Hello from the Gillespies (43 page)

SPOILER ALERT:
The conversation with Monica McInerney and the book club notes that follow tell more about what happens in the book than you might want to know until after you read it.

A. My starting point was the Christmas letter. I’ve been fascinated by the idea of them since I was a child. My parents used to receive quite a few each year and I remember being astonished at how much detail people would write about their lives, and how perfect these other families’ lives seemed. The year I turned seventeen, we received one particular letter that was so over the top about the family’s achievements that my sister and I felt compelled to write our own parody version. We called it ‘The McInerney Report’ and filled it with breathlessly elaborate (and false) entries about all nine members of our family – our charity work, our exotic international travel, how we had won the bid to host the Olympics in our small hometown . . . We had so much fun doing it, we produced an annual one for the next ten years. It was never circulated – we definitely wrote it for our family’s eyes only!

I suspect that planted the seed to somehow use a Christmas letter in my fiction writing. In 2009, I wrote a short story called Elizabeth’s News about a widowed woman in her sixties who deliberately invents an adventurous, false life for herself in her annual letter to amuse herself and her readers. She gives herself a husband and two daughters, talks about trips on the Orient Express, a Mediterranean cruise, and she even climbs Mount Kilimanjaro. Two years ago, I happened to reread it, and it got me thinking about the flip side – what if someone wrote a completely
truthful
letter for once? And what if – someway, somehow – it got sent out? Once I’d had that thought, I knew I had the starting point for a whole novel.

Angela’s form of amnesia came to me later in the writing process. After the bombshell of her private Christmas letter and her fantasy life going public, I wanted to take her out of her family for a period of time, to see how they coped without the wife and mother they thought they knew. I considered different possibilities, including having her go away or even fall ill and be in a coma. But I missed her so much. I needed to rethink that idea and somehow find a way to keep her present but also apart from her family. In perfect timing, I met a neurologist called Siobhan Hutchinson here in Dublin who introduced me to the idea of confabulation. She was a treasure trove of detail, and helped me so much.

A. It was a deliberate choice. I am so intrigued by family life, in reality and in my fiction – all those different personalities under one roof, so many people at different stages in their lives; it’s a miracle anyone gets on with one another at all. With this novel, I particularly wanted to explore the relationship between a couple trying to keep their marriage on track while also dealing with all the emotions and responsibilities of being parents and running a station. In Angela’s case, how can you be a wife when your time is taken up with being a mother? In Nick’s case, how do you cope with depression and still be a husband and father? I also wanted to write about adult children coming home to live again, how they revert to being kids, but also how they must come to the realisation that their parents have their own lives, hopes and emotions too – that they are not simply Mum and Dad. And in the middle of them all, there’s Ig, still a child but living his own form of a fantasy life.

A. I’m of Irish descent on both sides, and researched my own family history when I first moved to Ireland twenty-four years ago, visiting my ancestral home places in County Clare, reading up on the family tree, being alternately frustrated and elated by the records that were available to me. That experience certainly fed into Nick’s family tree research. My mother’s Irish grandparents went to Australia in the 1860s, settling in a tiny place called Cradock in the Flinders Ranges. From what we know, they didn’t last long as outback farmers – the drought and hardship defeated them and they moved onto easier farming property. But recalling that story helped me to put myself in Nick’s shoes, and imagine a multi-generation connection to the land.

Over my years here in Ireland, I’ve also met and spoken to visitors and tourists researching their family trees, sometimes going back many generations, all looking for a personal connection to Ireland. It can be a very emotional experience for some people. There are many genuine companies assisting people in their genealogical searches, but I’ve also heard stories of records being fudged, people being told what they want to hear rather than what might be the truth . . . All of that fed into the plot as well.

A. I either already knew or had visited everyplace that features in the novel. I’ve known and loved the Flinders Ranges all my life, having grown up in the town of Clare, less than three hours away. Over the years I’ve gone bushwalking or camping there, taken long drives through the area around Wilpena Pound, and stayed in pubs in the outback towns of Hawker and Blinman. In November 2013, my brother Paul, my mum, Mary, and my niece (and research assistant) Ruby travelled up to the Flinders Ranges specifically to research this novel. Paul was the perfect tour guide, answering my questions, patiently driving me up long dirt tracks, pointing out station buildings, stopping at every lookout point so I could choose and photograph all my locations. So much from that trip is in the novel – the drama of a big summer storm, the incredible changing colors of the Ranges, the vast distances between towns, the look and isolation of station homesteads . . . Paul had lived in the area for several years and was not only able to give me great help himself, but also put me in touch with friends of his, Keryn and Henry Hilder, who had lived on a sheep station near Hawker. After returning to Ireland, I spent hours on the phone talking to them, and they gave me so much excellent detail, about everything from the impact of drought to the number of sheep on the property to the perils of learning how to shoot a snake . . .

I also mapped out every part of Nick’s journey, walking the streets of Dublin and traveling down to Cobh and across to County Mayo in Ireland, as well as Islington and Forest Hill in London. For the other locations, I drew on my own experiences of visiting New York (and always seeing film sets) and my own memories of living in Sydney and Adelaide.

As always, I was amazed that research details seemed to present themselves at just the right time. For example, I needed some extra information about life as an Australian living in New York, to add color to Genevieve’s chapters there. I discovered that my American literary agent’s assistant, Rachel, is Australian, and she gave me terrific background details. I’d just started writing the chapters featuring the twins when a friend in Dublin happened to tell me a story about the close connection between friends of hers who were twins. She introduced us, and Noreen and Catherine gave me wonderful insights into life as a twin, including the lucky boots story. Similarly, just as I needed details about what it was like to be parents to twins, with a third child close in age, I met a couple in exactly that situation who shared great stories with me.

Medically, I was so lucky to be introduced to Dublin neurologist Siobhan Hutchinson, who couldn’t have been more helpful with the confabulation scenes in the novel, answering my hundreds of questions about the cause, symptoms, treatment, and also reading my early drafts. My own doctor, Deirdre Coyle in Dublin, was a great help with the details of Ig’s accident and treatment, male depression and miscarriage. That said, any mistakes are mine, not theirs!

A. I’ve had quite a few brushes like that – emails or texts being sent to the wrong person, private remarks made when I thought the phone had been disconnected, etc., and so was easily able to describe that moment of realization – the sudden rush of coldness, then heat, then horror . . . My own real horror story of private information going public thankfully took place pre-internet. I was packing up to move and had collected a box of books to donate to a nearby charity shop. What I hadn’t realised was that the diary I’d been keeping for my first few years of married life in Ireland had also somehow made its way into the box. I’d poured my heart out onto its pages, filling the diary with all my first impressions of Ireland, my in-laws, what it was like being married . . . By the time I realised and rushed back to the charity shop, it was too late – the entire box of books had been sold, my diary among them. Even now, all these years later, I still sometimes shudder when I think of my most private thoughts being read by a complete stranger. On the bright side, I could easily imagine Angela’s horror, multiplying that one set of eyes by hundreds . . .

A. I’m so glad to hear the Gillespies all felt real; thank you. They became very real to me as I was writing the novel. I talked to as many people in similar family situations as I could, then filtered it all through my imagination. I did also draw on my own family life, but mostly from an emotional point of view rather than by borrowing facts and real events. Like every human being, I know what it’s like to feel jealous, angry, left out, but I also know how good it feels to be part of a close family, the ties and the loyalty. Even though I’m on the other side of the world, I’m in almost daily contact with my mum and six brothers and sisters via texts, email and phone calls, and we meet up as often as possible. I think of us like a solar system, planets moving around one another, a constant connection even if we are not all in the same place. There is always a lot of snip-snap dialogue when we are together and also on email, and I love to recreate that family banter in my novels. One of my favourite scenes in
Hello from the Gillespies
is when all four children are in the lounge room, about to read Angela’s letter for the first time, but in the meantime just lazing about in the heat, talking and teasing one another. It felt like I was back at home again as I wrote that.

I’m the middle child of seven, and that position definitely came in handy when I was writing this book and my other novels. I know what it’s like to feel left out by the older ones, and also how it feels to be one of the younger ones, with that bit more freedom. But ultimately the finished novel is a product of research and imagination. I ask myself question after question as I write my books. What would it be like to have a twin, an even closer connection than I already have with my three sisters? How would it feel to be like Lindy, always on the fringes? What would it be like to have a much younger brother like Ig?

I especially loved writing Ig’s scenes. Once I decided he was a solemn, quirky little fellow, all his other character traits seemed to fall into place. I’m sure it helped that I have a trio of excellent ten-year-old nephews (not triplets, as each belongs to a different sibling) that I love spending time with. I find them so amusing and entertaining, and I suspect Ig is an amalgam of them. Ig’s imaginary friend is also drawn from real life, but goes back more than thirty-five years to when my own youngest brother, six years my junior, had an imaginary friend he called Tickles. Tickles was part of the family for a couple of years, coming with us on car journeys (it was already crowded in the car with nine of us) and sitting at the table (also already crowded). We all became very used to seeing my brother play board games with Tickles, chatting away and moving the pieces for him. It didn’t feel right to call Ig’s friend Tickles, though, as he belonged to my brother, not me. So I did the next best thing and called him Robbie – my brother’s name!