Tough childhood means I am an open book
THERE are two ways of dealing with life in small-town Ireland. Keep your head down, your personal life discreet and convince yourself no-one knows or sees you. Or look everyone in the eye, let the world know your business and not give a damn if they do. Luckily for fans of Anna McPartlin and her novels, she chose the latter approach. Her experiences have been inspiring her writing since she burst onto the literary scene five years ago.
McPartlin was five when her parents split up and she moved with her mum to live with her frail grandmother in Dublin. Her mum was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and McPartlin became carer for both women. When she was 11, social workers were drawn to the plight of the happy but under-nourished youngster and she was fostered by an aunt and uncle in Kenmare.
When McPartlin was 17, her beloved mum died, followed soon after by a close friend and then her father, and at 21 she was knocked down by a car.
After all that, it wouldn’t seem odd if she had become an introverted accountant. Instead, McPartlin became a stand-up comedian.
“People would naturally pity me. You would always get the sideways head and the ‘ahh, there she is, poor thing’. After a few days back at school I couldn’t take this any more, so I did a five minute stand-up routine of my mother in heaven and me trying to ring her but she couldn’t talk because she was going off playing tennis with Elvis,” she says.
It wasn’t just bravado. McPartlin’s mum’s motto was ‘always look for the light’ and her daughter believed in that passionately. She didn’t want to be a sob story. “It is a sad story but I hope people see that I’m not trying to emphasis the sad,” she says.
McPartlin is at ease speaking about her past. “I’m an open book. It’s difficult to have secrets when you’re five years old and living in a house with your mother and grandmother unwell. There is no privacy when your mother is falling down on the street bringing you to school or people are coming to your home to help light the fire,” she says.
“When I’m wiping my mam’s behind or helping my grandmother wash, there is no illusion, no privacy, no pretence. Everything is as it is and the outside world invades your home because without the outside world you can not live together. You have to be open to get by.
“Then I lived in a very small town (Kenmare). I had an accent. Every dog and duck knew I was Anna McSwiney and I lived with the O’Sheas. I called them auntie and uncle when the rest of the family called them mam and dad.
“They knew my father lived 30 miles down the road. They knew — most of them before I did — that I had a half-sister. Could I try to keep a secret? Not a hope in hell.
“If I didn’t think this was important to the kind of writer I am, I wouldn’t talk about it as much, but I know my books are totally inspired by my childhood and that the reason I can write about characters who suffer and struggle is because I have lived so many aspects of tragedy and love in the trenches.”
McPartlin’s latest novel, The Space Between Us, her fifth in five years, revisits the trenches, this time occupied by Eve and Lily, best friends whose lives take a dramatic turn the summer they leave school.
Their story is told in the present day and through the letters they exchanged 20 years earlier when Lily took a summer job in a hotel away from home while Eve prepared to leave for college in London.
McPartlin didn’t have far to go to recreate the Ireland of 1990 because she was that teenager and she was reintroduced to the letters of an old friend she rediscovered when going through a box of mementoes.
“I read them all howling with laughter and it was great to hear the kind of language we used. It helped to make Lily and Eve sound more authentic,” she says.
Authenticity is important in McPartlin’s writings. The Space Between Us features casualties of the economic collapse and the legacy of the child abuse scandals.
But she dismisses any idea that she’s trying to be the great chronicler of our times.
“I would never be as arrogant as to call myself a commentator on modern life because I’m not an academic and I would not see myself as that clever,” she says.
Producing five books in as many years makes McPartlin a prolific storyteller but she also finds time to be a regular panellist on TV3’s Midday programme and has turned her attentions to television in other ways.
She penned the comedy series School Run and is working on a film script for a coming-of-age tale set during the 1990 World Cup, a script based on her musician husband Donal’s first band and a series satirising the vampire genre.
“It’s the Father Ted of the vampire world and I love it,” she says. “The thing with TV is that you can produce loads of ideas and scripts and you have no idea if any of them will ever be used, but I get to laugh all the time while I’m working on them, so I’m having a ball.”
The Space Between Us, Poolbeg, €15.99
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