Growing up as the daughter of a leading politician was hectic and complex, but time spent escaping into her wardrobe dreamworld has reaped creative dividends, Cecelia Ahern tells Róisín Ingle
HER LIFE THESE days is all business trips to LA, international publicity tours and marathon late-night writing sessions, but when bestselling author Cecelia Ahern was a little girl, she spent a good deal of her time hiding in a wardrobe.
Wearing a blue silk top and sipping latte in a private members' club in Dublin city-centre, the wardrobe comes up in relation to her first play, Mrs Whippy, which will be staged at the end of next month. The play, directed by Michael Scott, starring Marion O'Dwyer, and based on Ahern's novella of the same name (written for the Open Door adult literacy series), focuses on 46-year-old, 16-stone Emelda, a character Ahern describes as "a quite empty person who needs to be filled". She is talking about Emelda's need to escape and her own desire to "hide behind my words" when she mentions that, as a child, an old- fashioned wardrobe, lined with a piece of brown carpet, provided a Narnia-style portal to her own private dreamworld.
Behind these doors she could become whatever she wanted to be, "a doctor, a really good private investigator, a writer" leaving the real world behind.
"There was an outgoing, social side to me but I lived in my head all the time, in a complete dream," she says.
This will make a lot of sense to her fans. The characters in Ahern's books, six of them in total since she published PS, I Love You atthe age of just 21, dwell in a kind of other-world, even if, on the surface, it appears to resemble Kerry or cosmopolitan Dublin.
Gritty reality is not her stock-in-trade. When she sits down to write, she creates simple wordscapes filled with whimsical characters, lost souls, magical flourishes and plots that require the reader's belief to be seriously suspended. In her last book, Thanks for the Memories, a woman who gets a blood transfusion suddenly has the memories and gifts of the male donor. Ahern says the "concept" always comes first with her, as though she is speaking about movies rather than books.
It all amounts to a winning formula, which has resulted in book sales of more than 10 million, a successful movie version of PS, I Love You, and a producer credit on Emmy-nominated TV show, Samantha Who?.
"I still technically go into my little wardrobe when I am writing," she says.
When you ask why she thinks she took refuge in the wardrobe, or what exactly she was escaping from 20 years ago, she fixes you with those friendly blue eyes and flashes a sweet smile.
"Maybe there were things I had to think about when I was five or six years of age. I am sure I could have a big therapy session about it - you never know really," she says.
In fact, those wardrobe days, when she was "five or six" happen to coincide with the period when her mother and father were splitting up.
Because her father, former taoiseach Bertie Ahern, happens to be a slightly famous politician, we tend to be more curious about Cecelia's family life and upbringing than we are about the provenance of, say, another successful local writer, Marian Keyes.
She is known for gently deflecting queries of a personal nature in interviews, so I don't expect an answer when I ask if her need to escape may have been a response to her parents' difficulties at the time. "Perhaps," she says, warily. "Obviously I would assume in my head that's what it is, but I don't like to say that and put that on my parents, because I was only five or six, and I can't actually know."
It's a candid moment, from a writer who has spent her life being instinctively aware of the importance of keeping nosy parkers at bay. When journalists rang the house looking for her father, for example, she knew without anyone telling her to reply, "I don't know where he is".
On the day we meet, her father is quoted in newspapers saying that the tribunal "ordeal" took its toll on his friends and family. So what impact did the Mahon tribunal and her father's surprise resignation from the position of taoiseach make on her? There is a sigh, a pause, and then a nervous giggle.
"Well," she eventually replies. "The funny thing is, dad is always, on the surface, saying 'it's fine, we'll deal with it, we'll do this, that and the other' . . . His reaction was 'we'll battle on, get through it, keep going, it's hard but we'll battle on'."
The Ahern family motto is Per ardua surgo? "I rise through difficulties, yes," she says. "I was concerned about him, of course. I could see it was a stressful thing, but it was only at the end really, because obviously he would have loved to have been there longer . . . that's when I felt quite angry as well, very angry on his behalf, because the person who had said 'I'll battle on' finally said: 'Okay, let's stop now.'
"I just felt so hurt for him. I don't think he has any regrets. He's happy now. But as a daughter, at the end you feel angry and hurt."
She says that, as she grows older she has realised that they are very much alike, both workaholics, both driven. Would she like him to go for president of Ireland? "I think he would make a great president," she says.
FOR ALL THEIR whimsy, Ahern's characters go to some very dark places and it annoys her when critics suggest she hasn't lived or experienced enough to explore this side of life adeptly.
"It irritates me that people judge a person by their age," she says. "You go through lots of things in life. Just because people saw a few photographs of me every year growing up doesn't mean they know what happened in my life.
"Anyway, as a writer you just have to know what it is like to feel. I am a very emotional person. I jump into people's heads. I drive myself insane. I can't watch the news. I feel things all the time, that's just the way I am."
She knows people think the books are "fluffy", but says she always looks for "beneath the surface" themes. Her next book, The Gift, is about a man called Lou Suffern (a play on Lucifer) and the notion of being in two places at one time.
She's learnt to ignore the more strident critics of her work.
"They don't get what I am doing, and that's fine . . . You can say things in a way that is accessible to people, but it can mean a whole lot more if you read it properly," she says. "I am not saying I am a deep literary writer, but there is always a deeper meaning . . . Just because I am writing about life, and it's heartwarming, doesn't mean it's not intelligent."
Her self-belief never seems to waver and the ideas never dry up. When ABC called to ask whether she had an idea for a TV show, she came up with Samantha Who?, the story of a woman who, after an accident, develops retrograde amnesia and forgets who she is. (How did she feel about RTÉ turning it down, saying the series "wasn't outstanding"? "I was upset about that - I just wanted everyone here to see it, but I am delighted it's on TG4 now.") Earlier this year, she wrote an original screenplay in eight days ("it just came out," she says), and when director Michael Scott came calling about turning Mrs Whippyinto a play, she just set to work expanding the story. The other night she stayed up until 5am working on her seventh book.
"If you sat around saying 'can I or can't I?', you probably would never do anything," she says. "Obviously, not everyone is going to love it. So do I listen to the people who say 'you can't' and not be happy, or do I go with the positive and try the best I can and do what makes me happy?"
When she's not working she reads crime books and thrillers, while her favourite TV series are currently The West Wing, Houseand Prison Break. She lives in Malahide, Co Dublin, with her boyfriend, David. "He's an actor," she says. "He holds me up when I get wobbly."
Close with all the family, at the moment she is "addicted" to her twin nephews, the sons of sister Georgina and Nicky from Westlife. She values her mother's support, particularly her honesty - "She told me she didn't really like my second book," she says, laughing - and has a healthy attitude to her wealth.
"I always feel I could lose it all at any moment, so it's not something I dwell on," she says.
HER FIRST PLAY, Mrs Whippy, stars Marion O'Dwyer as Emelda, a woman who's every significant life moment is linked to an ice-cream dessert. She has been abandoned by her husband and sits in her house picking through her life in knickerbocker glories and ice-cream wafers. At one point, Emelda says of her ex-husband: "Hate is not a strong enough word . . . I detest him. I detest him and dream of ways he can die a very painful death. Perhaps that's too harsh. Perhaps just a serious accident with an outcome involving baby food and a straw. And castration."
Lest anyone think she is describing her mother's experience after her father left, she says: "I didn't draw on that at all. The father in this story is a monster - it's totally different."
Some people claim Ahern writes "modern fairytales" but she rejects this idea in favour of a self-help philosophy that sums up her phenomenal journey so far.
"Fairytales are unrealistic," she says. "The woman is rescued by the man and all that. Happy endings aren't necessarily getting everything you want. Sometimes it's about waking up one day and saying, 'I can help myself, I can rescue myself', which is often what happens to my characters. What I like to do is find the extraordinary in the ordinary.
"Sitting in the wardrobe when I was young was a magical feeling, not like hocus-pocus or rabbits out of hats, but the feeling you get when you go to another world, and essentially what I try to do in my novels is bring people into that wardrobe world."
• Mrs Whippy, by Cecelia Ahern, will run from Oct 29 at Liberty Hall Theatre, Dublin
