Interviews

Interview about Venus Reborn with Martina Devlin

You touch on the theme of adoption in Venus. Did you research adoption or had you a personal interest in the subject? I understood the overwhelming urge to have a child at any cost, which the character who adopted Venus felt. I've had three failed attempts at IVF fertility treatment and will never forget the craving for a child which consumed me at that time. I was like a woman possessed. Perhaps that's the only way to deal with something as invasive in your life as IVF- to be absolutely focused and 100 per cent convinced, each time, that it will work. And to believe that it will all be worthwhile when the child is in your arms.

I look back on that time now and marvel that I managed to survive it. I had no idea how deeply the treatment would affect me - I was on the verge of breaking point when the third attempt failed. At that point I knew I was mentally, physically and emotionally incapable of a fourth try, although some people go on to have multiple attempts and some do have happy endings, I'm glad to say. It does work for some people, it's just that we expect it to work for all of us - the odds are against us.

Did you have a happy ending? Not immediately. My marriage collapsed under the strain, I lost my home, felt rudderless and a complete failure. I wasn't back in Ireland very long - I'd spent quite a long time in England - so my circle of friends was far from wide. But I had started writing my first novel around this time and I found a release in fiction, and eventually I realised that life needs some darkness in it to make you appreciate the light. I accepted that you can't have everything, and although I'm sad that I can never be a mother, I realise there are compensations. You can be an aunt, a friend - and in my case, I'm grateful to say, an author.

Why do you feel so strongly about IVF treatment? Many people don't realise you're taking a heady concoction of drugs which set your hormones whirling madly and can push you to the edge emotionally. You have to snort a drug at regular intervals through the day and night, so your sleep pattern - and that of your partner - is disrupted. Basically your hormones are turbo-charged and your ovaries go into overdrive. All this has a substantial physical impact which is something else to come to terms with. In addition, you need to take an honest look at your relationship and make sure it's built on firm foundations because IVF has the potential to strain it to its limits. I feel a little worried that women sometimes see fertility treatment as the answer to all their problems - the miracles of modern medicine making everything solvable. That's not always the case.

You brought your central character back from London and set her up in a rural location. Was this based on your own experience? I moved back to Ireland after a number of years in London and had to adjust to a different pace of life. I really wanted to be back here, but it still required some tweaking in terms of realigning my expectations. This necessity to go away - and sometimes return, but not always - is a fairly common experience for many Irish people. I belong to a generation that had to leave home to find work, but I was also fortunate in that I was young enough to take advantage of the economic boom and come home. Another few years and my roots might have been too deep in England. It's fantastic there's finally a generation not facing inevitable emigration, but I would say that living and working in another country teaches valuable skills - it challenges your preconceptions and shows you another way of doing business.

What was the inspiration for the book? I love Irish seaside villages and I wanted to set a novel in one. Then my sister said to me, 'would you ever stop writing about self-absorbed thirtysomething women' in that caring way sisters have. So I decided to incorporate a character in his eighties and look at how the generations learn to live with each other. Naturally this meant including a self-absorbed thirtysomething woman.

Venus has a great need to go back to her roots. Is there a stage in our lives when we need to know who we really are? Roots are enormously important to me as a way of understanding the person I am and why I'm that way. I've always felt like a bit of a hybrid, with a mother from Tipperary and a father from Tyrone, and I think that's made me something of an outsider or an observer. This is useful for writing, of course. I suppose, however, that knowing where you come from is less important than knowing where you want to go.

What do you hope the reader will get from reading Venus Reborn? Pleasure, first and foremost. I gave a talk to some children at my old primary school, Loreto Convent in Omagh, and they told me about their mothers being tired after a day at work or looking after them, and how they loved to relax with a novel. And I thought how worthwhile that was as a writer - the idea that maybe you could help distract someone who needed an escape from everyday life. I was taken by the idea of people getting involved with my characters and forgetting about their problems, however briefly. One of my greatest pleasures is making someone laugh, and any time someone has told me they've giggled over something I've written I feel it's a fantastic achievement.

Do you like to entertain with your writing or do you hope that people will sit up and think about their lives and what is really important? A bit of both really. It's important to entertain, because people read partly for diversion, but when I pick up a book I want it to have some substance too. I like to learn something new, or find myself wondering how I might respond in a similar situation. I try to include in my novels the sort of dilemmas that people face in life - where I bring in issues, such as the asylum seeker plot or the euthanasia dilemma in Venus Reborn, I want to make them at once thought-provoking and accessible.

Strong women's characters populate your novels - why? I'm fascinated by the freedoms women have now - and the price they occasionally pay for them. My grandmother was worried about my mother who for years showed no sign of wanting to marry - she thought all the decent men would be gone and she'd never find a husband. What concerned her most was that she couldn't see how her daughter would have a home of her own without a husband. It would be a case of renting a room in someone else's home. Now I look around me and I see women with their own mortgages, leading independent lives, and this shift has happened in a relatively short space of time. But there are stresses, for some there is loneliness - and deferring motherhood brings its own problems in terms of the inexorable biological clock.

Did you enjoy writing Venus? To be honest there were plenty of days when it was like extracting teeth - but the odd days when it flowed more than compensated for all the root canal work.

What's the worst part about being a writer? Book signings when you find yourself being used as a big stick to beat a teacher with. I had that experience recently when I was cornered and quizzed by a twelve-year-old boy. I was a bit surprised by his interest but decided he must be in touch with his inner woman, and who was I to thwart him? He interrogated me on whether I sketched out plots in advance or just went with the flow and I admitted that I wasn't very disciplined about planning story-lines. 'Hah!' he said, 'I knew my teacher was wrong about scolding me that I had to do more preparation work for my essays' - and beetled off to tell her he had it on good authority she was wrong. I still feel guilt twinges about that.