Waking Hours

The successful author who’s living at home, saving for a mortgage

I’m not an early riser, but that’s because I write until 3am. When the alarm goes off at 10am, I have this impending sense of doom. I probably hate getting up more than anybody else in the world. I love being asleep, and I usually have pretty trippy dreams.

I stay in bed for half an hour, going through emails and checking social media, just getting acclimatised to real life once more. I’m an author, and my children’s books are published by Bloomsbury. I also spend a lot of time in California. My boyfriend, Jack, lives there. He is American, but he will be moving to Ireland this month. At the moment I’m back living with my parents in Galway. I’m trying to save for a mortgage.

I love the sea. I grew up beside the Atlantic Ocean, and it’s a huge inspiration behind my latest novel, The Storm Keeper’s

Island. There is something very special about being able to look out my window and see the sea. When I was younger, I didn’t really appreciate it. A nice walk on the prom is not the most refreshing hobby for a kid. I start my day with a walk by the sea, and then I’ll go home and have breakfast. Then I’ll read for an hour. It puts me in the right headspace to relax. I like Irish writers who were inspired by the landscape.

If I’m on a roll, I’ll work for eight hours straight. Sometimes I go completely into this other world. My brothers joke that if the house went on fire, I wouldn’t notice.

My cousin is a teacher in a tiny school on the island of Arranmore, which is off the north-west coast of Donegal. She asked me to teach creative writing there. I wasn’t writing at the time, and I didn’t have any burning ideas.

I hadn’t been on the island for 10 years, so I decided to go. The last time I was there, I was a teenager. Back then, I didn’t care where my grandparents were from, and I was totally disinterested. When you’re 15, all you want to know is ‘Why isn’t there a McDonald’s here?’

But when I was on the ferry, only 20 minutes away from the mainland, the island was bubbling out of the ocean, rising to meet me in a swathe of mist. It was a peculiar feeling of coming home, of recognising a place in my blood. It was a feeling of kinship, not with a person, but with a place.

I stepped on to the island. My grandparents were getting older, and my grandfather was struggling with his memory, so suddenly this place became so much more important: this little piece of land which birthed them; the place where they grew up and fell in love. Suddenly, it was so important to me, because I knew that it held all of their memories. For the first time, I was really seeing it, and I wasn’t expecting to experience those feelings.

In turn, that was the inspiration for my novel. It is about a brother and sister who are plucked from their Dublin home and sent to live on the island of Arranmore for the summer, with their grandfather. Their mother suffers from depression, as her husband drowned while working on the lifeboats. A strange sort of magic grips the boy and he finds himself immersed in an ancient war between good and evil. In The Storm Keeper’s Island, there are flying horses, sea barbarians and magical candles that store old memories. But it is also about family and love, and the grandfather’s memory loss.

I felt that it was important to include the mother’s depression and the grandfather’s Alzheimer’s because children are not immune from these parts of life. A lot of young children have grandparents who are going through memory loss, and they don’t understand it. It is as frightening for a six-year-old child as it is for a 30-year-old. There is no age limit on sadness in real life.

My grandfather has Alzheimer’s. He is in a nursing home, and when I visit him, I continue to connect with him. His short-term memory may not be good, but his long-term memories are still very sharp. In the book, I wanted to investigate that sense of magic when somebody who is losing their memory, lights up with the kernel of one and really inhabits it. We are the sum of our memories, and without them, part of us starts to fade.

I really enjoy writing. Initially, I didn’t set out to be a writer. I did a degree in psychology, but when I started a post-grad course, I hated it and dropped out. I had a bit of a breakdown — ‘What am I doing with my life?’ My mom called in the family priest to have a talk with me — ‘What do you want out of your life?’

My mother tricked me into doing a creative-writing course with her. I loved it. People encouraged me to do something with my talent. It was the first time that I felt validated. That’s when I decided to try to write a book. When I told my mother my plan, she gave me a smug smile. She had duped me.

In the evenings, I go for a run and eat, and then I work until very late. That works out well with my boyfriend in California. I usually chat with him at 2am for an hour, and then I’ll fall asleep. I usually have crazy dreams.

The Storm Keeper’s Island had such a tight turnaround because Bloomsbury wanted to make it a lead title. That meant I had to work on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and I remember that I went to bed at 5am on Stephen’s Day. I was doing thousands of line edits a day. Then I had a dream that I had stabbed my main character, Fionn, in front of a group of crying children. I woke up thinking, ‘I need to step away from this novel’.

“A lot of young children have grandparents who are going through memory loss”