Five Places That Changed My Life
CLARE VALLEY, SOUTH AUSTRALIA I grew up here, leaving aged 17 to work in Adelaide (as wardrobe girl on Here’s Humphrey.) From there, I moved to London, Sydney, Melbourne, Ireland. In…
Read MoreMy Trip Of A Lifetime
One of the great things about being a writer is it is such a portable occupation. I spend many hours alone in my attic in Dublin writing my novels, but…
Read MoreThe Weight of Words
A much loved friend of mine died earlier this year. She had cancer, but, even so, her death came as a shock. Once, I might have phoned my friends and…
Read MoreFamily Secrets, Christmas Letters, and Hello From The Gillespies
Years ago, a young Monica McInerney was working as a publicist on a book tour for Roald Dahl, a year before he died. She was in a hall filled with…
Read MoreHow I learnt to love the chaos of Christmas
Last night I dreamed it was Christmas morning. Outside, the snow lay thick and soft. Inside, the fire burned in the grate. I stood in front of the Christmas tree,…
Read MoreIn Defence of Christmas Letters
I was ten when I first read a Christmas round-robin letter. My eyes widened at the writer’s account of her family’s exam successes, sporting triumphs, job promotions and exotic holidays….
Read MoreA Conversation with Monica McInerney
(Questions by Ellen Edwards, my editor at Penguin Random House in New York.) Hello from the Gillespies begins with a Christmas letter gone awry—how did this irresistible premise inspire the…
Read MoreThe Real-Life Railway Children
‘They were not railway children to begin with,’ starts Edith Nesbit’s classic The Railway Children. Not in our case – we seven McInerneys were always railway children, our father the…
Read MoreTeenage Angst
‘I’m on canteen duty next week.’ My Mum said it so casually, but the words struck fear into my heart. I was 14 years old, at high school in rural…
Read MoreThe Statues of Dublin
In the centre of O’Connell Street in Dublin there’s a statue of the man who used to own the vegetable shop in my childhood hometown in Australia. On North Earl…
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