Dubliner Tanya Sweeney has a lot to celebrate as we ease into 2026. Her debut novel, Esther is Now Following You, has arrived in bookshops accompanied by the kind of pre-publicity and literary merch (badges and tote bags) most budding authors can only fantasise about.
The novel is a pacy, darkly funny and original thriller about obsession and celebrity fandom. It landed her “the agent of my dreams” Marianne Gunn O’Connor, and what she describes as a “comfortable” six-figure advance for a two-book deal from Transworld.
When we meet in The Hoxton hotel in Dublin, Sweeney is full of good cheer and, understandably, the nerves that come with any debut. And there is another reason for the jitters: as a journalist Sweeney has, until now, been used to the other side of the interviewing table. “It’s very strange to be the one answering questions,” she says with a smile.
One of the most talented and hardest working features journalists and columnists in the country – I can attest to this as, full disclosure, I was once her editor when she worked as a freelancer for this newspaper – Sweeney describes herself as “a total commitmentphobe” when it came to her lifelong dream of writing novels. She’s been thinking about writing a book “ever since I knew that people could write books”. Journalism and writing was the only job that ever made sense to her.
From a working-class family in Blanchardstown, at the age of 11 she wrote and edited the children’s page of local newspaper Newswest. Meanwhile, she’d been writing stories since the age of seven. “I’d get halfway down the page of a copy book and start fantasising about owning a swimming pool and about being a millionaire. And then I’d stop about a page and a half in, which became a motif for the next 40-odd years, basically.”
After an arts degree in Maynooth, she did a journalism masters at University of Westminster in London, spending time in the music industry and later completing a masters in screenwriting. Along the way, freelancing for magazines and newspapers, she took part in “countless” novel- and play-writing courses.
“Writing a novel was like a monkey on my back,” Sweeney says over coffee. “I describe it as those two weeks before the Leaving Cert, where you feel you should be studying, even when you are watching TV or you’re on the loo, you’re thinking ‘I should be doing something else’ and then you feel guilty for not doing it.” She carried that “guilt” around for a long time until it got to the point where she says “it actually became easier to write the book than carry that around any more”.
The first draft of the novel was written in 2023, but she’s been cultivating the idea for Esther for almost 25 years after seeing a Channel 4 documentary about a psychological disorder called erotomania, also known as De Clérambault syndrome. “It’s a delusional disorder where you feel famous people are talking to you through the telly. It’s an actual thing. We all have celebrity crushes, but in this situation it goes too far and it’s almost always preceded by trauma or grief.
“It prompts you to escape into your own brain, your own imagination, into something that is safe and controllable and gratifying. I’d always wanted to go back to that story, and then we started to hear more about super fans, One Directioners or Swifties, and all those parasocial relationships. I thought it would be really fun to write about that world.”
I think when you are grieving you’re actually quite horny
— Tanya Sweeney
The novel follows Esther, a Dublin woman in her 30s living in London who becomes obsessed with an up-and-coming Canadian movie star Ted Levy after walking past him in a local park. Esther Is Now Following You is a compelling portrayal of a sharply funny, often exasperating, woman in the grips of an acute mental spiral. Following a personal tragedy, Esther, who from the outside appears to have it all – a great job, cool friends and a loving husband – blows up her life to pursue her celebrity crush, which involves becoming a “Tedette” on a fan site full of fellow obsessives and buying a one-way ticket to Canada to pursue the actor in the real world, convinced they are meant to be together.
Sweeney, who has followed celebrity culture closely since she was a teenager, is unsurprisingly strong on its evolution. “When I was a teenager you bought Smash Hits on a Wednesday and jumped in front of Top of the Pops on a Thursday. You might know some trivia about your celebrity/musical crush like that they love red jelly beans, and that kept you going. We were blissfully unaware about most of what they were up to.”
[ Tanya Sweeney: Make no mistake, the binge-watch cheat is a real betrayalOpens in new window ]
With the advent of social media, this filter between celebrity and fan became increasingly porous to the point where, in 2010 and 2011, when the book is set, “you could message a celebrity on Twitter and there was an outside chance they or one of their team on their account would either retweet or quote tweet you. It was very unguarded. And it was a delicious time to write about.”
There’s a scene in the book where Ted Levy’s girlfriend Alice accidentally gives away her home location in an Instagram photo. “I set the book at that time because this incident just wouldn’t happen now. Celebrities have pulled back and it’s all very stage-managed. They have teams that drip feed the public with what they want them to know, but in 2010 that wasn’t happening. The filter wasn’t there as much.”
[ Tanya Sweeney: The most dispiriting celebrity interviews I have conductedOpens in new window ]
Given the huge appeal of the Netflix show Baby Reindeer, the novel is being pitched as that idea, but from the stalker’s perspective. She says her own celebrity crushes are “turbo-charged, I’m blessed and cursed with an amazing imagination”. In the book, Esther is grieving a tragic loss and Sweeney remembers how, when her mother died in 2011, her own crushes were “so vivid … I think because I was lonely …” She has a theory that people can become highly sexually charged when grieving (there’s quite a bit of sex and masturbation in the book). “I think when you are grieving you’re actually quite horny, so I drew a little from my own crushes and imaginary relationships,” she says.
Sweeney first wrote and then abandoned the novel in 2021 during yet another creative-writing course. Around the same time, she and her husband were given an eviction notice on their rental home which led to several subsequent house moves with their toddler. (Their daughter Isola is now a spirited almost seven-year-old who also loves writing stories in her copy books.) “It was a massively stressful time, so anything creative went by the wayside and I fell into a bit of a depression about it all. I just didn’t have any creative energy or any bandwidth left over for anything else.”
Tanya Sweeney first wrote and then abandoned the novel in 2021 during a creative-writing course. Photograph: Ruth Medjber
A few years later, having bought a house and been employed as a staff journalist with the Irish Independent, she decided to return to Esther. “A lot of journalists were writing novels and I was getting really jealous of these people. Edel Coffey was one of them. She’d had a book deal announced in The Bookseller. I sent Edel a text going ‘I couldn’t be happier for you, genuinely, but I am beyond envious and a bit sad for myself here’.”
Coffey’s success hit differently because the two journalists had, over the years, talked a lot about writing novels. “Then Edel went ahead and did it. And I think that was the real lesson.” Sweeney gave herself a stern talking to: “It was like, you know what, you need to stop talking about it. You need to stop talking to other writers and trying to embarrass yourself into being held accountable. They don’t care what you are doing… you just have to put your bum in the chair. It’s really boring but that’s it.”
She is effusive in the book’s acknowledgments about the Six Month Novel course run online by the Urban Writer’s Retreat, during which she completed her first draft, sending Coffey a screenshot of her word count saying “ha, now I’ve written one too!”.
In a lovely plot twist, it was Coffey who connected Sweeney to Marianne Gunn O’Connor, suggesting she send the first draft to her agent. It was a Thursday in summer when Gunn O’Connor called Sweeney with feedback. “She said, ‘This is amazing, this is so exciting. I want to represent you and bring it to the Frankfurt Book Fair’. I was sitting in my back yard, my jaw hanging like a lantern. It was the most exciting moment of the whole thing,” Sweeney marvels. The novel never made it to Frankfurt; instead there was a bidding war before Transworld offered enough money to take it off the table. Then her own massive deal was announced in The Bookseller. “I didn’t believe it, I thought it was an elaborate prank being played on me. I was numb.”
It might have taken a while to get here, but the 48-year-old has no regrets. Well maybe one. “The only regret I have is that the books market is quite challenging now,” she says. She hopes the book will find enthusiastic readers. Early signs are positive, with a slew of rave reviews online. She won’t be giving up her day-job – “God, no” she exclaims, “I love it too much” – and is currently deep into the second novel.
When she looks back over those years of trying and failing to write novels, she’s impressively self-aware about both her arrogance as a younger woman – “I thought I knew it all when I did not” – and the way she allowed, as so many of us do, the judgment of others to block her path. “I obviously have a very fragile ego, once I got a lick of criticism, I was like ‘Well, that obviously needs to go in the bin, because who’s going to buy that?’” One memorable put-down came from a fellow participant in a creative-writing course 24 years ago. The man described Sweeney’s fiction as “sub Sex and the City drivel”. Let’s hope he’s reading this now.
Esther is Now Following You by Tanya Sweeney is published by Transworld