Bestselling author Cecelia Ahern talks to Claire O’Mahony about returning to romance, creating a children’s heroine inspired by her daughter, and why she still believes in the impossible.
It is, perhaps, the closest Cecelia Ahern comes to explaining the thread that runs through everything she writes, and she has always been drawn to stories that ask readers to suspend disbelief. More than 20 years after PS, I Love You introduced her to millions of readers, that instinct is still strong.
This summer, however, she is taking it in two very different directions. Within weeks of each other, she is publishing Love Unlocked, her first full romance in years, and Detective Thingy Majiggy, the first in a new children’s series inspired by bedtime reading with her youngest daughter, Blossom, aged 6 – she also has two other children, a daughter Robin and son Sonny who are in their teens.
The children’s novel began, she says, in the most ordinary of ways. “I think it was reading every night with my daughter,” the 44-year-old author says. “I had done it with all of my children who are now teenagers, but I just felt like I’d been engrossed in that world myself with my daughter. Night after night reading books; and she’s so into these stories. I had ideas that I was like, ‘Yeah, this is the time.'”
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Her daughter became part of the creative process, helping to choose the illustrations and talking through the story with her mother as it developed. “It was a joint project,” Ahern says. Writing for younger readers required a shift in pace rather than subject matter.
“Children are more than able to understand even the darkest and saddest of things,” she says. “They’re able to take on everything. But I suppose it’s how you tell the story.”
Adult novels, she says, allow space for description and introspection. Children, on the other hand, expect the story to arrive much sooner and can be the harshest of critics. “You need to get to the story quicker. No padding, no waffle, just get there. But I still think you can be as deep and as moving and as sad and as complicated as you want to be. Children are more than capable of reading that.”
The lesson was reinforced by her youngest critic: reading an early draft aloud, Ahern found herself stopped midway through the opening chapter. “She went, ‘Skip!'” Looking back, she realised her daughter had pinpointed exactly what wasn’t working. “There was just too much description. It was, ‘Get to the point. Get to the point.’ I was trying to do my long intro, like I would in a novel, and she didn’t want that. She helped me to edit, to pull back on the too much that we kind of enjoy in an adult novel.”
It’s not difficult to see where Detective Thingy Majiggy came from; she is a playful parent, she says. Listening to Ahern describe family life, imagination appears to seep into almost everything. She still has the pillowcase she slept on as a toddler. Known as “Sniffy”, it has travelled with her throughout her life.
“Now at this stage it’s a grey rag,” she laughs. She apologises to chairs when she bumps into them. When her children were small, vegetables were given voices to make them more appealing, while a toilet acquired its own personality to help ease toilet training. “What I’ve done in the book is really everything that I’ve always done with the kids, which is to give things voice and character and personality to make things a little bit easier for them.”
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Mia is the young heroine of Detective Thingy Majiggy, who can talk to inanimate objects, which also talk back to her. Living in foster care, she clings to the objects she carries from home to home. “Her backpack is incredibly important to her. It’s the one thing that has gone with her everywhere she’s gone. It’s the one constant,” Ahern says. “The objects that she loves have become like family to her because they are the one thing that stays the same in a world that keeps changing
The idea behind Love Unlocked, her latest adult novel, arrived almost by accident. Ahern was researching one of her previous novels, Into the Storm, when she came across the story of the Pont des Arts bridge in Paris, where hundreds of thousands of padlocks left by couples were eventually removed because of the weight they placed on the structure.
“As soon as I read it, I was thinking, ‘Gosh, what if everybody broke up as soon as the locks were cut open?'” she says. “Then I thought, ‘There’s a novel.’
The image fascinated her, not because of the bridge itself, but because of what the locks represented. “They’re symbolic of your love. They’re very important to people. If that is severed, is the love too? How much power do we put in these symbols of our love?”
The result is a novel that explores heartbreak, hope and second chances through two people, Melody and Al, whose lives intersect in unexpected ways.
“I wanted to write something uplifting,” she says. Al has lost faith in love altogether, while Melody is afraid of hurting someone again. “Their two reasons for wanting to stay away from it are very different,” Ahern says. “But they’re the two people that can actually heal each other.”
Photo: RTÉ Guide
The novel asks questions about the fragility of love, but it’s still a joyous tale. “It’s my first truly romantic book in a really long time,” she says. “Romcommy. I had so much fun writing it.” Running through the book is the story of Joseph Plunkett and Grace Gifford, whose marriage in Kilmainham Gaol on the eve of Plunkett’s execution has become one of Ireland’s most enduring love stories.
“I don’t think I even considered any other story,” she says. “The first one I thought of was Joseph Plunkett and Grace Gifford because it was the most tragic, beautiful love story.” Researching their letters became one of the most rewarding parts of writing the novel: “The way he wrote was so moving, so romantic. I wanted them sprinkled throughout the novel.”
Melody investigates the mystery at the heart of Love Unlocked through her podcast, but Ahern admits her own listening habits are rather different. “I do like podcasts,” she says. “I listen to a lot about wrongful convictions, that kind of traumatise me, and for some reason I have to keep listening to them.” Her playlist also includes Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend and SmartLess, hosted by actors Jason Bateman and Will Arnett, and she recently enjoyed seeing Deirdre O’Kane and Emma Doran record their Keep It Tight live podcast.
As for Melody’s fictional show? “I don’t think I’d listen to Melody’s. It wouldn’t be my type of podcast, but it was fun to write.”
Even after more than 20 novels, she knows fairly quickly when an idea is worth pursuing. As one book reaches the editing stage, she says, her attention begins to drift towards the next. Ideas accumulate in the notes app on her phone until one begins to gather momentum. “I think it’s the excitement,” she says. “The adrenaline and the buzz that you get knowing, ‘Oh, this is something that I can’t get out of my head.'”
Home, in Malahide, Co Dublin with her children and her husband, David Keoghan, remains the anchor around which everything revolves. During the months she is drafting a novel, her days are relatively structured. “It really is nine to one,” she says of her writing hours, before school collections, activities and family life take over. If necessary, she’ll return to her desk from nine until midnight. “I do like a rhythm to my life,” she says. “I need that for writing.”
Living in the north county Dublin coastal town provides her with a welcome balance to life on the road.
“Love it,” she says. “It’s beautiful. Especially in this weather, but even in the winter it’s beautiful. It’s dramatic. It’s something different every day when you’re looking out at the sea.” Walking is one of the ways she unwinds, alongside regular trips to the gym and a love of live comedy and theatre. “I want people to make me laugh,” she says. “I want people to be funny, I want my friends to be funny, I want laughter, and so I love going to comedy shows.”
Despite spending so much of her working life alone, she still relishes meeting readers. “I love the solitary part of it. That’s why I do it,” she says. “But the other part of it is an honour.” Book events, she explains, sustain her long after the applause has faded. “I always say this to the people I meet at them. It’s like I take a photograph of them all in my mind when I’m on stage and I take that home with me because then when I’m on my own at the desk, I think of those people. That’s who’s waiting for it. That’s who’s reading it.”
The promotional side of publishing can be a necessary evil – or not – for authors. Ahern finds aspects of it fun. “I love fashion. I love clothes,” she says. Every book tour brings a fresh challenge as she plans what to wear, even matching outfits to the colours of her book jackets.
“Last year I was all pink with Paper Heart [her last novel]. This year I’m buying a lot of yellow. I have to stand with this book for a couple of weeks. What do I want to wear with it?” With regard to her clothes matching the book cover, she says that booksellers do it too.
“They either notice I’ve been on a pink theme in my events on Instagram and they join in for the events, or the interviewers and the readers do too. Sometimes they decorate their nails to match the cover; sometimes their clothes have hearts – like the Paper Heart cover – or match the colour, so it’s really lovely!”
And, for anyone feeling hopeless about love/life/dating/relationships etc, Love Unlocked could be the book to restore your faith in humankind. “I wanted to write something uplifting, and it doesn’t work out with one person, but that doesn’t mean that there’s nobody else out there for you.”