Show notes
Monica McInerney’s best-selling and award-winning books explore the resilience and fragility of family bonds, whether in a single-mother family as in her latest book, The Godmothers, or in earlier ones like the hugely popular The Trip of a Lifetime. This one introduced, as one critic put it, “a huge-hearted and colorful family you’ll want to call your own”.
Australian born and Dublin based when we’re not in pandemic, Monica tops reader popularity polls for warm family stories packed with emotion on both sides of the world.
Hi, I’m your host Jenny Wheeler, and today Monica talks about why she loves the drama of big families – she’s from a big family herself – and about her first published book in her primary school library.
She got her first paid writing job as a script writer on a popular children’s TV show when she was just in her teens, and she has been writing in one form or another ever since.
Six Things You’ll Learn
Six things you’ll learn from this Joys of Binge Reading episode:
Being part of a big family
Getting her start in children’s TV
Living between two countries
The two year project that never got published
The writers Monica most admires
Why being a passionate reader helps her writing
Where to find Monica McInerney:
Website: http://www.monicamcinerney.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/monicamcinerneyauthor/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/monicamcinerneyauthor/
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/47105.Monica_McInerney
What follows is a “near as” transcript of our conversation, not word for word but pretty close to it, with links to important mentions.
But now, here’s Monica.
Jenny Wheeler: Hello there, Monica and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.
Introducing Monica McInerney
Monica McInerney: Hello, Jenny. Thanks very much for talking to me.
Monica McInerney – popular family stories
Jenny Wheeler: You are in South Australia, I’m in New Zealand; we’re both rather lucky in terms of what’s going on in the rest of the world.
You have been published regularly in Australia’s Booktopia Top 10 as one of the most popular authors in that country, and you’ve made emotional women’s stories your chosen area of expertise.
As one reviewer put it, you explore the resiliency and fragility of family bonds. What drew you to that territory initially?
Monica McInerney: I think it’s because I grew up as the middle child in a family of nine, Jenny, to be honest. I’ve got six brothers and sisters and I’m the middle child. I grew up in a small country town called Clare in the Clare Valley of South Australia. From the earliest I can remember I was surrounded by people, by drama, by comedy.
My father was the railway stationmaster and we lived in the stationmaster’s house. It was always visitors, friends, families, relatives visiting, and so constant squeaking of the gate as people arrived with stories to tell – some news, some drama, a funny thing to share – and that really concentrated my mind, even as a child, how interesting families can be.
Agatha Christie’s microcosm
Agatha Christie always said that she set all of her books in small villages because they were a microcosm of the whole world. For me, families are that.
Through them are introduced to so many different elements of being a human being under the family roof – grief and love and sometimes bitterness, sometimes difficulties, sibling rivalry, and all of that is such rich pickings for a novel, so I trace it all back to my childhood.
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Jenny Wheeler: The Godmothers, which is your most recent book and the one we’ll focus on today, is Eliza’s story. She’s the sole child of a single mother who, though troubled, creates a magic world for her daughter. The outside reader can see that this magic world that is related through Eliza’s eyes, is also a little bit turbulent on the surface, but she’s also got safety and oversight from two remarkable godmothers who are the godmothers of the title.
You’ve said that an event in your own family initially inspired this particular story. Can you tell us about that event?
Monica McInerney: I certainly can. One of the many things I’m fascinated with about family life is the secrets between generations, and I’ve always been very aware of that. I was an eavesdropping child, I’m an eavesdropping adult to be honest, and a very curious child and a curious adult.
A never-discussed family mystery
I grew up very conscious that I had a missing aunt in my family tree and that was my father’s half-sister, who drowned in her forties on the family farm in Northern South Australia, about eight years before I was born.
She was in her forties and she drowned in an underground water tank and it was one of those stories that was never discussed in front of the next generation, and if you walked into a room and you knew they were talking about it, everybody would go quiet.
The Trip of a Lifetime – Monica McInerney Another warm family story.
I asked my father about it once and he said he didn’t know any more. As far as he was concerned it had been a drowning, it had been an accident. But there was always that mood that there was more to it. Was it suicide? Was it something more sinister?
I had only one godmother. I didn’t have a godfather. I grew up in a big Irish, Australian Catholic family, and my brothers and sisters all have a godmother and a godfather. My godmother was very, very religious so mom and dad thought they couldn’t match her with somebody to share the role. I always believed that my godmother knew more about the mysterious death of this missing aunt, but I could never get her to share any details with me, no matter how much I asked her as I became an adult.
The custodians of family secrets
I think those two elements came together in terms of – what if the godmother in your life was the custodian of some very important family secrets? For me, of course, the missing aunt was just curiosity. I wondered about this woman, what had happened, what had her life been like but, as is often the case with my novels, you add on.
What if the godmothers knew secrets that were absolutely integral to your development as a human being, to your safety, to your idea of yourself. That’s where the novel came from.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s fabulous because both Eliza’s mother and her godmothers keep a lot of information from her, including the identity of her father, and at the end there is still one thing that the godmothers conceal from her. You introduce the interesting question of – is it sometimes best to lie?
As a reader going through it, you identify with Eliza and you feel indignant because there are hints that they are concealing something that they’re not telling her, and you feel very much indignant on her behalf.
Is always wrong to lie?
Then right at the end, when you realize what this information is, and you realize what their decision is – and I won’t spoil the story by saying what that is – you actually agree with the final decision they make and you make a decision about that. Can you talk about it without giving the actual storyline away?
Monica McInerney: I can, and you have to get to be so careful of spoilers, especially with The Godmothers, because it is full of twists and turns and moral dilemmas and secrets and lies, all the way through.
One of the things I’m really interested in as a human being, and also as a writer and as a reader, is the secrets we all keep from one another and the moral dilemmas that are involved in our relationships with other human beings.
It’s very easy to hurt people by telling the truth. It can be as, not superficial, but as casual as telling somebody they look terrible in an outfit they’ve spent ages preparing.
In the story of The Godmothers, if the godmothers were to reveal to Eliza their goddaughter everything they know about her troubled mother’s life, everything they know about their own relationship with her and all the very many layers of it – how devastating that could be to her.
A story of family moral dilemmas
They have to make a decision, because nothing is ever black and white, everything is gray in terms of our relationships with one another, I believe. So it’s a book of moral dilemmas. Absolutely.
Jenny Wheeler: The other judgment call you make is that if a psychologist or a psychiatrist or a counselor was reading it, they would probably put both Eliza’s mother and the other character, the boy Sullivan, into one of those personality profiles that have a label, and yet you very much hold back from making judgment calls.
Those Faraday Girls – Monica McInerney – an award winning tale of family secrets and lies
You describe the way they behave but you withhold totally any judgment call about why that might be, or what it really is all about, don’t you? You leave the reader to make up their own mind.
Monica McInerney: Absolutely. That was a very, very deliberate decision on my part as the writer of this novel. Eliza meets Sullivan, the 12-year-old boy you mentioned, on a plane when she’s flying from Australia to Edinburgh, where she’s going to meet up with her two godmothers.
She’s sat next to this young fellow who is, as I said, 12 going on about 112, a very articulate young man and very unusual character. Certainly, Eliza’s mother is a troubled person but full of love, full of drama, full of adventure, but for every high there’s a low.
The extremes of personality
Indeed, I could have said with both of those characters, here’s what they probably would be diagnosed with if that was to be the way I was going to be writing it. But I didn’t.
To go back to that there’s nothing black and white about the way human beings are, everybody has shades of personality, shapes in themselves, I think.
Also, what I wanted to really explore in this novel, as in all my novels, is the way people react to other people’s behavior – whether that behavior is because of a particular personality order or disorder or because people are behaving out of selfishness or fear or anger or vulnerability, all the things that make us react in difficult ways with one another – that is what really interests me as a writer.
That’s what I’ve done in this novel. They are tricky characters, both of those. I think everybody in the novel is actually, because no human being is straightforward. But Eliza’s mother Jeanie would have been a very difficult friend, and the godmothers, her two best friends since school, are very conflicted in their love and their relationship with her. They are very protective of her, but they’re exasperated by her.
A character with great charm
Certainly Sullivan, the young boy, would not be the easiest of sons to have either, but he makes a really excellent friend for Eliza when she needs one. People react to him in different ways throughout the book as well. As one of the characters says, that kid’s a weirdo. Perhaps, but he’s also got enormous charm.
That’s what I like to write about – the way we react to people who behave in ways we don’t expect.
Hello From The Gillespies – Monica McInerney – After 30 years Angela tells some home truths
Jenny Wheeler: I love the dialogue between Sullivan and Eliza, and I think that by not labeling him, you give him the space to be himself, which makes the book that much more fun in a way. It might not happen in real life, but it’s lovely to be able to see it happen in a book.
Monica McInerney: I’ve been quite spoiled actually. I’ve got lots of young nephews myself and where I usually live in Dublin – I’m sure you and I will talk about that, moving between countries – and in our street there were lots of inner-city kids, very kind of wild and free in Dublin in a way that they’re not so much in Australia.
Living between two countries
I had lots of friends, I’m 56 now but of about 10, 11 and 12. These kids would come and play, because I was home all day writing in my office. My office looked out over this Dublin street, so I was like a curiosity then, also because I had this different accent. I got to know all of their friends and, to be honest,
I think Sullivan is an amalgam of a lot of those kids. I have seen it in real life, I reckon, that kind of particular friendship you can have with really unusual kids.
Jenny Wheeler: That does bring us on to talking a little bit more widely about the rest of your literary output, because it’s huge. This is your 13th novel.
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As you mentioned, you were born in South Australia, but you’re married to an Irishman. I presume you might have even been tracing your family roots back to Ireland when you met him, I don’t know. But you now divide your time between the two countries and your books very much reflect that kind of peripatetic lifestyle, don’t they? They often do spread themselves between those two places.
Monica McInerney: They sure do Jenny, and yes, again, that comes from my own life experience. I often say that I don’t write factually autobiographical books, but I certainly write geographically autobiographical books and I write emotionally autobiographical books. I draw on my own life in lots of ways as every writer does.
Irish on both sides of the family
We all have to draw on all the material that’s inside us. As I mentioned, I grew up in the Clare Valley of South Australia and I’m the great granddaughter of Irish immigrants on both sides. My mother’s and father’s side were from County Clare in Ireland.
My Irish husband had immigrated to Australia back in 1988 and we met when he was working on a newspaper in Melbourne. He’s a journalist, and he was already going back to Ireland, so I went back with him.
Rather than a kangaroo keyring souvenir he brought me back to Ireland, and since then we’ve been moving back and forth between our two countries. He’s one of a big family too so we’re very used to packing up our lives and spending time back and forth.
He was a big traveler. I’ve traveled a lot as well, so I know that feeling of arriving in a new city or country.
Small country town to big city
Some of it I think was coming from a small country town, and if I wanted to experience as big a life as I can, which I did want to, and still want to. I left our small country town at the age of 17 and I was living in London by the time I was 19. I’ve lived all around Australia and traveled widely.
I’m very interested in the impact travel has on a person, that sense of excitement you get when you go to a new place, the opportunities that open up, the way you can reinvent yourself if you care to, but also the fact that you bring yourself with you.
There’s a terrific saying that “skies change, not cares, for those who’ve crossed the seas.” I think that underpins a lot of my novels too. People do travel for lots of different reasons, but they bring themselves with them and sometimes they find what they’re looking for, sometimes they find unexpected happenings and again, for me as a novelist, that’s really rich pickings.
Jenny Wheeler: How has all of that been affected by what we’re going through at the moment?
Monica McInerney: Oh, gosh, I tell you it’s the funniest thing. I’m talking to you from Adelaide in South Australia which is where I grew up. I came here in March last year for a month.
Negotiating family life in pandemic
I try and get home to Australia once a year for a month to see my mum who’s in her eighties and all my brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews, and I was due to fly back two days before the pandemic was declared and all the international borders were closed. I’ve been here since.
I had nine months where I didn’t get to see my husband. He had stayed home in Dublin while I was here, meeting publishers and finishing, researching, writing and editing The Godmothers. We turned into pen pals for nine months because the world closed down and I couldn’t travel and he couldn’t travel.
Then a circuitous chain of events meant he was able to apply for a travel exemption, so he arrived in Australia in November. We were reunited, not in Dublin, but here in South Australia. All that while I was editing and working on The Godmothers, which has people flitting back and forth between Australia and Scotland and getting on ferries and going to Ireland and all sorts of travel.
It was very strange to be editing and reading these scenes – people on a plane, so close to each other, no masks, walking through crowds. It felt like fantasy more than fiction sometimes.
Looking to the uncertain future
I’m really interested to see how it’s going to affect my novels in the future, whether I always set my novels in 2019 from now on, because my novels have people flying all over the world. Also, I don’t think anybody will ever want to read about a pandemic, so I don’t know if I want to put it in my books.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s right. It creates a few little conundrums going forward. It also introduces the thought about uplifting stories. Your stories are uplifting, and you write about what one person described as colorful and huge hearted families that you want to call your own. There is very much a good vibe in them. Do you think it’s important to have that uplift in these times as well?
At Home With The Templetons – Monica McInerney – other people’s families are not as perfect as they look
Monica McInerney: I do, very much. Again, that’s not a deliberate decision. I think a lot of them, all of my novels, the thirteen novels and I’ve written a lot of short stories as well, reflect my worldview in a way that your novels would reflect your worldview. Every writer brings the way they see the world into their stories.
For me, as a human, I need to feel hope. I need to feel that even though we’re all going through bleak times, and I certainly have in my own life had times of deep sorrow and deep sadness and gloom and bleakness, but there’s always been a tiny light.
You’re going to get through this. All things will change. If you get through this, there will be brighter days. That has proved right to me over and again in my own life and that’s what I bring into my stories.
Hopeful rather than happy endings
I don’t write happy endings in my novels because I put my characters through the wringer each time. I explore under the family roof and through each of my novels, the darkest of human experiences – great grief, results of accidents and terrible decisions. But what I want to do is see how people are shaped by those elemental things that happen to them and keep going.
What I always say is I write hopeful endings. All my novels have hopeful endings in that you can think, God, that person, that character has really been through it, but I think they’re going to be okay. I always write epilogues because I love epilogues as a reader.
I love when you finish the story and sometimes if it just stops, you go, but then what happened a year later? All of my novels reflect that desire I have. I introduce my readers to, here they are a year later and look, I think they’re going to be alright.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s wonderful. Turning from talking about the specific books to your wider career. Tell us a bit about what your life was like before you became a full-time writer. I’m not quite sure how long ago that was, but did you have experience that you brought to your work when you started writing?
Monica’s life before fulltime writing
Monica McInerney: Absolutely Jenny. This year marks my 21st year of being published, so I’ve been writing or around words and stories all my life, again, as I said, starting with my childhood in this big noisy family full of stories and comedy and drama.
My first job out of school was as a wardrobe girl on a very well-known Australian television show called Here’s Humphrey, a kid’s’ TV show. I was originally wardrobe girl for this, it was a man in a bear suit, a real tradition in children’s television here in Australia.
The House Of Memories – Monica McInerney – Sometimes the hardest lessons matter most.
Then I began writing TV scripts for that, which was fantastic experience now I think about it, in terms of writing for children. You’ve got to keep the action going, there’s got to be lots of color, lots of movement, and my books to this day are very fast moving and full of dialog.
Ironically, Humphrey B Bear, who was the bear in this children’s TV show, didn’t speak, but all the adults around him did, so it still had to have lots of very big and fast storylines.
I moved to London where I worked in the music industry and writing media releases and advertising copy. I moved back to Australia, worked in the music industry in Sydney for a while, again writing articles and media releases. Then I began working in publishing and I worked in publishing for 10 years.
Every experience valuable
I worked for Penguin Books who are now my publisher in Australia, in Melbourne, where I worked with authors including Roald Dahl and the wonderful Margaret Mahy from New Zealand. I toured with her, which was an incredible experience.
Then I met my husband, moved to Ireland, and worked as a book publicist there. I worked with incredible authors. I met Harold Pinter, Toni Morrison, all sorts of amazing authors, Tim Winton I’ve met as well, Carol Shields, so I spent a lot of time listening, talking to authors.
In a way, I think that was fantastic experience in terms of almost doing a writing course by osmosis, because I sat in on lots of interviews, like I’m doing now, hearing the way people write, hearing that so much about writing and longevity is determination and dedication, turning up to your desk day after day.
A lot of those interviews that I sat in on when I was a publicist for 10 years have been fantastic grounding for me to keep me going. I know basically what goes on behind the scenes to be an author. Along that way as well, in my career, I worked as a temp. I’ve worked in arts festivals, I’ve been a hotel cleaner, a waitress, a kinder gym instructor, lots of other jobs, public relations journalist. If anybody has ever read all thirteen of my novels, every single one of those careers has popped up my books in some way.
From publisher to author
I teach a little bit now, I do some writing courses in Ireland, and I always like to tell the students that nothing is ever wasted. If you think, I can’t be a writer because all I’ve ever done is worked in a morgue, I always want to say, you are a perfect person to be a writer because people would want to know what happens in a morgue.
Whether you are you a paramedic or working in a boutique or whatever job you do, you’re coming up against people and stories. I’ve drawn on every single job I’ve ever had.
Jenny Wheeler: What was the trigger that made you decide you wanted to write a book rather than publish and market other people’s?
Monica McInerney: I had always wanted to be a writer. I actually wrote my first book when I was eight at my primary school in the Clare Valley. It was a school holiday project. I loved writing that. It was a very small, simple story with illustrations, but a wonderful thing happened with that book.
The school librarian asked if she could borrow it when we went back to school, and she covered it and cataloged it and put it on the shelves at the school library, so the whole time I was at that primary school, a book I had written was on the shelves.
A memorable school librarian
No one had ever borrowed it, but I was very conscious that there it was. And we copied the books, so it had a cover, it had the ISBN at the back and the little biog and everything. Also, I just adore books. Everything I do as a writer is because I’m a reader.
I was writing stories, even though I was writing children’s TV stories, and even writing media releases and articles was about working with words and putting information across and shaping the way I see the world into other stories, I suppose.
Lola’s Secret – Monica McInerney – Magic can happen in any family.
In fact, ironically, it was only when John, my husband, and I moved to Tasmania in 1996. Up until then I’d been working in book publishing for more than 10 years, working with all these writers, and that was fulfilling my longing to be around stories and storytelling – working with authors all the time and hearing what they had to say about their inspiration and their working life, et cetera.
When we moved to Tasmania there were no jobs in publishing because there wasn’t really a publishing industry there, and I missed it, Jenny, I missed that feeling. One day I borrowed the laptop from work – this is now 25, 26 years ago – and I thought, I wonder, could I write a story?
At that stage it was the magazine I was really interested in. I loved reading magazines, and often there was a five-minute fiction at the back of magazines and a little twist in the tail.
The stories poured out
I’d read one in the dentist and I thought, I wonder, could I write one of those? I sat down one night in Tasmania with the borrowed laptop and had a tiny idea for short story. I wrote it and I can still remember it, the feeling, I can feel it now even, the hairs at the back of my neck standing up.
This story poured out of me. I borrowed the laptop the next day. I had another story, another story, another story. Within about three months, I’d written 50 short stories.
It was like all these stories had been building up, all these other jobs I’d been doing, all these writers I’d listened to being interviewed, and now I was away from publishers and away from talking to authors, I needed to tell those stories myself.
That’s how it started. Short stories for me. Many, many, many rejections, and then in very quick, succession three got published in magazines in Australia. That gave me the confidence to start my first novel. That was published 21 years ago.
Jenny Wheeler: Fantastic story. There’s a perennial question I like to ask everyone. Is there one thing you’ve done in your writing career, more than any other, that you’d attribute to your success?
A passionate reader of every genre
Monica McInerney: Yes. To repeat again, it’s because I’m a reader. I still read two or three books a week. Every writer I know, and I’ve got great writer friends in Ireland and Australia and America – we’re all huge readers. We’re interested in what other people are writing, we’re interested in how they did it.
We read first and foremostly as enthusiastic readers, being lost in a story, can’t put that book down. But we also read as writers going, how did they do that, I wish I’d done that, I wish I’d had that idea, why have they kept me turning the pages – or sometimes if you feel your attention is not quite as gripped as it might be, why isn’t it working?
That’s the beautiful thing. I didn’t go to university. I started work as a 17-year-old when I got that job. I had taken a gap year from uni and then got the job in children’s television and never went back. But for me, a library, a bookshop is my university, because every single book you pick up to read as a writer teaches you about writing.
I read every genre. I read children’s books; I’m writing children’s books now. I read poetry, I read nonfiction, everything I can get my hands on – classics, contemporary fiction. That’s why I’m a writer. That’s why I’m able to be a writer because I’m a reader.
Turning to Monica as reader
Jenny Wheeler: I have heard it said that you actually learn more from books that don’t work quite as well as the ones that do work really well. I think it’s sometimes interesting to look at it that way.
Turning to Monica as reader because we are starting to come to the end of our time together. The series is called The Joys of Binge Reading because it’s aimed at readers and it’s hopefully introducing our listeners to new authors and books they might not have discovered yet. You say your taste is very wide. What are you reading at the moment, and what would you like to recommend to our listeners?
Garry Disher’s most recent Hirsch novel – Consolation
Monica McInerney: I’m going through a real crime and thriller stage at the moment. Funnily enough, I think The Godmothers is a family mystery because Eliza is on the search for some truth about her mother and also the father she’s never met. That’s the pull through the book – to find out, the solving of this family mystery.
But in terms of my own reading, I love crime novels because I don’t think I could write them, the little twist and the turns and the red herrings and all that kind of thing, when it’s about a dead body somewhere.
Some of Monica’s favourites
Particularly because I’m here in Australia unexpectedly for such a long time, I’ve been reading a lot of the novels by a crime writer here called Garry Disher.
He has a series of books with a detective called Hirsch, and I’ve loved those. They’re set in South Australia, not far from where I grew up, so I get double pleasure out of reading his novels because I can recognize the street, the roads he’s talking about in the Hills, and the scenery and the weather, as well as really intricately plotted, crime novels too. I’ve really enjoyed him.
In terms of children’s books, I’m about to start rereading all the Harry Potter books. I read them. I didn’t want to wait a year each time for J K Rowling to finish them, so after I read the first one, all those years ago, I thought I can’t bear to have to read it and then wait a year.
So I didn’t read any of them until she’d written all of them, and then I took to the bed for three weeks and read the whole lot. I’m thinking about doing that again. I love that immersing yourself in a whole fictional world.
What she’d do differently – if anything
I also love the Vera books, Ann Cleeves’ books. I’ve been reading those and watching the TV series, again that world of crime novels. John Le Carré I love. I love spy novels too, so I’ve read a lot of his Smiley books. It’s not a series as such but you meet the same characters at different stages. So I’m on crime binge at the moment.
Ann Cleeves’ Vera on BBC TV – a different sort of crime show.... and a Monica McInerney favourite
Jenny Wheeler: Michael Robotham is one of the people we’ve had on the show and his thrillers are great, aren’t they?
Monica McInerney: They’re fantastic, but I have to read his in the daytime because I get really spooked by his books. I can’t get to sleep. (See Michael Robotham on the Joys of Binge Reading.)
LISTEN TO MICHAEL ON JOBR
Jenny Wheeler: Circling around and looking back down the tunnel of time, at this stage in your career, if you were doing it all over again, is there anything you’d change, and if so, what?
Monica McInerney: I don’t think so, Jenny. It’s a really interesting philosophical question in lots of ways, and I have to say no, I think. I mean, I’ve had books where I started which didn’t work out and I had to go back to the start.
Even before The Godmothers I had spent two years working on another novel during a very sad time in my family in Ireland’s lives, and I discovered that much of the grief and homesickness I was feeling had gone into that book.
Facing up to stuff that’s not working
After two years of writing it and spending every day on it, I realized that book wasn’t for publication. It was a book I had needed to write to sort through all these very sad, difficult feelings I was going through. That book is sitting on my laptop in Dublin.
But I don’t regret a day I spent working on that book because that book didn’t need to be read by anybody else, but I needed to write it. And because I wrote that book, because I worked through a whole lot of other feelings, I was able to then write The Godmothers. It almost cleared lots of layers of feeling so I could find other things underneath it.
I think if I was to change anything along the way of my experiences as a human and as a writer, I wouldn’t be where I am today. I’m in the early stages of a couple of new books at the moment, and I’m really interested in what I’m uncovering. I think that’s because I’ve been through what I’ve been through, and if I was to change one of those elements, the whole castle might fall down.
Jenny Wheeler: It’s interesting hearing you say you’re now working on two books. It sounds a little bit as if you might be the sort of writer who starts with an idea but then follows it through, rather than a big outliner. Is that how you work?
Monica’s typical writing process
Monica McInerney: It is, Jenny, yes. I’m not a plotter. What I do is, I’m a thinker, I’m a preparer, but I’m not a plotter. I spend months before I write any of my novels thinking about my characters, thinking about my fictional family.
I consider where they live, who gets on with who, just their normal lives, what they work at, what shaped each of them, what their sibling relationship is like, the mother/daughter, what the makeup of the family is like.
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The Godmothers, for example, it’s the smallest of possible families, a single mother and her daughter, but I’ve written books about six members in the family and five members and all girls and a mixture, all the different shapes a family can take.
Once I know those fictional people, very, very well – and I haven’t written a lot of it down, it’s when I’m daydreaming, it’s when I’m imagining in the middle of the night or walking – then I decide on what I call an emotional explosion, which I throw into the middle of that fictional family.
Then the story ‘takes off’
That’s when the story takes off for me. That’s when I start writing. I know everybody very well and then it takes off. It’s me working out how they all react to that explosion.
Sometimes in my novels the explosion has happened, say, 10 years earlier but the shock waves are still there. Sometimes I write about the family and everything is going fine, everything’s normal, and then in the first chapter, bam, this great big thing happens.
How are they all going to cope? Because that’s what interests me. How are people shaped? How resilient are people? How do people react differently – because of the way they’ve been brought up, because of their personalities – to what happens to them?
Upside Down Inside Out – Monica McInerney – another warm and engaging family story
That when I then write. I write seven days a week. I aim at 2,000 words a day. The first draft can be very, very long – 200,000 words sometimes – but then the whole story is down. It starts with knowing all my characters very well and then that explosion that I mentioned.
Jenny Wheeler: But you probably don’t know how it ends.
Monica McInerney: Never. In The Godmothers, as I said, Eliza is in search of the father she’s never met, and knowing that the godmothers are keeping secrets and how much they know and not know. When I began that book, I didn’t know who her father was and so I had to discover as she discovered along the way.
Keep the work fresh and surprising
I get a lot of emails and messages from readers, which I really love to receive, and people say you kept taking me by surprise the whole way through this book. I didn’t know, this happens and that happens. I write back to them and say, it’s because I didn’t know what was going to happen.
Every time I feel a big emotion when I’m writing one of my novels, be it surprise or be it being amused or being moved and crying – then I often find out that’s when readers get in touch and say, I really laughed then, and I really got very upset at that stage. It echoes what I feel when I’m writing it.
That’s a really lovely thing, to think that the pictures that were in my mind when I was writing it, all the emotions I was feeling through the magic of writing and reading, gets transferred into another person’s mind and imagination. I love that side of writing.
Jenny Wheeler: It sounds like you and Michael Robotham have got a lot in common because he writes seven days a week as well, including Christmas Day. And he is exactly like you, he doesn’t know how it’s going to end, even with those really twisty plotted books that he does. He basically lets the characters tell him what’s going to happen. It’s remarkable.
Plotter or pantser? Different styles
Monica McInerney: I find it amazing when I hear crime writer saying that, because I’ve listened to the wonderful Jane Harper who wrote The Dry and Force of Nature and The Survivors, and she plots hers absolutely intricately before she writes. She knows everything that’s going to happen in every chapter.
I have a great author friend in Ireland called Sinead Moriarty and she does the same thing. She knows absolutely before she starts writing what’s going to happen. She and I meet often and talk about our books in progress, and I say, how can you write when you know what’s going to happen? Why would you want to? And she says, how can you write when you don’t know what’s going to happen?
I think of Michael Robotham, but the idea of a crime novelist not knowing who did it – I love that. He surely must have to go back at the end to plant some clues.
Jenny Wheeler: He might do, yes. You’ve alluded to it beautifully, but tell us what is next for Monica the writer? The next 12 months, what do they hold in store?
Monica McInerney: I’m working on two new adult novels. I’m looking at a smaller project which I can’t talk about too much. I find I get very secretive about books in progress, just because they’re so fragile and I need to keep them a bit special and keep that feeling there’s something magical happening.
What Monica is working on next
It’s a book that has no travel in it, interestingly enough, going back to what we were saying earlier, the way the pandemic and the way we’ve all been locked down and then staying still is going to affect so much creativity and so much subject matter. This book is set in one very small area, and I’m sure that’s me responding to what has happened.
A new venture into children’s books from Monica McInerney
I have also started writing children’s novels. My first children’s book is for 10-year-olds, it’s a chapter book and that’s being published in Australia and New Zealand in October-November this year. That’s called Marcie Gill and the Caravan Park Cat.
It’s set in a kind of alternative caravan park run by this family of hippies, who call themselves hippies. It’s all through the eyes of a 10-year-old and her grandmother’s cat. I have had so much fun writing that series. I’m working on the second book at the moment. It’s full of magic and family and childhood memories.
I’ve absolutely loved writing that. It’s got illustrations too. I’m working with a beautiful illustrator called Danny Snell, and that has been a first for me. He has brought all my characters in these settings to life through illustrations in this chapter book. I’m working on that. Lots of ideas still.
Where readers can find Monica online
Jenny Wheeler: That’s wonderful. You mentioned that you enjoy hearing from your readers. Where can they find you online?
Monica McInerney: I love it. If anybody’s listening and they want to ever get in touch, if they have read my books, I’m very active on Facebook and on Instagram. It’s me that does both of those pages, and I get back to everybody as quickly as I can. I post a lot – not about my writing process because I do keep that quite private until I feel that the book is as ready as it can be for other people to read about it.
But because I’m a big, big reader, I do lots of posts about other books I’m reading and loving. I invite other authors onto my page and do giveaways of my books and other people’s books.
My hobby is nature photography. I do a lot of walking and I find that when I’ve been in my own head and intricately untangling or tangling plots, to be out and about with my camera, taking details of nature and sometimes closeups of flowers and leaves.
And I do a lot of galleries on my social media of beautiful things I’ve seen on my travels and walks. I’m very active and people get in touch with me via that, and also my website. I love hearing from people and always get back in touch as soon as I possibly can.
Show notes and what’s up next
Jenny Wheeler: We will have show notes for this podcast and links to all those things when it goes up. We’ll make sure those are all included.
Monica, thank you so much, it’s been fantastic talking to you. I almost feel like I’ve made a new friend just across the ocean. It’s lovely. Thank you.
Monica McInerney: Thanks Jenny. You have made a new friend. It’s been gorgeous to talk to you too. Thanks so much for inviting me on.
If you enjoyed hearing about Monica’s emotional family stories you might also enjoy Tricia Stringer’s The Model Wife and other family stories
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