Author interview: Murphy’s debut explores real, honest stories through fiction

After announcing her debut novel ‘Blood & Water’ on national television last year, Rebecca Murphy is both excited and nervous at the prospect of people reading her work

‘Today’ show presenter Maura Derrane, Rebecca Murphy, ‘Today’ show presenter Dáithí Ó Sé, and Carina McNally, when Murphy was announced as the programme’s first time novelist competition winner last year. Picture: Gerard McCarthy

• Blood & Water 
• Rebecca Murphy
• Mercier Press, €16.99

Not many new authors have their first book announced on national television, but that’s what happened for Rebecca Murphy, when her debut novel  Blood & Water won the Mercier Press and RTÉ  Today show first time novelist competition.

She admits that keeping the news under wraps until she appeared on the show was difficult. 

“I’m really terrible at secrets,” she tells me. “I get so anxious about it, even when they’re good secrets.”

A year on, the Cork-born author is preparing to release her finished book.

It tells the story of Susan, who is dealing with loss and grief that has sent her marriage to Jen into turmoil. 

She escapes to her ancestral home — the fictional Dune Island — following the death of her uncle Frank, and the book follows a dual timeline structure as she deals with her own pain and discovers the secrets that run through her family’s history.

While Dune Island is fictional, it will feel familiar to readers who have spent time on islands off the west coast of Ireland, and was inspired by Murphy’s trips to West Cork over the years. 

“I love nature, I love the sea,” she says. 

“I wanted to capture that moment when you’re down in West Cork somewhere, and you’re standing on the top of a hill, and you’re looking out at the sea, and you can smell the Atlantic, and you can smell the flowers.”

It’s a place that holds personal significance for Murphy and her wife, Rachel. 

The couple, who now live in Wicklow with their two dogs, got engaged on The Warren Beach near Rosscarbery, and married outside Dunmore House Hotel in Clonakilty.

I don’t want to be one of these people who’s just always on about Cork, but genuinely, West Cork … it’s the best place in the world.

Murphy began writing poems as a child, which evolved into “sad teenage poetry” and “Buffy fan fiction” as she got older — “my friends have always taken the absolute piss out of me over it,” she laughs.

Creative writing took a back seat while she studied drama and English at University College Cork. 

“I didn’t write for a few years … I think I was just too caught up in my own head … I was seeing under the hood too much, I think, in terms of writing and books.”

Later, joining writing courses and groups helped her craft to flourish again, and she set her sights on her dream of writing a book. “I always felt I had a novel in me, at least one.”

Murphy started writing Blood & Water in 2021. 

“I’d been writing short stories and doing different creative writing classes… so I’d been building up my skills and confidence, and then I just kind of went for it.”

As an adult, she found she had to shake off a newly developed self-consciousness about her writing. 

“There’s a process of unlearning that I think was really important for me,” she says. 

No such thing as a perfect first draft

“To be willing to give things a go and not feel like everything has to be perfect the first time you turn it out. Because no writer in the history of the world has ever turned out a perfect first draft.”

In her day job, Murphy works in the mental health promotion department at Jigsaw, the National Centre for Youth Mental Health. 

With such a demanding role, finding time to sit and write isn’t always easy. 

“I find it hard sometimes to really stick to a consistent schedule. So having a class or some bit of accountability is really useful,” she says.

A place on the Faber Academy ‘Finish Your Draft’ course proved helpful in this regard, and allowed Murphy to hone her skills.

“I learned so much there in terms of looking at the mechanics of plot, the mechanics of character,” she says.

“I think we should break rules as writers, we should play around, but it’s much easier, I think, to play around with things when you have an understanding of some of the basic mechanics of how stories are told, and how they’re shaped.”

Writing the book in the depths of the pandemic, the remoteness and wildness of the island setting appealed to Murphy.

Looking to nature for comfort in covid times

“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that there have been a number of island based things coming out of the covid era,” she says. 

“A lot of us, myself included, were looking to nature for comfort.”

As well as being a beautiful and rugged backdrop, for the story’s protagonist the island is an escape from the painful realities of life. 

One of the central themes in the book is infertility, as Susan struggles to let go of her dream of becoming a mother after several rounds of unsuccessful fertility treatment. 

At the time, Murphy was going through her own journey of IVF and loss, and the novel gave her an outlet to write about this deeply personal topic through the lens of a fictional character.

“Every time I sat down to write, this was all I wanted to write about. Because life can get so narrow when you’re in that process,” she says.

“Fiction definitely allowed me to say, ‘here’s this totally different person to me, making totally different decisions, in a totally different environment, with all these characters that don’t exist. And it definitely was easier to write about it then.”

Although conversations around infertility and miscarriage have increased in recent years, Murphy believes women carried the weight of loss alone for too long. 

“For years it was such a silent topic, and it was only when I started going through IVF and having things go wrong in different ways, that I suddenly started hearing about other people’s experiences,” she says.

“If you ever want to understand women and how strong we are, and how amazing we are … start having those conversations, [about] what people are struggling with and managing while working full time and maybe managing other children in the house and everything else.”

Murphy hopes that telling this story and sharing aspects of her own experience will help others in a similar situation. 

It’s been really positive for me. It’s also a bit nerve-wracking … putting it out into the world, but at the end of the day, I’m not ashamed of it ... it’s something I’m happy to talk about,” she says. 

“If one person reads this and they feel like they can understand this … then that’s actually a really lovely thing.”

Despite dealing with some heavy themes, there’s a lightness of touch to Murphy’s writing and how she details the real struggles of daily life.

Inspired by Maeve Binchy

She cites Maeve Binchy as an inspiration. “One of the things that I love about Maeve Binchy is that she just has these ordinary people dealing with ordinary lives,” she says.

“I was thinking of her when I was writing it, and that it’s not about these supernatural situations or these incredibly extraordinary [events], it’s actually ordinary people’s lives, just how sad and how rich they can be.”

Murphy is excited and nervous at the prospect of people reading her book. 

“One of the biggest obstacles I think as a writer, is to get used to other people reading your work. It’s really scary when you put something out there and you have to then be perceived.”

While the novel is “not a simple story”, Murphy assures readers there is plenty of levity within its pages, which sums up her approach to life. 

“I find a lot of humor in life,” she says. “It’s like Irish funerals — you can have the most craic at an Irish funeral. You can find humor and you can find lightness, whatever’s going on.”