Diagnosis Murder?
Her first baby, Jemima, arrived four days early, just as Abbie was finishing the edits of In Safe Hands.
“I was sitting in Mount Carmel with an epidural in my back, in labour, and still editing,” says Abbie, when we meet for tea in Dublin’s Merrion Hotel.
“Then the midwife came and took the pages away. She said, ‘you’ve done enough’.”
Abbie met her deadline thanks to her husband Peter, who took over the care of Jemima for a day. But she’s been a happy full-time mother ever since. Today is the first time, since that day, that she’s handed Jemima over to her dad.
“I always wanted to write,” says Abbie. “I was always scribbling, but when I had exams there was never time. Once I wasn’t studying in my spare time, I started writing again.”
Abbie had tried out several plot ideas before she had her eureka moment.
“I was sitting, waiting to get the tube to work one day, when this idea popped into my head. I imagined a young mother getting off the tube, and the doors closing with her child still on board. What would she do?
“I wrote down that chapter and the rest followed on. I’d just finished my training at the time and I was living in London. It was 2007, and I was 34,” she says.
The book found instant success. Super-agent Marianne Gunn O’Connor took Abbie on; with the help of her Italian colleague she sold the book to 20 different countries. Abbie was overwhelmed by such success.
But the second book proved harder.
“I wanted to write about euthanasia, and a serial killer nurse who was stalking the wards, killing for altruistic reasons, but it was difficult to create a character who the readership would have a sympathy for,” she says.
Abbie made several attempts, writing and deleting at least 18 chapters, before she came up with Dawn Torridge. A surgical matron and brilliant nurse, she is blackmailed after killing an elderly patient to end her unbearable pain.
A credible character, who the reader, at times, feels ambivalent about, she enables the author to show the two sides of this thorny issue.
“I wanted Dawn to be devoted to nursing; to be excellent with her patients, so that her motivation isn’t questioned, but I also wanted to show the darker side she reaches when she’s broken through that taboo of killing,” she says. In Safe Hands is a taut psychological thriller with corkscrew turns in the plot; it’s also finely researched and thought-provoking. And with a recent conference held in Dublin by the assisted suicide advocate, Dr Philip Nitschke, director of the organisation Exit, it’s a timely debate. Where does Abbie stand on the issue?
“I don’t think voluntary euthanasia should be legalised. I do think it’s morally right, and it is, I know, such an emotive issue for those who have seen their loved ones die in terrible pain. The problem is, if it was legalised, I think it would be abused. I think we should try and deal with terminally ill people by controlling their pain.
“I’ve thankfully not had to deal with the issue personally, and it’s easy for me to say that in the fullness of my health, but I do feel elderly people would be pressurised. And people like Dawn could start off with good motives, but human life could become a little less valuable or sacred. It could become easier to say, ‘let’s give up on this person’,” Abbie says.
The author doesn’t push her conclusion onto the reader. It’s left to us to make up our own minds, and Abbie’s main aim was to entertain with a clearly written page turner. She’s succeeded in that; the reader will have their hearts in their mouths until the final page.
She deals with other issues too. Through observing the medical staff, we can see the difference good nursing makes. “Some nurses carry the weight of the ward on their shoulders. Having been a patient to have my baby, I realised, sharply, the difference a good and a bad nurse makes.
“On a ward you can have two nurses who are quite superb; two who are fine and two who are awful. There’s a huge variation, yet they might all have the same job title, and I presume, the same salary.
“I think it’s a matter of personality. As a patient, you really notice when a good nurse comes on duty. You relax and feel safe. You think, ‘I’m ok now. They’re here’,” she says.
What will she write next?
“I’d like to write another book set in a hospital or with a medical background, but my maternity leave ends next month. So for a while I want to concentrate on my work, and on looking after Jemima.
“I do realise how lucky Peter — a psychiatrist, and I are to be in a recession proof profession,” she says. “We spent all our training years moaning about everyone else running around at weekends when we were working, or studying for exams, but it was worth it.”
Abbie’s parents are extremely proud of their daughter. Her father was a doctor and so is one of her brothers. Her mother’s praise, though, is always diluted because of her maternal ambition.
“She’s a typical ‘tiger’ mother like Amy Chua,” Abbie says. (The controversial author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.) “She’ll say, ‘well done, you’ve published a book’ and the next question will be, ‘when will it be topping the Irish bestseller lists?’ If it topped the list, the next question would be, ‘why is it not in the New York Times bestseller lists?’ She laughs fondly. My mother’s not as extreme as Amy Chua, but she was hugely ambitious when it came to academia.”
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