Juggling a life of crime and motherhood works just fine
RTÉ journalist Sinéad Crowley tells Michelle Fleming how starting a family gave her the chance to pursue her dream of writing fiction
IT was New Year’s Eve, 2009 and – as was the custom for the previous 20 years – Sinéad Crowley announced her New Year’s resolution to her gang of friends. ‘To write my book!’ Her friends smiled – they’d heard it before.
Like many journalists, RTÉ’s Sinéad always dreamt of writing a book. She got her first brown and tartan coloured typewriter aged seven and although she wrote a book in her twenties, she never got it published.
As the years rolled by, busy with her high-paced career as RTÉ’s arts and media correspondent, her creative writing ambitions played second fiddle to her high-profile professional career. But when she skipped off on maternity leave to have baby Conor in September 2009, she returned to Montrose a year later with not only a fully-formed baby to show off, but the guts of her debut novel Can Anybody Help Me? too.
‘I was 36 when I said I’ll give it one last shot – I’ll do it before I’m 40, see if it works out – I didn’t want to say “if only,’ smiles Sinéad, now 41.
The chilling fast-paced crime thriller garnered great praise from the critics and saw her shortlisted for the Crime Fiction Book of the Year Award in the prestigious Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards, which was won by Liz Nugent for Unravelling Oliver.
Now, just a year and two months after her debut novel hit the shelves, Sinéad’s second book in a planned trilogy Are You Watching Me? is about to be released. And she’s busy plotting her third. So, just how, after being too busy to write one for years, did she finally find the time to churn out two at a time most women consider the busiest and most stressful of their lives?
‘Going on maternity my brain was detached from the day job so it gave me the space to think about it and the subject matter was about a young mother so not much research needed,’ says Sinéad, now mother to Conor, five, and Séamus, who is two-and-a-half.
‘The first one took three years, really – Conor was born in September 2009 and I got an agent after my maternity leave with Séamus, who was born in October 2012 so the book deal was nailed down before Christmas 2012.
Can Anybody Help Me? is about first-time mum Yvonne, who is new to Dublin, and turns to online parenting forums for advice and support. Friendships between mums develop but it takes a sinister turn when one woman disappears and Yvonne thinks she may have been murdered.
It was no coincidence the book spilled out just as Sinéad, who is married to journalist Andrew Phelan, was settling into motherhood for the first time. She mined some of her own experiences to come up with thriller gold.
‘Being in the whole bubble you’re in having your first baby, it was so close to the surface,’ she explains.
‘Conor was born in 2009, the year of the really bad snow, so I was in the house all the time. We couldn’t leave the house. I remember-texting and ringing friends who had recently had babies, but not going out. Little things like wondering how to dress the baby for the cold, you find yourself jump--
‘Maternity helped detach me from the day job and gave me the space to think about writing a novel’
ing online. You could be in the supermarket wondering about the difference between Pampers Baby Dry and another brand, so you google it and next thing there’s a seven-page discussion on parenting websites on Lidl v Aldi and you’re in the middle of it.
‘That was 2009 but the internet has changed so much since then as now these people who were anonymous, are on Facebook so these parents meet and befriend one another with a real face and name... but then it was anonymous forums and people would say whatever they wanted. I remember recognising one person on a forum and that gave me the idea – as a journalist my chip went off. I knew there was a book in it. Imagine it was someone who didn’t wish you well? I knew it was a psychological thriller.’
Initially, Sinéad wrote Sergeant Claire Boyle as a minor character but, after discussions with her editor, decided to flesh her out. Now Sgt Boyle is the common thread pulling the trilogy together. Sinéad’s second offering Are You
Watching Me? leans more towards the detective crime fiction genre – a personal favourite of Sinéad’s.
Her debut has been described as ‘domestic noir’, a style of fictional crime based around the home, in the vein of popular recent novels such as Gone Girl and The Girl On The Train.
‘Almost every police procedural drama has this hard-working detective who has to sacrifice his family life to solve the crime. There’s always a scene where he rings the wife to say he can’t come home. I thought, “imagine if you reversed it?” with the woman being the ambitious, driven one but who still loves her baby.
‘Would she be able to leave the baby at home and would society accept it?’ It’s a juggling act Sinéad has mastered, although she asserts every working mother devises her own successful arrangements.
‘There’s no doubt it’s challenging,’ she says. ‘My husband is great taking the kids at the weekends to the park. Conor is in school now and Séamus is in a crèche and we have a wonderful child-minder. It’s working out so far.’
Despite being in the public eye as a TV journalist, Sinéad confesses she was terrified at finding herself at the mercy of critics when her debut novel came out. ‘It was so nerve-racking. People think when you work in RTÉ you’re used to it but that’s telling other people’s stories. You really are exposing yourself. ’
But she needn’t have worried. Erin Kelly loved its ‘brilliant observations about the early days of motherhood… moving, at times wryly funny and always completely convincing. ‘Disturbing and emotional – I loved this book,’ raved author Alex Marwood, while author Melissa Hill described it as ‘brilliantly original’.
Sinéad’s job demands she reads widely. And that’s on top of her own reading list, which she is currently compiling for the family holiday at a Greek resort in August.
‘A book for me is tuning out. That has always been the way. The first thing I did as a teenager on summer holidays or after exams was go to the library. That’s how I shut off.’
Are You Watching Me?, published by Quercus, is out this week.