Author interview: Striking first line eventually leads to an extraordinary twist

Famous for explosive openings, Liz Nugent tells Sue Leonard about her writing process, her latest novel, and what led her to create the lead character, Ruby Cooper, as an alcoholic

Liz Nugent: ‘The blank page is terrifying. But I don’t stress because I know, if I keep at it, it will come. It always has. It has never let me down, but the beginning is hardest.’ Picture: Steve Humphreys

Since Liz Nugent burst onto the literary scene in 2014 with Unravelling Oliver, she’s been famous for her explosive first lines. 

And the opening of her sixth novel is no exception. The preface of The Truth About Ruby Cooper starts with, ‘For the second time in six weeks I woke up with the wrong husband.’

“I thought of that line,” says Liz, when we meet at her house in Blackrock Co Dublin, “and then wondered what kind of person would be saying that.

“I decided that she was an alcoholic; not a normally promiscuous person, but that when she’s drunk, she falls into bed with the wrong people all the time.”

Chapter one dips back quarter of a century, to Boston, where the privileged teenage Ruby Cooper lives in jealous awe of her beautiful elder sister, Erin.

Until, that is, ‘an incident’ between Ruby and Erin’s boyfriend Milo sends the family spiralling, with Ruby and her mum moving to Ireland, leaving Erin with their pastor father; a move that ends up in years of misery, mayhem, and damage.

There’s a huge twist in the middle of this novel — one that makes it a little hard to describe the plot. 

The author, fearing that Ruby’s story, being an unusual one, might make readers want to ‘hurl the book across the room’, tells me that she felt it essential to ensure that there is a comeuppance for her.

Suffice it to say that Ruby, while being more ‘normal’ than many of Nugent’s protagonists, is complicated.

“She’s unhinged but does a very clever cover-up job so that she doesn’t appear to be,” says Liz.

Once Liz has her grasp of a character, she has to follow them. It’s not that they write themselves (she hates that phrase), but she says you have to show consistency. 

In Ruby’s case, that’s carrying through her tendency to feel jealous.

Living in Ruby Cooper’s head

What though, was it like, living in Ruby’s head?

“When I write Ruby I am Ruby,” she says. “So I am constantly justifying my actions. I can totally see things from her point of view. It’s not traumatic writing her, because she always has the upper hand.”

Liz’s process is to write the book in around 18 months — making it up as she goes along — and then to check through the draft to check that it’s all possible. 

And that’s when the research comes in. In this case, making sure that her description of Boston rang true, and that the rehab centre, based loosely on Dublin’s Rutland Centre was authentically depicted.

“That was inspired by my closest friend who is coming up five years sober now. When I watched how hard he worked to become sober — how much it took out of him for the first couple of years, I admired him so much.” 

So much so, she has now given up alcohol too.

“At first, I had a few drinks now and then, but I had to schedule it. There was nothing casual about my drinking, so last year I gave up completely. I think life is better without it.” 

Ruby, she says, is a dry drunk. One who became alcoholic because what she wants is not what she needs.

“What she wants is to get as far away as possible from the incident, in time and distance, but what she needs is to tell the truth. It’s a constant fight.” 

Novel partly inspired by the #MeToo movement

With the novel being partly inspired by the #MeToo movement, Liz ponders why it is that some women don’t report rape. But she’s not surprised.

“I remember when a woman crashed her car into me, and we had this court case hanging over us.

“I was so stressed at the idea of meeting this woman in court because she would say I had bumped into her. The stress of that was so much, and I thought if I had been raped there is no way I would take a case.”

Already a huge success, with every book making Ireland’s number one bestseller slot and winning an Irish Book Award, her fifth — Strange Sally Diamond — sent her into the stratosphere, selling in more than 40 territories. She travelled widely.

“Bulgaria was mad,” she says. “It was like being one of those Oscar people where you’re put in a room and a stream of people are brought in.

“I had 10 or 12 interviews back-to-back with, sometimes, no break for lunch.”

The terrace house Liz shares with her husband, Richard McCullough, isn’t large — but it’s gorgeous, and was renovated thanks to Strange Sally Diamond with new windows and paintwork. 

The kitchen is especially lovely, with its deep turquoise wall, blue wall tiles and wooden floor, and matching kitchen island.

I’m chatting to Liz upstairs in her office and we’re facing the bookshelves which are lined with all her myriad translations. 

Magical retreat in Monaghan

It’s a gorgeous room, and has a wall full of the art Liz had bought from various friends, mostly those she met at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in county Monaghan — the magical retreat where she does all her best work.

The couple have recently returned from a 10-day holiday in Mauritius — a much-needed break.

“It was gorgeous,” she says. “Everybody smiled. A guy came round twice a day to clean your sunglasses.

“They came round with glasses of guava juice, or strawberry and basil, and another lady would do a hand massage by the pool.

“It was the honeymoon we always wanted,” she says, “but we were so broke that we went to France.”

For all that, Liz has her feet firmly on the ground, saying simply that her success now allows her to relax for two or three years.

“I have a contract for the next two books,” she says, “and I know what the next one will be.”

One of eight siblings, Liz was the only one not to attend college. Instead, she attended the Gaiety School of Acting, and went on to work in theatre as a stage manager, moving on to Riverdance, where she met Richard, a sound engineer, before settling at RTÉ.

“I worked as back-up story team for Fair City, but I wasn’t allowed to write for them because I wasn’t freelance.”

Frustrated, she wrote a six-part animation for TG4 and wrote for Sunday Miscellany, and was shortlisted for the RTÉ Francis McManus Short Story Award. 

She also won a new drama competition, with a prize of a screenwriting course with Mary Kate O’Flanagan.

“That was really good and useful for novel writing,” says Liz. “She covered the questions you must constantly ask when you’re writing.”

She also completed Unravelling Oliver while working at RTÉ. After six novels does writing get easier? She shakes her head.

“Every novel is harder than the one before,” she says. “You think you’ve used up every idea you have in your head and it takes a long time for the well of ideas to refill.

“The blank page is terrifying. But I don’t stress because I know, if I keep at it, it will come. It always has. It has never let me down, but the beginning is hardest.”

When I ask Liz when she realised that in finding writing, she had found the perfect career, she said she has never felt that.

“I’m still hoping there’s another career in me; that I can pivot to something else. Often, I see a job advertised in a paper and think, ‘I have no qualifications for that, but I know I could do the job’.

“I’d love to be a speechwriter, or a spin doctor for a politician,” she says, her eyes lighting up. “I know I could get them out of so much trouble by telling the truth in a certain way.”

• The Truth about Ruby Cooper by Liz Nugent is published by Penguin Sandycove, €15.99