A life story full of little plot twists
Edel Coffey’s novel is packed with surprises – like her own journey, writes
‘Oh, I love when other people tell me what they think my books are about,” says Edel Coffey, slightly leaning forward. A journalist since she graduated from college in her early 20s and now publishing her second novel, Coffey understands well that perception is subjective. Years of interviewing have taught her that who a person imagines themselves to be is often contrary to how others perceive them. Further, she knows there is no one definition of anyone.
For example, the theme of her new book, In Her Place, is “the covetous world that we live in and the feeling of not having everything, which makes people so unhappy”.
“It’s the idea that we must have everything to be happy, and comparing ourselves to others, which I so dislike.”
For my part, In Her Place is an exploration of motherhood and how that one role can shape women’s self-image and, moreover, how they’re perceived by others. The perceptions, internal and external, rarely match and the interest lies in how we learn to live with these, particularly as roles shift and change.
At the start of the novel Ann is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn, relatively happy with her lot, even if she feels others judge her for not having a life partner and children. There is in her, however, a sense that life could be more and when she meets Justin, that alternate life opens up to her.
Justin lives in a plush suburb of glossy people living covetable lives. He has a young daughter, Sophie – and awkwardly a wife, who is in hospital and terminally ill.
Ann doesn’t want to be the other woman, but Justin convinces her this is temporary, that his dying wife, Deborah, would want him to be happy and for Sophie to have a mother figure. Ann moves in with Justin and Sophie, finding herself easily seduced by the lovely house, the ready-made family and her unexpectedly swift pregnancy.
Life is falling into place, until an experimental drug sees Deborah make a miraculous recovery and return home to her family, where Ann is suddenly the cuckoo in the nest.
It’s a plot of twists and surprises, expectations and assumptions turned on their heads, while Ann struggles to work out who she is and where she fits in a constantly changing situation.
Coffey knows all about change.
A decade ago she had a fairly firm handle on where her future lay. She had a job in RTÉ, working in radio as a researcher and reporter, and was also books editor for the Irish Independent.
After the end of a long-term relationship, she embraced the single life.
“I had finished a relationship where we were supposed to get married and that ended and I was 36. I was very much of the mind of ‘that was your opportunity to get married and have children and you’ve made a decision and now your life is going to be a single woman with a great career and lots of fabulous friends and that’s OK’.
“Of course I went through wondering if I wanted to have children and if it was a loss, but I was never one of those woman who knew for sure I wanted to have children. It wasn’t that I didn’t think that I would ever meet anyone again. It was more I felt I had to accept the possibility that this might be as good as it got. And was this good enough? For me, the answer was yes.”
Then, out of the blue, Coffey met a man and fell in love. He lived in Galway, was a widower and had two small sons.
“There was the surprise in meeting somebody,” she says. “And then in meeting somebody with kids. It was really surprising to me I had maternal instincts.”
People didn’t pull their punches as Coffey embarked on a relationship where during the week she was in her native Dublin, working away, and then spending weekends in Galway with her now husband and stepsons.
“People were verbatim: ‘Do you know what you’re getting yourself into here?’” she recalls with a laugh.
“I didn’t think of it that way, partly because I was in love with him and saw no problems. He just made me happy and whatever or whoever was connected with him was just part of him and it wasn’t a problem. I didn’t feel I was taking anything on.”
There was never any big plan, she explains. Life just happened, as life does. Coffey continued to live in Dublin all through her first pregnancy, working away, only moving to Galway once the baby was born. She did all the baby planning, reading all the books and even “every single clinical report of every maternity hospital to get a feel for what the child mortality rates were, what my chances were, what the worstcase scenario was”.
“It was horrendous but it’s how I cope with the unknown. I did all of that, but didn’t really think about moving out of Dublin. I never thought I’d leave.”
She did leave Dublin, however, and is now a wife and a mother to four children. She also remains a journalist since the publication of her best-selling debut novel, Breaking Point, in 2022.
Putting pen to paper for Breaking Point didn’t happen until her two daughters started pre-school. It was a time when Coffey felt not just how radically her life had changed, but how she was now perceived differently by others. In this new city, where she knew no one and had no professional or personal history, it was a struggle to reshape her identity.
“I was furious about that. I wanted to tell people: ‘I’m a lot of other things. I have loads of interests.’ People only saw one aspect of me, that I was a mother, but it coloured me completely, in a way that fatherhood doesn’t colour men. I was in denial for a long time. In my head, it was: ‘When
I go back to Dublin. When I go back to work.’ That was a defence mechanism, I suppose, until I was able to accept my new life.”
In that new life, when her two girls started pre-school, she embarked on becoming a novelist. She was determined and focused, using the time the house was empty to write.
Yet what both her books dig into is how unpredictable and uncontrollable life really is.
Both of Coffey’s novels have been set in the US and she can’t see that changing. She says she hasn’t found it possible to set a novel in Ireland yet, as it feels too close to home. From an outsider’s perspective, it could appear that a US setting makes Coffey’s novels easier to adapt for the screen. Both could sit happily on any of the streamers and Breaking Point, she says, has been optioned by an Irish production company, with a US producer attached.
When I say her books seem like something Reese Witherspoon would set her sights on, Coffey says emphatically: “Love Reese. Tell Reese I’m happy to talk to her.”
If that’s her next big change, Edel Coffey is ready for it.
People only saw one aspect of me, that I was a mother, but it coloured me completely
‘In Her Place’ by Edel Coffey is published by Gill Books and out now
When you become a children’s writer, you really do have to get used to your audience losing teeth while you’re talking to them. It happens with a surprising regularity.
Often it will be announced by a flutter of excitement from a patch of the room, or on occasion with a shout and triumphant raising of the newly freed incisor. Sometimes you’ll only learn about it all afterwards when the kid ambles up with a book in one hand and a freshly uprooted tooth in the other.
Maybe this happens a lot to, say, John Banville but I’m inclined to doubt it. At the very least, if his audience has a habit of losing teeth while he talks, I’d imagine they’re more likely to quietly tuck them away in a tissue and say no more about it. But being a children’s writer means writing for – and talking to – an audience that is quite different to any other. One for which happy chaos is only ever a few seconds away.
This month, I’ll publish my first picture book, Dexter Lost His BooWoo, with illustrator Ben Mantle and I will once again head into the classrooms and libraries to meet the audience. They will be younger than the ones I meet for my fantasy books for older children, but I’m guessing the experience will be similar. The kids will be engaged, imaginative and funny. They will be unfiltered. And I will learn as much from them as they will from me.
There is an idea among many grown-ups that kids are brutal, if not borderline feral; that walking into a room of kids is some Lord of the Flies test which you have to survive and just get out of there with your sanity intact.
I learned how wrong this was a couple of years before I wrote my first children’s book, when seeing writer Michael Morpurgo (War Horse, Private Peaceful) speak to a packed room in Kinsale. To that point, it was the best literary event I had ever attended. He was as interested in his young audience as they were in him. There was a constant back-and-forth and he read only a single line from one book.
Most striking was how quickly he could shift from madcap hilarity to deep seriousness, and how the children would go with him. He talked to them about war, for instance, with honesty and respect, never talking down to them. There was a freewheeling sense to the occasion – guided by the children’s questions – yet it never once felt like it would ever careen out of control.
It was also performative. I saw in that hour that being a children’s writer didn’t just mean sitting at the desk attempting to craft a story, but was about getting out there and not just sharing the story with an audience but creating something of a character out of yourself. The old idea of a “reading” for kids – where they sit quietly while the author reads a chapter or two of their book and maybe takes some questions – is a rarity. They are more often closer to being “shows”.
Since I started my own career as a children’s writer, I have done many such events to audiences as large as 500 and as small as one (you wouldn’t want much ego in this business). Every time I do, I learn again just how brilliant and energising that young readership is.
The key, always, is to let them speak. To let them be involved. To make any talk as much about their ideas as it is about yours.
Ask them questions. Let them come up with ideas – and encourage them to come up with the stories in the way that suits them. Maybe they like drawing rather than writing. Perhaps they want to use their own world to create stories. Each has their own life, their own voice, and the aim is always to encourage them to use it.
“Kids are the most honest critics,” adults say all the time. “If
Seeing what kids respond to – the comedy, themes, illustrations – informs everything I write afterwards
they don’t like something they’ll tell you.” Are children unrestrained in their honesty? Absolutely. But almost always in the positive. If a kid likes your books, they will tell you enthusiastically. They will often read it three, four, five times and know the story better than you do. They will proudly present the grubby and dog-eared paperback for signing. And if you really strike a chord, you will later get an email or an envelope of stories and drawings inspired by your books.
If they enjoyed your talk, they will declare you are the greatest writer in the world, the best thing to ever happen in the school, the world’s funniest/smartest/most creative person. And sure, they probably tell that to all the writers and illustrators they meet
– but it doesn’t matter because when you spend much of your creative life doubting everything you do, the unrestrained positivity of a room full of 10-year-olds is a balm.
Yes, things will sometimes veer just on the edge of chaos. Were an adult to blurt out a half thought mid-reading at a serious adult literary event, they would be quietly escorted from the room – but a child doing it only adds to the experience. A grown-up audience will stifle sneezes, but a kid will explode with joyous force.
There might be a nosebleed or a spilled bottle. Half the room might without warning pack up and leave for a football match. A pigeon might wander into the hall – as happened to me in one school – and you must accept you are now the second most exciting guest of the day. At best.
You have to allow for noise – welcome it, really. The kids will talk. They will chatter. They will giggle and gurn. But if they’re interested then they will always come back to you.
They will do so even though, more often than not, they are being asked to sit on a hard floor for up to an hour. We think kids have short attention spans, but you go and ask a group of adults to rest their backsides on an unforgiving, bone-bruising floor for 60 minutes and see how they respond. There will be legal claims.
The truth is that in a decade of doing such talks, the only time I’ve ever had stern words was with a couple of teachers who had talked their way through most of a workshop, shushing the kids unnecessarily every now and again and using the rest of their time to catch up on corrections.
However, I have visited schools with kids of vastly different socio-economic backgrounds and for all the difference in expectations and challenges, not only are the kids uniformly brilliant but the teachers are too.
It is a privilege of my job to see the often extraordinary work being done and how many of them go above and beyond to give kids the best chance in life possible. There are more teachers than you would believe sourcing coats and clothes for schoolkids who don’t have them.
I learn from it all. A visit to a German school for the visually impaired changed how I thought about my own writing and how to create richer, more vivid worlds. Meeting kids from a range of backgrounds affirms the importance of kids seeing themselves in stories. Seeing what kids respond to – the comedy, the themes, the illustrations – informs everything I write afterwards.
Do you know what’s terrifying to me now? A room full of adults. Reserved. Self-conscious. Worrying about how long they have left on their parking ticket.
They’re the tricky ones. That’s an audience that needs warming up. A primary school audience doesn’t require such a thing. You can get them going simply by asking them what happened during lunchtime. There is always – always – a story.
‘Dexter Lost His Boo-Woo’ by Shane Hegarty, and illustrated by Ben Mantle, is published by Hachette Children’s Group and out now