Roisin Meaney: 'There always comes a moment when I'm writing where I will get totally bogged down'

Roisin Meaney for This Much I Know 24 July 2021.

It never occurred to me to be a writer growing up, although I was a total bookworm. We have so many family photos of me with a book tucked under my arm. I would just put it away for the photo and pull it out again. I actually went into teaching when I finished school because my mother had been a primary teacher. She was a brilliant teacher and the kids loved her.

I loved young kids too so without thinking too deeply, I went straight to training college and taught for the best part of 20 years before the thought of writing a book popped into my head. I loved teaching but I just wanted a break of some kind and then in the 1990s my cousin said: “You're always winning things in competitions.” I have been winning things in sentence-finishing competitions since I was 18 when I won a Ford Fiesta from the back of a Cornflakes box. I got hooked and kept winning things — holidays and so on — but it was only finishing sentences so it never occurred to me to look for a job in advertising like he suggested.