Recognising how the past shapes our present
Sheila is talking about Abbey Anderson, the 20-something heroine of her latest novel, the best-selling Things We Never Say. She could very easily be talking about her younger self, however, and a personal reinvention and happy-ever-after that could have come straight from the pages of one of her own novels.
“My parents had a grocery shop in the Liberties,” says the Dublin-born author of 18 best-selling novels, “but then my dad died of cancer when he was quite young, in his early 50s so we sold the shop and my mum went back to work. I was the eldest, I was about 19 at the time, and the imperative was to go out and get a job because we needed some income coming in. So I got a job in the bank. I never wanted to work in the bank, I was disgusted about getting a job in the bank, but it actually paid quite well”.
When we meet in the Mint Bar of the Westin Hotel, Sheila O’Flanagan is petite, elegant and warmly welcoming. She is also refreshingly forthright and pragmatic, with a steely edge that suggests that fools will not be suffered gladly. It’s no surprise that she thrived in the pressurised world of banking.
“I got quite competitive about it,” she says simply, “because there were loads of guys there and I wanted to do well. But the truth was that I always wanted to write books, so I’d be writing away at short stories in the background”.
Despite her career success in banking, Sheila remained creatively unfulfilled.
“Most people in finance know a load of it is rubbish,” she says, “that it is only about making money and there’s no other creative element to it. There’s no other measurement of success other than making money. There’s no attitude of, ‘I made a good product, or I produced something.’ There comes a point where you just say to yourself, ‘This is not what I want to do with my whole life.’ So I decided that I was going to give myself some time and write a book — or see if I could write a book — and see how that might go.”
Very well, as it transpires. Sheila’s first novel, Suddenly Single, was published in 1999, and the author who once believed that writing “wasn’t something you could plan to make a living from, really,” had to reconsider.
It’s tempting to read something of Sheila’s own journey into that of Abbey Anderson. A San Francisco-based nail technician, Abbey is contacted by Irish lawyer Ryan Gilligan and informed that she has Irish roots, and that said roots might well tap into a considerable financial windfall. Can Abbey cope with the pressure of reconfiguring who she always believed herself to be?
“I think Abbey is a kind of character who is very capable but who probably lacks self-confidence and belief in herself,” says Sheila. “That’s mainly because she’s surrounded by people who have very clear visions of themselves and their futures.
She doesn’t have that clear vision, so she was influenced and dragged in a few different directions, and never really got to grips with what it was that she wanted.”
In part, Abbey’s dilemma comes from trying to deal with other people’s expectations. Her mother, Ellen, believes Abbey has the potential to be a great artist, but Abbey prefers to work on the miniature canvases provided by her clients’ nails in her role of nail technician at a beauty salon.
“At one point, Abbey says that she does her nail art and sends women out feeling happy, feeling good about themselves,” says Sheila. “I like that nurturing side of her: ‘I’m doing something that makes people happy, and it makes me happy too — is that not enough to make my life good?’ You don’t have to have this big, massive ‘important’ career — important as perceived by society — to be a successful person, and to be a good person.”
Is Abbey’s desire to create ‘nail art’ a subtle commentary on critics’ dismissal of popular women’s fiction — or ‘chick lit’ — as frivolous entertainment?
“I wasn’t actually trying to make the comparison with popular fiction particularly,” she says, “but I do think that there are things that are artistic, and things that are creative, that don’t have to be big gestures”.
Is it still possible to employ the term ‘chick lit’, or has it been degraded beyond use? “I do accept that my books are mostly read by women, so I’m happy to say ‘contemporary women’s fiction’. When the ‘chick lit’ label first appeared, which was some time after I’d published my first couple of books, no one minded. But then it just became an all-encompassing, derogatory statement, and it was used by people who hadn’t even read the books.
“There’s a lot of good writing out there that would be described as ‘chick lit’,” she adds, “and there’s also a lot of bad writing — but there’s also a lot of good and bad writing that comes under the ‘literary’ label. I know we all like labels, but ‘good’ or ‘bad’ are my labels when it comes to books.”
You should never judge a book by its cover, of course, but the conventional ‘chick lit’ image of domestic bliss portrayed on the cover of Things We Never Say, with the title picked out in pink, is in fact a subversive one. The novel deals in part with the impact of the Irish recession, and especially the pressures experienced by families crushed by the collapse of the property bubble.
The novel draws on another dark chapter in Ireland’s recent history, that of the Magdalene laundries.
“The story is about a child who was given up for adoption,” Sheila says, “and because of the way I was structuring the story, it seemed to me that it was very likely that that would have happened in that time and place. Now, I didn’t want to disrespect anyone who went through the Magdalene experience by bringing it into my book lightly. Nevertheless, I felt that this is what would have happened to my characters at that time. So it was important to me to write about that subject and to give it a certain voice.
“I think what I’m trying to show is how things from the past have really impacted on the present,” she continues, “and how those decisions, and those things that happened, are still having an effect two or three generations on”.
Despite her two decades’ of best-selling popularity, there’s still something of the embryonic Abbey Anderson inside Sheila O’Flanagan.
“I suppose it gives you a certain confidence,” she says cautiously of her success to date, “because you know that enough people have read your books to make it a number one. But every time I start a new book, I don’t feel any different to anyone who hasn’t had a book published. You’re more confident, maybe, because you know you can do it, but every time you start a book it’s a new book, and you’re going to be judged on that book. And that’s how I feel about it all the time.”
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