SOPHIE GRENHAM talks to author RACHAEL ENGLISH about growing up in Shannon, presenting on MORNING IRELAND and WRITING TO ESCAPE …
Eoin Rafferty
Rachael English was born in Lincolnshire and brought up in Shannon, County Clare. She is a highly respected broadcaster who currently presents on Morning Ireland, one of the country’s most iconic radio shows. For over twenty years, Rachael’s prestigious journalistic career has seen her work on some of RTÉ Radio’s most prominent news and current affairs programmes, such as Five Seven Live, RTÉ News at One, Today with Pat Kenny, The Marian Finucane Show and The Late Debate. Rachael holds a PPI Award for her riveting reportage of the September 11th attacks in 2001. While covering national and international stories has long been Rachael’s bread and butter, writing tales of her own was a dream that ticked away in the background. In 2013, Rachael’s fantasy was realised with the publication of her first novel Going Back (Orion) as part of an exciting two book deal. The Irish Independent called the work ‘an impressive debut from a skilled novelist who brings a breath of fresh air to the Irish publishing world. English is certainly a force to be reckoned with and may prove to be as formidable a player in the books market as she is in the broadcasting world.’
Rachael’s second offering, Each and Every One (2014, Orion) quickly followed and earned similar success. Her new novel is particularly poignant in light of recent ecclesiastical controversies. The American Girl is an instantly involving and deeply emotive story of mothers and daughters in a plot that unfurls in both Boston and Ireland. Already scaling its way up the charts; it won’t be long now before book number three joins the bestseller list.
Rachael English lives with her husband in Ranelagh, Dublin. She is currently writing her fourth novel.
The American Girl (€13.99) is published by Hachette and available from bookshops nationwide.
On home
We live in Ranelagh which gets busier all the time. Some days it feels like an extension of the city centre. I spend a lot of time in Er Buchetto, an Italian café. Many people know it as ‘the purple place’ because that’s the colour it’s painted. You really can’t miss it. I’m old school enough to read actual newspapers, and that’s where I like to go for a read, a coffee and maybe a chat.
On roots
I grew up in Shannon, Ireland’s newest town. Some people laugh when I describe it as cosmopolitan, but in the 1970s and 1980s it was very different to most Irish towns. For a start, it didn’t look like anywhere else. All of the houses were new, as were all of the schools and shops. The population was different too because everybody was from somewhere else. There were lots of returned emigrants, drawn by the promise of work at the airport. There were a considerable number of people from Belfast who’d moved south to escape the troubles. And there were several families of refugees from Chile who’d been forced to flee after the coup there. The school playgrounds contained a lot of different accents. In those days Shannon teemed with children. It was a very loud town.
On creating
I write at the kitchen table, facing a white wall and a beautiful wooden clock, bought many years ago on holiday in Westport. Every now and again, I tell myself I should be more organised and find a better place to write, and then I get distracted by other tasks. Occasionally, for a change of scene, I go to the library in Rathmines and work there. Like many writers, I try to carry a notebook for those moments when an idea floats in and I’m scared it will drift away again. Sometimes, I end up scribbling on a piece of paper. My bag is littered with scraps of paper containing notes I no longer understand.
On bookshops
I live near a fantastic bookshop called The Company of Books. They have a great selection of fiction, but are very strong on non-fiction too. When The American Girl arrived, Gwen, the owner, tweeted me, and I was able to pop in and sign her copies. I genuinely think the country is well served by its bookshops, including the chains like Easons and Dubray.
On her nightstand
The problem with bringing out a book is that it takes over your life and you run out of time for reading. I’ve just finished Sinéad Crowley’s new book, One Bad Turn. It’s not out for a couple of months, but keep an eye out for it. It’s a great read. Waiting for me are Claudia Carroll’s Our Little Secret and Behold The Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue.
On escapes
Because I also have a day job, writing tends to be my escape. It’s not that I find writing particularly easy – sometimes it’s hard – but, compared to Morning Ireland, it’s very peaceful.
On broadcasting
I always wanted to be a journalist, but if I had any particular ambition it was to be a newspaper reporter. When I left college there was more opportunity in local radio, so that was where I went. Being a reporter gives you a chance to see all sides of life which can be very useful when you’re writing fiction. I’m conscious, though, that today’s young reporters aren’t able to get out as much as I was ten or twenty years ago. Deadlines have multiplied, and resources have diminished.
Morning Ireland can be crazy. We might plan a programme the night before, then something big happens, and we have to start all over again. I’m often asked about the morning the (then) Governor of the Central Bank, Patrick Honohan, rang in to announce that the IMF was giving the country a bailout. I had assumed that, like the government, he was going to say the opposite. Seven years later, people are still surprised that somebody came on the radio and told the truth.
Recently, most of our strangest mornings have had a Donald Trump theme. During his first weeks in office almost every day yielded a new controversy. Other mornings can bring unexpected tragedy. The most recent example I can think of is the crash of rescue helicopter R116.
On recent history
When I’m presenting Morning Ireland, I have to get up at half past four. By lunchtime, I’m often overcome by tiredness and I usually have a nap in the afternoon. One day, while drifting in and out of sleep, I had the radio on in the background. On Liveline, people were talking about the difficulties faced by adopted people who wanted to trace their birth parents. It was a subject I’d covered many times as a journalist, but there was something about that particular discussion that got me thinking, and the idea grew from there. There’s a part in The American Girl where one of the characters recalls her small daughter watching the news and asking, ‘In the olden days, did they not like children?’ Like many people, I’m fascinated by Ireland’s recent past. So many lives were blighted by behaviour which now seems inexplicable but was somehow seen as logical and appropriate. I wanted to try and capture the ways in which an ordinary family is forced to grapple with what happened and with its own place in the wider story.
On Boston
I first went to Boston on a J1 Visa when I was nineteen. More than twenty years passed before I returned, this time with my mother. She’d been sick, and we wanted to go somewhere that was interesting but relaxing. Last year we went back again: partly so I could capture some detail for The American Girl, but mainly because it’s such a beautiful city. Sections of the book is set in the suburbs, while other scenes take place in quite well known areas like Boston Common or Harvard. By contrast, most of the Irish settings, like the mother and baby home in Carrigbrack or the town of Templemorris, are entirely fictional. I love inventing places.
On what’s next
I’m in the middle of another book. This time it’s about four friends from a west of Ireland village whose lives are shaped by something that happens when they’re thirteen. Over the next thirty years, they drift apart, but they’re eventually drawn back together by what happened on a snowy Friday night in January 1982. I have an autumn deadline and I’m beginning to worry that I won’t finish in time.
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