Interview with Clare Dowling, 2006

Clare is quick to point out that her new novel, ‘My Fabulous Divorce’ is purely fiction. ‘It’s about two people, Jackie and Henry, who enter marriage with completely unrealistic expectations and end up falling flat on their faces and going down the divorce route,’ she explains. ‘It does get bitter the way these things do and the families get involved but there is a happy ending. I like writing about strife and how people get through it.’

Divorce is very topical at the moment but why did Clare choose this particular subject for her book? ‘I was reading some statistics from the UK last year and there are now more divorces than marriages,’ Clare says. ‘It just seemed like something worth exploring in an Irish context.’

One of the main characters in the book, Henry, is English, which adds an extra dimension to the plot. So is Henry based on Stewart who is also English? She smiles. ‘No. Not at all.’ But she has used her own experiences to make her book authentic. ‘Stewart found it difficult living here at first,’ Clare admits. ‘He moved over from Essex. We agreed that we’d give each other’s countries a try out, but then I got pregnant and we ended up staying here. Leaving his friends and family behind was hard on him.’ And it took him a while to come to terms with Ireland’s feelings towards the English soccer team. ‘We were watching an England versus Bolivia match,’ Clare says. ‘And in the house next door they were cheering on Bolivia. Stewart asked ‘Does Ireland have a special relationship with Bolivia?’ I had to explain the ‘any team but England’ thing and he found it very strange. He’s learned to take it as a joke.’

‘Fast Forward’ was Clare’s first book, published in 1999 and set in the glitzy world of film. ‘I was just lucky,’ she admits. ‘I was at a very lean period in my writing career. I was hoping to get work with Fair City and in the meantime tried my hand at writing a book. Irish women were starting to have such marvellous success, Marian Keyes and Patricia Scanlon. Those writers paved the way.’ ‘Fast Forward’ was a great success but it was Clare’s second book, ‘Expecting Emily’, that catapulted her to the top of the Irish book charts and established her as one of our top romantic comedy writers.

As well as writing the novels, Clare still writes for Fair City and says Eunice is her favourite. ‘She’s such a complex character and very funny,’ Clare says. ‘I really enjoy writing for her. And I like the Phelans; they’re a good, solid Dublin family.’ She finds the books and the script writing feed into each other. ‘I love writing dialogue and I learnt my craft writing for the stage and screen. I write (for Fair City) from home, but I go into RTE for meetings. Lively meetings. It’s lovely to have that as well as writing can be a very lonely business.’

The stage and screen are close to her heart as Clare used to be an actress. ‘I had this mad notion in my head from the age of eight that I wanted to be an actress,’ she says. ‘But I was too embarrassed to do anything about it. But after college I decided if I don’t do it now, I’ll never do it, so I applied to drama school and got in. I worked in professional theatre for about ten years after that.’ When suitable work started to dry up, she turned to writing instead. ‘It’s a very natural progression for actors to turn to writing,’ she says. ‘When you act, you get a whole grounding in characterisation, plot development and in dramatic tension. In acting we were taught to write detailed character sketches to get to know characters better and I do that now for my books.’

So what’s next for this busy writer and mum? ‘I’ve nearly finished my next book, Le Romance, which will be out next year. Until then, it’s the Travel Lodge for me!’ she adds with a smile.

First published in Woman’s Way, 2006