There are a few books I keep aside for my holiday reading. The Lee Child thriller (Exit Strategy, which is the 30th Jack Reacher), an autobiography of a well-beloved or controversial celebrity (this year it’s We Did Ok, Kid: A Memoir by Anthony Hopkins), a bestseller I didn’t have time to read when it was released (the tome The Secret of Secrets by Dan Brown) and the new Cecelia Ahern (Paper Heart). But I couldn’t keep that for the hols this time, because I had the opportunity to interview her (yes, exclamation mark)!
Ahern is the author who penned the mega bestselling book PS, I Love You at age 21. It was adapted into the iconic 2007 romcom film starring Hilary Swank and Gerald Butler. If you are ever in doubt of what to get as a meatier summer read that’s filled with enough pathos and humour - Ahern’s books are it. She now has 22 novels to her name. There are a few dark ones in the mix but they are still easy to read and her latest Paper Heart is back to her usual poignant asf style.
We chat about her having her first book, written at such a young age, becoming a bestseller. Ahern says that she was incredibly fortunate at 21. “I studied journalism and media communications and I had just began doing my masters in film production. That was the area that I wanted to go into. I got the idea for PS, I Love You when it was a wobbly time in my life. I was feeling fearful of losing the people I loved. How could I hold on to them? Then that’s when I thought, ‘Oh wow, what if somebody left letters?’ That’s when the idea came to me for the storyline.
“I poured my heart and soul into that book. I would write from about 10 at night till six in the morning and sleep half the day – and then get up and type up what I had handwritten the night before. It became a personal project. I wasn’t thinking, ‘Oh, I’m going to try and publish it or anything’.”
Her mother encouraged her to seek a publisher. “She said, ‘Why don’t you show this to somebody in the publishing industry and see if there’s anything that can be done?’ I thought, ‘Okay, at 21, what’s the worst that can happen, you know? I have nothing to lose’.”
Ahern then found an agent after sending her ten chapters. “Within a month or two I had my first two-book deal. It’s an incredible story because I know it’s not how it works in publishing. If I had tried to achieve that, I don’t think it would have worked.”
If you are ever in doubt of what to get as a meatier summer read that’s filled with enough pathos and humour - Ahern’s books are it.
One of the questions Ahern is always asked at festivals is if she always knew that she was a writer? Her answer: “I feel like it just comes spilling out of me and it has ever since I was a child, since I was seven years old, whenever I could actually write. I was writing diaries, short stories, poems. That was how I processed the world. It wasn’t me sitting down and going, ‘I would like to write a story’. It’s like the stories come through me.”
“They arrive in my head and they circle like a plane before it comes in to land. Then all of a sudden, I feel like it’s time to write. It’s a physical thing as well. I get this adrenaline if I get a good idea; my heart starts pounding and I feel like I have to put pen to paper. I have to write it down. I have to see if anyone has written a book like that.”
Nobody has written a book just like Paper Heart. We find ourselves in the life of Pip who lives in a small town in Ireland called Ballybeg. She is slithering down in the back seat of the car as her mother Josephine hoots unrelentingly at the unexpected traffic while her 16-year-old daughter Bella laughs at her grandmother’s impatience. Immediately questions arise about why Pip is in the backseat instead of Bella, why she’s so embarrassed, and why at 32 she seems to not run her own life. We realise that she’s been dismissed her whole life and that she is paying for the fact that she had a child at 16. She has never left Ballybeg, never driven a car, and works every day at the garage shop making sandwiches. Her life changes when she meets the mysterious yet very friendly Io who works at the local observatory. Meeting him opens up her life and imagination, which she tries to fold into these little origami paper hearts where she writes poems about her sadness and smallness.
Ahern says the inspiration for the book was a cooking show: “I know every novel has its own way of coming to life. With this book, I was watching the Great British Menu and for their final banquet, in 2021, the venue was the Jodrell Bank Observatory. They were talking about this huge radio telescope, which they said was tasked with finding a signal from a distant star. Now that phrase “signal from a distant star” struck me. I went down this wormhole of understanding what that meant and the whole astrophysics side of it. Then there was the astronomy side of it, and that we’re looking out to get any kind of communication and connection.”
“Then I was thinking about how many of us are waiting for things to happen, waiting for signals and waiting for signs. Yet we’re not making them happen. You wait for life to happen, but you don’t make it happen. That inspired me to write the character Pip, someone who had a lot of dreams and hopes and ambitions but who was waiting and wasn’t actually taking part in life. So it goes from hearing one phrase to asking all these questions about who a person is.”
Though there is romance in Paper Heart, it’s not where you think it may be. Pip and Io connect immediately but in a non-sexual way. Ahern says that she wanted to bring in a character like Io who opens up a world for Pip and who takes her to places she’s never been before. A person who is just a friend. “He’s someone from outside coming in for a short period of time who can just shine a light on what she feels is wrong about her life. Then also there’s the question of who he is and where he is from. That gives it another layer, another dimension.”
Other holiday reads to look out for:
Boy from the North Country by Sam Sussman: A wrenchingly beautiful account of a mother/son relationship, this novel is an expansion of the autofictional viral essay the author wrote for Harper’s in 2021, “The Silent Type: On (Possibly) Being Bob Dylan’s Son”
Heart the Lover by Lily King: This is not a bodice ripper, rather, it’s an in-depth examination of young love and how decisions made in the past force a successful writer to relook at her life.
Bosadi by Kopano Matlwa: Naledi is a woman unravelling slowly and Aunty, a Zimbabwean domestic worker bears witness. This is, as the blurb says, “an exploration of gender, grief, immigration, violence and the impossible expectations that swallow black women whole.”
Service by John Tottenham: A witty and dark novel about a bookstore in LA through the eyes of a cynical English bookseller.
Wild Dark Shore by Charotte McConaghy: This is what they call an eco-thriller, which means evocative nature writing and human tragedy and trauma.
Case of the Claws: The series brings feline crime to Christmas, with classic stories from the golden age of crime by Catherine Aird, Edmund Crispin, Patricia Highsmith and Ellis Peters.
Inside the Mind of the Golden State Killer by Brad Hunter: For true crime fans – this book uncovers the behind-the-scenes work that led to the identification of the serial killer and rapist Joseph James DeAngelo.
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