She was born in the West of Ireland in 1963.
I was a month overdue and I often wonder what my life would have been like if I'd been born on time and been a dynamic, sunny Leo, instead of a perfectionist Virgo; it was a hard lesson to learn and since then I’ve always been very punctual.
She was brought up in
Dublin, and then she spent her twenties in London.
When I left school I went to college, got a law degree, then put it to good use by going to London and getting a job as a waitress. Eventually I upped and got respectable and got a job in an accounts office, where I worked (I use the term oh-so-loosely) for a long, long, long time. I thought I'd be there forever, that I'd end up as a grumpy old woman with forty cats and that small boys would throw stones at me. What I certainly had no notion of doing was becoming a writer.
During her twenties her
life-long low self esteem gradually mutated into a drinking problem.
By the time I was thirty it had all come to a terrible head and, after a suicide attempt, I was lucky enough to get into rehab. (Mind you I didn’t feel lucky at the time! I thought my life was over.) However, I’ve been one of the fortunate ones and I’ve stayed sober and – more importantly – happy about it, ever since.
She started writing in 1993 and her first book Watermelon was published in Ireland in 1995.
I began writing short stories four months before I finally stopped drinking, and after I came out of rehab I decided to send them off to a publisher. So that they'd take me seriously, I enclosed a letter saying I'd written part of a novel. Which I hadn't. I had no intention of so doing, either - I was much more into the instant gratification of short stories. But they wrote back and said, send the novel, and for once in my self-destructive life I didn't shoot myself in the foot. I wrote four chapters of my first novel Watermelon in a week, and was offered a three-book contract on the strength of it.
Since then she has become a publishing phenomenon. Over twenty-three million copies of her nine novels have been sold worldwide.
In November 1996 I was finally able to give up my day job and become - allegedly anyway - a full time writer. Except that almost from the moment all my time was free to write with, I began to try and distract myself and do anything but write. I'm up and down the stairs, checking to see if the mail has come. (Even after it already has.) I pray for the phone to ring, I make appointments for root-canal treatment and toy with the notion of scrubbing the kitchen floor. Anything other than switch on the computer. Of course, once I start it's not so bad, I always find.