I have two sisters, and I think siblings are always going to be irresistible for novelists. They have been throughout time and they'll continue to be.
Maggie O'FarrellI always had the urge to write. Not in the sense of wanting to be a writer, but just writing things down, getting words on a page. Graphomania, it's called. I've always had a definite love of stationary products - I used to spend all my pocket-money on pens and notepads. I still do, in a way.
Maggie O'FarrellSpending a lot of time away from home was strange. My parents visited me, obviously, but I was in hospital a lot, alone. And then when my health had improved a bit and I was in a sick-bed in the house, with the life of the house going on around me, that was very vivid for me. I always think that's a bit like the position of a novelist in a novel, going through drafts: there but not there, one remove from reality.
Maggie O'FarrellI think it was Rose Macaulay who said, "A house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived."
Maggie O'FarrellThe Chilean novelist Isabel Allende says there's no such thing as writer's block, you just need to live a bit more. I try to bear that in mind.
Maggie O'FarrellDespite being from Ireland, I've always avoided writing about it, for two reasons. For a very small country, Ireland has produced an astonishing number of literary geniuses, and at some level I probably never felt, having left as a toddler, that I had the right to try and add my voice. That's part of it. But I also didn't want to write something that was the equivalent of the Irish theme pub. You find them all over the world. The idea of producing a novel that might replicate that type of ersatz really set my teeth on edge.
Maggie O'Farrell