MY LIGHT BULB MOMENT

Author Cecelia Ahern

CECELIA AHERN, 35, is the bestselling author of 14 novels. The daughter of the former irish premier Bertie ahern, she lives in Dublin with her husband, David Keoghan, and children, six-year-old robin and four-year-old Sonny.

I WAS 21 when I started spending all night writing fiction. I’d just left university and was undergoing a transition in my life.

I may have had the world at my feet, but I felt constantly anxious and became introspective. It was deeply unsettling — a physical sensation, like a state of constant heightened vigilance. A form of fear.

I realised the only thing that eased the fear was writing — and that was my light bulb moment.

I’d already started PS I Love You, my first novel, but I threw myself into it, reversing day and night so I was awake and working from 10pm to 6am and asleep until mid-afternoon.

I’ve always written as a form of therapy — my teenage diaries were full of emotion — but this was when I realised how vital it is to me. I sat pen in hand (typing it up came later), letting everything flow on to the page.

PS I Love You is about grief (a husband dies of a brain tumour, leaving behind a distraught wife), but it’s also about hope and the redemptive power of love.

In my vulnerable state, I found it easy and horrifying to imagine what life would be like if I lost someone close to me. And yet the writing process was cathartic, too — a means of examining my emotion and turning it into something that belonged to someone else.

I realised this therapeutic writing was the right thing for me to be doing. There was nothing I wanted to do more. It brought me happiness, and I needed to hold on to that.

It was my mother who suggested sending it to an agent. Expecting advice, but not much more, I posted it off — only to be told the book was good enough to publish.

I’ve written 14 books — all by longhand, but nowadays during the day. As a mum of two children, I’ve had to call a halt to my nocturnal habits.