The bright side of the road
Following her diagnosis with breast cancer last year, Cathy Kelly’s unbreakable sense of humour has helped her through good days and bad. The best-selling novelist talks to Donal O’donoghue
“I’m very good with getting bad news,” says Cathy Kelly, the bestselling author who last year was diagnosed with breast cancer. “When I get bad news, I just think ‘Okay, it’s happened, and I’ll deal with this’. So, I didn’t go to pieces when I got the news last summer. e thing is that as soon as I had kids, I also became aware of my mortality, realising that I now needed to be there for the boys (twins, Dylan and Murray). When I got diagnosed with breast cancer, it was the same thing. I will die someday of course, but I just don’t want it to happen right now because there are things I need to do in order to take care of my boys and my family. I’m not frightened of dying in the slightest, I just want to make sure that the people I love are safe and happy before that happens.” Cathy, speaking from her home in Wicklow, looks fab. No wig, Head shaved (by her own hand), Funky red glasses. A piece of vivid orange jewellery hangs from her neck as well as a pendant containing the ashes of her beloved dog, Dinky, that died in January from cancer, just before her surgery. “I had the wig on earlier for a photoshoot [to promote her new novel, Sisterhood] but you’re getting the ‘no wig’ look, which is much more comfortable,” she says. Despite all – her treatment has had several setbacks of which more later – the 57-year-old is upbeat, saying how the prognosis last July was good and life goes on. But she’s also human and the bad days can come too. “I either say to my friends ‘Feck cancer’ or ‘It is what it is’, depending on the day.”
Today is the day before her second surgical procedure. “I had a mammaplasty at the beginning of January which revealed another type of cancer in the same boob,” says Cathy with a ‘Wouldn’t-you-just-know-it’ shrug. “I’m going into surgery tomorrow to have the last piece removed, a minor operation. But I’m okay if they had to remove my boobs. ey can stick in plastic pointy-up ones! I just want to be alive.”
She is very much alive, busy promoting Sisterhood, a tale of two sisters, Toni and Lou, who embark on a life-changing trip following devastating revelations. It’s a rattling read, of secrets and lies and loyalty, that opens with Lou, the morning a er her 50th birthday, on the precipice of despair, beset by internal anxiety – or ‘ e Barking Dog’ as the book has it.
“I also have the barking dog,” says Kelly. “It’s when you get something that frightens you or makes you anxious and the barking dog takes over. en it’s all about how you can calm that dog. I have Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) and depression. I didn’t talk about my depression for a long time because I was paranoid that people would say that I was jumping on the bandwagon and using it to publicise a new book. But it’s something I’ve lived with my whole life. I had my rst depressive episode when I was 14 and I’ve been on and o anti-depressants most of my life. But the thing is that because I’m funny – at least I think I am – people believe that you can’t be funny and be depressed. For me, humour is a great way of dealing with darkness.”
Cathy is funny, with a neat line in gallows humour, despite events of recent years including the break-up of her marriage, the cancer diagnosis, and all the rest (and there is, she says, much more). “I have two auto-immune diseases, vitiligo and chronic fatigue, and then cancer comes along, so I wasn’t surprised when it did,” she says. “Last year I felt something in my breast, went into Breastcheck, was called back, an ultrasound was done as well as a triplebiopsy and ten days later the diagnosis was con rmed.” Since then, she’s been through the wars. “I had a port which got infected. In rare circumstances, PICC lines can cause clots. So, who gets a clot? Me! I’m now injecting myself every day with anti-clotting medicine. I also got pneumonia during my week in hospital. But you just have to laugh at it all.”
Last time we spoke, in 2022, Cathy Kelly had a new man in her life, PJ. All going well? She raises two thumbs. PJ was with her the day of her cancer diagnosis and has been a rock ever since. But some things you must go through on your own, like breaking the news to her sons. “I told the boys that the prognosis was good and then I tried to make it fun with the haircutting,” she says. “First, I gave myself a sleek bob, then a few insane Grayson Perrystyle looks before ending up with a pixie cut and eventually I just buzz cut it. But it was very hard for my mum. When my hair fell out it broke her heart to look at me. As a parent, you want to x this thing but the only person who can go through it is the person themselves. I’ve never written about someone losing a child in my books and I don’t think I ever could. It’s just too much.” Sisterhood is Cathy Kelly’s 23rd novel, since her 1997 debut, Woman to Woman. It was completed in late 2022, even though the character of Mim, a ghostly but signi cant presence in the book, would pre gure real life. “I thought a lot about my dear friend Emma (Hannigan) when I was writing this book,” she says, “and I have also thought a lot about Emma since I was diagnosed with cancer.”
Sisterhood also seems to have a lot more of Cathy Kelly in it than her other books. “I used to fear the personal but in recent years, maybe it’s age or all that has happened, I’m like ‘ is is me’ and so there is more of me in my writing and that is freeing. Feminism too has always informed everything that I’ve done. at’s why, down the years, I’d get annoyed when people would say that I was this ‘Romanticky writer’ and I’d go, ‘You never met me, I’m not like that at all.’”
In the novel, Mim, who has cancer, says how much she dislikes “the cancer ghting motif ”, thoughts that chime with the author. “So many people describe it as a battle or a ght,” says Kelly. “With cancer, there is this belief that your personal power can change the outcome and if something bad happens then your personal power has failed. Drugs and amazing doctors and medical sta : all of that is what makes the di erence. It’s not you there with your arm out like a warrior saying ‘Gimme more medication!’ I suspect it’s because people are so scared of cancer so it’s that fear factor.” And yet I suspect she’s a very good patient. “Yes, I’m fascinated by medicine and while so much that could go wrong did go wrong, I was also getting ideas for stories to beat the band.”
Her ideas come from everywhere. In one of the most vivid scenes in Sisterhood, Toni is menacingly confronted by a man. It recalls a real-life incident that Cathy has spoken about before in her 20s, working as a journalist, she was sexually assaulted by a male colleague. “Even following that assault, I thought I was a tough little person,” she says. “But the reality is that I’m ve foot tall so if someone decides to drag me into the bushes and beat the hell out of me, they can do that. Every day we read about female abuse and it’s terrifying. When I worked in journalism, I had my head patted by a male boss. I should have just whacked him. And I don’t believe it has changed an awful lot.”
Yet Kelly is tough, re ecting Sisterhood’s Toni Cooper who “never waited for anyone to save her. She saved herself.” e author nods. “Years ago, when I rst started writing, there was a lot of romance literature in which women were being saved by a wonderful man, but that’s not going to happen. You’ve got to save yourself and look a er yourself.” e author is never going to buy Lou’s line that ‘What’s for you won’t pass you by’. “Absolute cobblers! You will not get the job if you’re the doormat. You will not get the birthday present if you say to your husband ‘Ah don’t mind me! I’m ne’. I don’t believe that in the slightest. What’s for you will pass you by at high speed if you don’t try to take it.” As for karma (which also pops up in the novel), “I’d love to believe in it but mostly, life doesn’t work like that,” she says. “I just hope that those people who do you wrong are not happy in their life.”
Has the recent past prompted her to turn to a higher power? (She was raised in Dublin in a Catholic home, but she readily confesses to a blissful ignorance of Testaments Old and New and all else too) “I’m not at all religious,” she says. “When I was in hospital I put down ‘None’ for the question on religion because I didn’t want some lovely person to come along, with the best intentions, to talk me into their world. I have my own beliefs and I’m happy with them. ey’re quite spiritual, pagan in a way, not that I dance around the garden scantily clad, but I simply believe in doing good things for other people. Simply put, I believe in kindness and the goodness of humanity (Kelly is a goodwill ambassador for UNICEF Ireland).” Despite the rat-a-tat of medical treatment, she’s managed to tap out the beginnings of her next novel. “I don’t have massive amounts of energy, but my brain is exploding with stu ,” she says. “So much has happened to me in the last few years.” Has she ever considered penning a memoir? “Ah Jaysus no, but I would like to write a couple of thrillers and I have a few ideas in my head. ere’s so many ways you can kill someone, isn’t there?” Anyone in mind, Cathy? She laughs. Literary ambitions aside, there’s also a long-postponed epic motorbike trip with PJ (“I’m going to need most of the pannier space for my clothes!”).
For Cathy Kelly right now, gratitude is the overwhelming emotion. “I have so many beautiful people in my life, and the fact that I’m still here, and that is good.”
Cover shoot: Photographer: Kip Carroll; stylist: Justine King; make-up: Breifne Keogh.
Look 1: Earrings, Magpie Rose Jewellery, magpierose.com; necklace, Zo&co, zoandco.ie; purple/pink print jacket, top and boots, Serena Boutiques, serenaboutiques.com; jeans, Di usion.ie
Look 2: Navy pinstripe blazer, t-shirt, jeans and boots, Serena Boutiques; earrings, Zo&co; rings, Cathy’s own.
Look 3: Earrings, Magpie Rose Jewellery; leather jacket, t-shirt and green tulle skirt, Di usion.ie; rings and boots, Cathy’s own.
Feminism has always informed everything that I’ve done