Thriller writer Andrea Mara: ‘My mother-in-law was Ireland’s first female private investigator, and my husband helped her with cases’

Tell me about your new thriller, Someone in the Attic (Bantam)

Someone in the Attic is about Dublin-born Julia, who relocates to Ireland from the US in a hurry. She and her kids move to a luxury gated complex and are trying to settle in when teenage daughter Isla spots a TikTok video seeming to show someone living in their attic and creeping around when they’re not there. Julia assumes it’s part of a TikTok viral campaign for a reality show, using Photoshop. Her son Luca, however, is terrified, hearing creaks and footsteps, convinced that someone is coming into his room when he’s asleep. Meanwhile, an old school friend has just died in mysterious circumstances. So Julia has to work out if it’s all a trick, or if someone from her past is out to get her – is there someone in the attic?

It’s been described as an homage to childhood fears and things that go bump in the night, yet it also tackles modern anxieties such as social media risks. How do you balance the two?

While it was fun writing the creepy scenes, there is a serious side to the story too, and to me, it’s not just about the risks of social media but the upsides too. On the one hand, the person sharing the videos may or may not have edited clips the family posted online themselves, but it’s also clear that the internet and social media are here to stay. So for parents, it’s better, I think, to understand and even embrace social media than to hope our teens might be in the tiny percentage who decide not to bother. Isla, the teen in the story, has been uprooted from her life in San Diego, and her only means of communicating with her friends is via her phone. When I was her age, I was uprooted (a much smaller journey from Cork to Dublin!) and I’d have given anything to be able to message my friends regularly, especially at that pivotal age.

[ Andrea Mara: ‘Dark stories were always rattling around in my head’ ]

Friendship is at the heart of the book. Why is it such a rich subject?

I think friendship is relatable for everyone – we’ve all lost friendships, found new friends, rekindled old connections or even deliberately cut ties with someone. I’m particularly interested in the idea of people we’ve known for decades and how we change over time, and the question of whether or not we’d be friends if we met today. It’s something I explored in No One Saw a Thing and again in Someone in the Attic. Despite 20 years apart, Julia believes she knows her old friends but as the story unfolds, she discovers – for better or for worse – that she doesn’t know them quite as well as she thinks.

How much fun was it to capture the south Dublin milieu?

That’s my favourite part – writing characters with their big, luxurious houses in south Dublin. It’s a little exaggerated, of course, because it wouldn’t be as much fun if it was a realistic portrayal of fairly normal people who do normal things like making dinner and huddling on chilly sidelines watching their children’s matches. It’s much more fun if they’re opening Champagne in marble kitchens, driving gleaming cars and popping off to Sicilian holiday homes.

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Your books are inspired by true stories. How do you twist them?

The real-life stories all ended pretty quickly with reasonable explanations; safe to say, there’s nobody living in my attic. But in the fictional versions, I look at the “what if” – what if my child was kidnapped on a play date, what if my child disappeared on the Tube, what if there really was someone living in the attic?

All Her Fault has been greenlit for a TV series by US streamer Peacock. What’s the latest?

Casting is under way and filming is due to begin later this year. It has just been announced that Sarah Snook, who played Shiv Roy in Succession, will play Marissa, the main character – something I’m extremely excited about!

You’re a late starter, writing your first book at 42. How has this helped?

A big upside – I can give all my characters the various jobs I had before I turned to writing! Many of my books have storylines involving parents and children and the worries we have about things that can go wrong, all of which were inspired by worries I’ve had about my own three kids, so that helped. As for the teen years ... let’s just say the next eight books are already planned out.

You have synaesthesia, seeing numbers, letters and days of the week in colour. Does this affect your writing?

Synaesthesia makes everything more colourful and makes the abstract visual, so this helps me with writing and playing out scenes in my head. I also have number form synaesthesia – seeing time as a physical path – and this helps with the careful timeline plotting required in thrillers.

Would you make a good detective?

I am better at coming up with plots than solving them. However, my mother-in-law was Ireland’s first female private investigator, and my husband used to help her with cases, so maybe some of it will rub off on me!

What is the best writing advice you have heard?

Write fast. Don’t stop to look back, just keep going to get to the end of the story. You can fix it, colour in the detail, change everything once you’ve written the first draft. But until you have something written, you have nothing to fix.

Someone in the Attic by Andrea Mara is published by Bantam