Library Assistant Hannah is passionate about books and reading. In the latest blog in the series, Hannah chats to writer Catherine Walsh. Walsh was born and raised in Ireland and is the author of feel-good romantic comedies.
With 4 novels already out, Walsh’s latest novel Snowed In is released in November. Megan is dreading going home for the holidays. She’s the village pariah, the she-devil who left local golden boy Isaac at the altar four years ago and ran away to the big city.
Christian’s fed up of being on his own every Christmas. He doesn’t mind being alone, but he hates his family’s sad eyes and soft tones as they sit around coupled up.
So when meet in the pub they come up with a pact to fake-date each other through the holiday season. But with everyone home for the holidays, two big families to deal with alongside old flames, things are bound to get messy. And when a snowed-in cabin and a little Christmas magic are added to the mix, anything could happen…
--------------------------------------
Hannah: Often in romances characters are almost annoyingly perfect; I love that yours are ordinary people with flaws who trip over at the wrong moment or end up slipping in mud and don’t look perfect when they cry. Is this something you would say is important to you to convey?
Catherine: This is incredibly important to me. To be clear, I also love books that do play up the fantasy element of romance – where heroes can be perfect or exaggerated. The wonderful thing about the genre is that there is room for everything! But for me personally, my characters are real people. And real people are flawed. Much like the comedy aspect of my writing, I don’t set out to make them flawed. They just are because no one in real life is perfect. We trip and we sneeze and we spill coffee and we have morning breath and we interrupt each other and we don’t always have the answer to every argument. While I think readers should always be ready to suspend a little bit of disbelief when they pick a book, and the romance genre is an escapist genre overall, I always try and find a balance with my characters.
I love that your books have a lot of comedy in them as well as the all-important romance; they remind me of early Jilly Cooper. Have you always written in this style?
That is a big compliment – thank you very much! And not at all! I started out trying to write fantasy (I was very bad at it), and then I tried historical fiction purely because I’ve always loved research. I spent a few years doing this but struggled to get published. I switched to romantic comedies because they were starting to get popular again, and I quickly realised that this was what I should have been doing all along. I was a big fan of romance books anyway and love writing them. While I don’t necessarily set out to be funny, humour is such an important part of my life and my relationships with others that it's very hard for me not to write that way.
Is Ireland as idyllic as it sounds in your books?
It is and isn’t! I suppose it’s like anyplace in the world in that it’s all about how you feel about it. I’m so glad it comes across as idyllic, though, because while I love living in Ireland, I also try and portray it as realistically as possible, which means including the good and the bad in a way that’s credible. So, while you can have sunrises over rolling green hills, you can also have underinvested and under-supported towns. You can have people working hard and struggling to get by. You can have beauty, and you can have pain. But ultimately, it comes down to community, which is what really makes any home. I try to always give my books a strong sense of this, as I truly believe it’s part of what makes our little island so great!
Would you ever be tempted to experiment with a different genre?
Yes! I’m really enjoying writing romantic comedies at the moment, but I would love to try something different in the future. I read across a lot of different genres, and though I have major imposter syndrome as a writer, I always like to challenge myself.
How do you find the publishing process?
Very easy and fun. Joking. It’s tough, but also…. no one pretends it isn’t? Personally, I think there are too many books being published at the moment. It’s very hard for authors to break through or even make any kind of money from the industry. And if they do, there’s no guarantee that they’ll be able to do so again. This makes it a very anxious time for writers who beat all the odds in writing a book and getting it into the hands of a publisher, only to see it fail financially.
At the moment, I’m very fortunate to be with an agent and a publisher who support me and to have readers who hold my books up high and say try this one! Because I have their support, I’m able to focus on the creative side of things and concentrate on getting each book into the best shape it can be. I love the writing and editorial process, even though I want to pull my hair out sometimes, and I get enormous satisfaction from seeing a book through from beginning to end. Even if I’m not 100% happy with a story (and I don’t think I ever will be), I always remind myself that I’ve just created something from nothing, and to me, that’s magical.
Who are some of your favourite authors?
I always find this question very hard to answer! I am a big Jane Harper fan. I don’t read a lot of crime fiction, but she has a way of sucking me in and spends a lot of time making you care about her characters. I think she’s a brilliant storyteller. Patrick Rudden Keefe wrote one of my favourite non-fiction books of the last few years, Say Nothing, which is about Northern Ireland, and I have devoured everything he’s written since. Stacey Halls writes wonderful creepy historical fiction (I am anxiously awaiting her next one!), and on the romance side of things, like a lot of writers and readers, I adore Emily Henry.
Do you have a library card?
No. Joking again (see! I’m a comedy writer!). I DO! I actually think I have two because I signed up for one near my old office in the city and then signed up again when I moved out to the wilds of suburbia. Libraries have always played a huge part in my life. Trips to my local one were a weekly event growing up, and now that I’m writing full-time, I’ll often spend a day working in some of my favourites ones around Dublin. I’m fortunate to live in a place that is so proud of its libraries, and I take full advantage of it!