Five years as a newspaper agony aunt gave Cathy Kelly valuable insight into love and all its facets, but the term 'romantic novelist' doesn't sit easily with her, she tells Richard Gillis.
On Valentine's Day, love becomes a news story. Cathy Kelly knows that because she used to write them. In her days as a young journalist, she was routinely sent out on to the streets of Dublin to find quirky takes on the thorny issue of romance - the faux outrage at the price of red roses; the rocketing sales of pink, fluffy handcuffs; or dodgy research suggesting that Irish men are the worst/best* lovers in the world (* delete as appropriate) - Kelly covered them all.
And later, when she wrote social features for the Sunday World (she refers to herself as "The Tallaght Correspondent"), love, or the lack of it, was a common theme. Her five-year stint as the paper's agony aunt meant her in-tray overflowed with intensely personal stories of every type - unrequited love; office flings; holiday romances; gay; straight - all of Irish life was there.
The difference between Cathy Kelly and the majority of her colleagues was that she went home from work, sat down at her kitchen table and wrote a bestseller, going on to become one of the most commercially successful authors Ireland has produced.
Love is still pretty much her stock in trade. But after writing nine books, and receiving a series of lucrative publishing advances, the value of her opinion on the subject has risen sharply.
We meet in a swish boutique hotel in a quiet corner of London's Knightsbridge, where the world's super-rich come to shop. Kelly has been here for two days, promoting her new book, Lessons in Heartbreak, before heading home to Enniskerry, Co Wicklow.
We begin by talking about love and romance and Kelly is warming to her theme - she's about to go on an anti-Valentine's Day tirade - but she pauses, to give me some editorial advice: "The Alternative Guide to Valentine's Day, according to the Queen of Romance", she says, laughing, which she does frequently, and pointing at my note pad. "That's your headline!" Once a journalist, always a journalist.
"I remember being a kid in secondary school, when I was 12, and getting no Valentine's cards and feeling like a pariah, that nobody loved me or liked me, or even vaguely fancied me from afar," she says. "The next year, my father, clearly feeling my pain, had written me one. How sad it is that people get so miserable over it.
"My problem with it [Valentine's Day] is that it can be used as a stick to beat people over the head with. Some women still think, if he doesn't come home with 76 red roses that cost him the mortgage, that he doesn't love them. Men and women think differently. A guy thinks, and sorry, but this is a total generalisation, 'I love you, I'm going to put up those shelves'. The woman thinks, I want you to prove you love me by bringing me a really big card, which he would be humiliated by buying. It's a big commercial, marketing thing, but love is about something different.
"If it matters to one person in the relationship it's good for the other person to make an effort, because it says, it doesn't matter to me, but I know it matters to you, darling, so I'll make an effort," she says.
Cathy Kelly's name is synonymous with the term "romantic novelist", something with which she has some issues. She is keen to distance herself from the worlds created within the covers of Mills & Boon, peopled as they are by blushing society ladies whispering lines such as, "Take me firmly, Mr Frobisher" to tall, dark, silent types who learn to love over the course of 500 bodice -ripping pages.
"My books are not flowery, romantic books. There's love in them, but there is a core of reality running through them like a big lump of steel," Kelly says. "Romance is a lovely thing, but far more important are respect, affection and kindness."
But romance is also very lucrative, both for Cathy Kelly and her publishers. So, while most of us think about this stuff once in a while, she does it every day. That's a lot of pressure.
"You sign a contract for three books and the dates are set. So, for the first month I swan around going la di da di da, having lunch and [mimes holding a pen and note pad], maybe I'll write a few notes down. Then suddenly I sit down and go 'Oh s**t!' And then I panic. I'm lucky that I have a great editor, Rebecca Hore, who is herself a published author and a very good writer. And she calms me down. I say to her that it takes me so long to get the beginning done. And she says 'well that's very important, it's your thinking time'."
Kelly says it takes her about six months to write the first quarter of a book. "I'm endlessly changing it, every day I change it, just to get the characters right. When I get the characters right, then it rolls. But until then, it's a nightmare, and I'm at that stage now, hammering away at different characters. The end of this year is when the book is due with the publishers. I'm at the 'Oh s**t' stage now."
Coming up with story ideas is never a problem she says. Some of them sit outside the romance genre. "I have three book ideas in my head now. I'd love to write a young adult's book. I keep fiddling with it in my head, and sometimes on paper. I'd love to write it, but I know now is not the time to do it."
She would also like to try writing a screenplay for a film. "I want to push myself to do something. Not a screenplay of one of my books. I don't think my books are cinematic." She is keen to convey that the screenplay, and the ideas for "non-romance" books, are not signals that she is moving in a different direction. "It's additional, a pie in the sky thing. I will keep doing what I'm doing because I love it."
Her new book is partly set in the size-zero culture of the fashion industry, the effects of which she became aware of back in her agony aunt days. "I got so many letters from young gay guys, and young women who were battling with eating disorders and were living in despair because they didn't fit in with how they thought they had to be. It is so powerful and so strong and so anti-women. I love women's magazines, but there is a lot that is anti-women in them. It's so negative. It's saying, if you are not a size eight, there's something wrong with you.
"I get sucked into it, too. For years I'd stand in front of the mirror and say, 'maybe I look a bit fat'. And it wouldn't matter what I was doing that day, inside I'd be saying 'yeah, but you're a big, fat pig'. It's so damaging. It doesn't matter how good and strong and amazing they are, many women still want to fit into size 10 jeans, how sad is that?"
Another tirade over, she catches herself, hoping that her points are coming across okay. "I'm a typical Virgo. I had an astrological thing done once and my planets are in Virgo, Virgo and Virgo, which apparently is dangerous; you need to be locked up when that happens." She's laughing that laugh again. "Oh God, am I sounding mad? Don't make me sound mad, please!" Not mad at all, just passionate. Which, like love and Valentine's Day, are two different things entirely. u
Lessons in Heartbreak, by Cathy Kelly, is published by HarperCollins (£14.99 in UK)