You are viewing your 1 free article this month. Login to read more articles.
Maggie O’Farrell looks back over her impressive career, with this year marking the 25th anniversary of her first book
Alice O'KeeffeIn a nutshell, I read books for a living. I interview authors for The Bookseller's weekly Author Profile slot and write the monthly New T ...more
From carrying a computer between flat shares in her 20s to working with a Hollywood director on a screen adaptation of Hamnet, O’Farrell reflects on the last 25 years.
In a nutshell, I read books for a living. I interview authors for The Bookseller's weekly Author Profile slot and write the monthly New T ...more
This year marks the 25th anniversary of the publication of Maggie O’Farrell’s debut novel, After You’d Gone. Now with nine novels, one memoir and three children’s books to her name, this year also marks 25 years for O’Farrell as a writer who has achieved both critical and commercial success with every book. To celebrate, Headline, her publisher since the very beginning, will reissue eight of her books on 27th March with gorgeous new cover designs: After You’d Gone, My Lover’s Lover, The Distance Between Us, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, The Hand That First Held Mine, Instructions for a Heatwave, This Must Be the Place and the memoir I Am, I Am, I Am.
When we meet at a north London coffee shop at the height of the frantic pre-Christmas rush, I ask how it feels to have reached the dizzy heights of quarter of a century as a bestselling novelist. She laughs: “Part of me thinks, ‘I can’t believe I’m that old,’ but the other part of me just thinks, ‘Actually, how amazing. How lucky I have been to do a job that I love, absolutely love, for 25 years. That’s quite something, isn’t it?’”
But looking back over her career is not something that comes easily to O’Farrell: “I don’t think you really want to examine too carefully what it is you do or where you’ve been or what you are about to do,” she says. “It’s a bit like the sun: you know it’s there and you can enjoy its warmth, but you shouldn’t look [directly] at it, it’s bad for you. I feel a bit the same about the act of writing – you have to trust it will come and you have to trust your instincts.” Although, she has always felt as a writer “that you don’t really choose the book. They choose you. And you shouldn’t examine it too much, because actually then you know that self-consciousness will creep in and that’s really bad. That’s the real enemy or antithesis to any kind of writing.”
O’Farrell, who was born in Northern Ireland and now lives in Edinburgh, began writing her first novel at the tender age of 24, but she has always felt the impulse to put pen to paper: “I’ve always had it, ever since I was quite a young child.” Aged eight, she contracted encephalitis which kept her bedridden for months and meant books assumed a central place in her life. After reading English literature at Cambridge, she was originally drawn to writing poetry, attending evening classes led by the Irish-American poet Michael Donaghy in London. But then someone lent her a “really massive, bricky” computer, which she trundled from flat share to flat share in her 20s, while working on the books desk at the Independent on Sunday. “As soon as I had that I started writing what eventually became After You’d Gone. Just the act of having a word processor is what unlocked it. I never really wrote poetry again – I should stress that is no great loss to the world of poetry,” she says, with a laugh.
How lucky I have been to do a job that I love, absolutely love, for 25 years. That’s quite something, isn’t it?
After You’d Gone, published when she was 27 years old, received rave reviews, and also won a Betty Trask Award. I still have my battered paperback edition with, as it turns out, a prescient quote from Ali Smith on the cover, reviewing for Scotland on Sunday: “O’Farrell is a born novelist... After You’d Gone is gripping, delivered with clarity, care, generosity... supremely moving.” Fittingly, Smith has written the foreword for the 2025 edition.
Over the course of her nine novels, O’Farrell has explored intimate relationships, both romantic and familial, with elegance and precision. Her characters are beautifully observed, and the story is always powered by a cleverly constructed, compulsive page-turner of a plot. To my mind she has written particularly well about motherhood, most viscerally in the 2010 Costa Novel Award-winning The Hand That First Held Mine – no writer has quite captured the chaotic days and nights with a newborn as she has here – and the unbearable death of a child in the Women’s Prize-winning Hamnet. Hamnet’s body laid out and prepared for burial by his mother remains one of the most moving depictions of grief and loss I have ever read.
The seeds for her novels have been different every single time, she says. Her most recent novel The Marriage Portrait was inspired by a painting. This Must Be the Place grew out of observing the reactions to a very famous celebrity in a Soho café. “You can’t go out searching for it, that’s the hard thing about inspiration. Also, it can have a long gestational period – something that you read or overheard or have seen – and it can be years later that it might start to develop into something.”
O’Farrell has combined her stellar career with raising three children – she is married to the novelist William Sutcliffe – and loathes “the school of thought that says every baby costs you a book”. It’s just not true, she says: “All books are written against impossible odds. Every single one. And the odds change throughout your life. The first two books I wrote while I was working full time as a journalist, then I had young children.” She managed to combine the two, although she does vividly remember an early challenge: “My son, when he was very small, once came into a room and put a cardboard box over my head. I said, ‘What are you doing?’ and he said, ‘I’m just trying to stop you thinking!’”
I ask if she has a favourite of her novels? “All of them represent a different time in my life and a different set of concerns, and also something that I wanted to learn about. I think you’re often told in writing classes to write what you know. But I don’t really agree with that. Often, we write what we don’t know and actually the act of writing novels is the way we find out.”
Neither has she found that the act of writing novels gets easier over time: “What you know how to write is the ones you have written and actually you don’t know how to write the next one. You’ll have to work that out as you go along.”
Most recently, she has adapted her novel Hamnet for the big screen, collaborating with the director Chloé Zhao, who won Best Director at the 2021 Oscars for Nomadland, on the screenplay. O’Farrell initially did not want to be involved, but Zhao was “quite persuasive” when the two met over video call. She found the whole process of effectively disassembling and reassembling the novel so that it worked on the screen fascinating, “externalising what is internal in the novel so that it can be expressed by an actor”. She is full of praise for the two stars: Jessie Buckley, who plays the free-spirited Agnes, Shakespeare’s wife, and Paul Mescal as Shakespeare.
A starry Hollywood film adaptation is surely another measure of her success. But O’Farrell sees things slightly differently: “The definition of success for me is whether or not I feel a book is working. Whether the characters are interacting with the plot, whether the structure is balanced, whether I’ve used too many repeated words. That’s the only form of success I really think about.”
Metadata
Titles After You’d Gone, My Lover’s Lover, The Distance Between Us, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, The Hand That First Held Mine, Instructions for a Heatwave, This Must Be the Place, I Am, I Am, I Am
Publication 27th March 2025
Format B format paperback (£10.99)
