Write of passage Edel Coffey

Edel Coffey is an Irish journalist and broadcaster. She began work as an arts journalist and editor with the Sunday Tribune and has since worked as a presenter and reporter with RTÉ Radio, and as editor of the Irish Independent Weekend Magazine, and books editor of the Irish Independent. She is a regular contributor to The Irish Times, a weekly columnist with the Irish Examiner, and books editor of The Gloss magazine. She lives in Galway with her husband and children. In Her Place is her second novel.

You say that you wrote your first novel, Breaking Point (2022), in ‘a tantrum’. What was the emotional driver that sparked In Her Place?

The tantrum quip was a reference to the fact that I was angry about how difficult we have made modern life, particularly for mothers. With In Her Place, the emotional driver was more nebulous. I wanted to write a book about a second wife, but Daphne Du Maurier had already written the perfect second-wife book in Rebecca. I had also been thinking about an idea for a separate novel about someone who was supposed to die but didn’t. When I put the two ideas together, In Her Place was born.

The book is set in New York with the narrator, Ann, living in Brooklyn. Why did you decide on that backdrop and how familiar are you with the city?

I love New York ever since spending a summer working and living there when I was 19 – I nearly didn’t come home! I’ve been back to visit a lot since, and I did a Brooklyn-specific trip once as well. I’m not an expert by any means, but for me New York represents a sense of escapism and freedom to write the stories I want to tell.

Ann, who works as a journalist, always used to believe she’d be a writer. You still work as a journalist but are also a published novelist. What advice would you give to anyone who aspires to becoming a writer? Don’t wait for the perfect moment, begin now. And try to go back to it every day, if you can, even if it is just to re-read what you’ve written, as it keeps the story alive and bubbling in your subconscious.

Is there a book from childhood or your teenage years that left a lasting impact?

The books I loved as a child were The Chronicles of Narnia because they introduced the idea of bad adults with bad intentions, but also the irresistible magical world of Narnia. As a teenager, my reading was totally unsupervised and I was allowed to read everything, from Stephen King to Jackie Collins, but the two books that left lasting existential anxiety were Alduous Huxley’s Brave New World and Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment.

A couple of years back you wrote that motherhood, contrary to Cyril Connolly’s pronouncement that the enemy of good art is the pram in the hall, was good for your career. How so?

Motherhood had the effect of focusing me on what I wanted to achieve. Life with children was so busy, I realised that if I didn’t put my mind to it, I might never achieve the things I hoped to. It was enough to scare me into writing my first novel.

What do you believe is the best novel set in the world of journalism?

I think Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities gets it just right because it exposes the egos, the highs and lows, the often mercenary or selfserving motivations, the terrible lifestyle and the precariousness of the whole enterprise.

What, if anything, can you tell us about your next novel and is the creative process getting any easier?

It’s foolhardy to say anything about the next novel because I know it will all have changed by the time it’s finished. That’s one of the things I’ve learned about the creative process. Another is that creativity is one part creativity, nine parts doing the work.

In Her Place by Edel Coffey is published by

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