’ve been influenced by writers like Joan Didion and Janet Malcolm for their forensic prose style, and the French-moroccan author Leila Slimani for how she blends a literary writing style with the narrative devices of the thriller.
Is there a book that changed your life or career?
I can’t say there is, but certain books have changed my outlook or perspective. As a young girl, writers like Marian Keyes and Patricia Scanlan showed me that writing didn’t have to be about the elsewhere, the other, but that it could also be about the familiar, the ordinary, the recognisable.
Why do you write?
I write to make sense of things. I keep a journal and if something happens, be it good or bad, I write about it until it no longer feels personal. Martin Amis said it’s only when you write that you can impose form and pattern and humour and comedy on your life and I tend to agree with that.
What is the one book you would have on that desert island?
It would be a toss-up between Charles Dickens’s monumental Bleak House, which I adore, or Jane Austen’s Persuasion, which I know is not as popular as her big hits but I love it for its nuance and more mature reflection on life’s disappointments, which tempers the romance of the novel – but only ever so slightly.