Entertainment

Maggie O'Farrell: I found loopholes out of the destinies expected for me

It's been a busy year for Coleraine-born author Maggie O'Farrell, who not long after winning the Women's Prize for Fiction for Hamnet, has just had her first children's book published. Here, she tells Gail Bell how her Snow Angel first came to life in the back of an ambulance to comfort her very ill daughter

Coleraine-born writer Magie O'Farrell won this year's Women’s Prize for Fiction for her novel Hamnet, about the death of Shakespeare’s young son
Coleraine-born writer Magie O'Farrell won this year's Women’s Prize for Fiction for her novel Hamnet, about the death of Shakespeare’s young son Coleraine-born writer Magie O'Farrell won this year's Women’s Prize for Fiction for her novel Hamnet, about the death of Shakespeare’s young son

MAGGIE O’Farrell has endured many moments of icy terror in her life, but the day her daughter became dangerously ill and lay shivering in an ambulance on her way to hospital was by far the worst – until a reassuring Snow Angel showed up.

Her middle child had suffered yet another life-threatening allergic reaction to any one of a number of triggers and the 'Snow Angel' was a mother’s quick reaction; an imaginary dramatis persona devised instinctively to bring comfort.

Thankfully, her daughter recovered, but the Snow Angel remained and now the Coleraine-born, recently crowned winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction (for eponymous novel about the death of Shakespeare’s young son, Hamnet), has brought her angelic creation to life in debut children’s book, Where Snow Angels Go, launched earlier this month.

Rooted in countless made-up bedtime stories, it marks a new departure for the Edinburgh-based author of Sunday Times bestselling memoir, I am, I am, I am.

The author of eight novels for adults, including The Distance Between Us (which picked up a Somerset Maugham Award) and The Hand That First Held Mine (winner of the 2010 Costa Novel Award), says her new venture, about the bravery of a little girl and the miracle of a snowy day, has brought her back to being a child again.

And while there are definitely elements of O’Farrell’s own health-stricken childhood in the book, primarily Where Snow Angels Go was written in answer to a plea from her daughter who suffers from a potentially life-threatening immunological disorder and who wanted simply for her mother’s next book to be a “happy one”.

“She had been looking over my shoulder one day when I was writing Hamnet [who was just 11 years old when he ostensibly died of plague in Shakespeare’s Elizabethan England] and she thought it was just too sad,” recounts O’Farrell of her award-winning historical novel published in March this year. “I was asked if I would write a happy, hopeful one next – so this is the result.”

Happy and hopeful, it also grapples with the Cambridge-educated mother-of-three's favourite topics – fear, danger and daring, all projected with trademark honesty, humour and eloquence and watered down into child-friendly chunks.

O'Farrell's 2017 memoir documents 17 brushes with mortality (including the time she faced a machete-wielding thief in Chile), but while appearing introspective on the surface, it was written with an outward-facing idealism: a literary exercise to show her daughter – and anyone with a life-threatening condition – that we can all be living close to the edge, and possible death, on a daily basis without knowing it.

Where Snow Angels Go seems to borrow that same lofty objective and is driven by small heroine Sylvie who becomes ill and is visited by a snow angel – a “reassuring metaphor" for being watched over by an invisible, kindly, otherworldly force.

Not that there are any religious overtones attached to the deliberately unnamed snow angel, O’Farrell is quick to point out.

“I’ve always felt I’ve been very lucky in life – I don’t any religious affiliations,” she stresses, “but I wanted to write a winter story that was kind of ecumenical in a way. My husband [the novelist, William Sutcliffe] has a Jewish background and I wanted my kids to have a story about winter that isn’t necessarily about religion or about Christmas, or tied to any specific festival.

“He is just the snow angel that has always been in the stories I used to make up for the children. Then, when I went on a book tour in Ireland, about three years ago, I sent my kids a letter every day and I always referred to our snow angel – the first part of the book is based around those letters.”

Mother to a boy now aged 17 and girls of 11 and eight, O’Farrell, who left Northern Ireland with her family when she was aged two, has incorporated personal, major life events into the book which she describes as a “modern fairy tale” conflating the “fascinating science” of the water table with some old-fashioned magic.

There are elements based on her own brush with death as a child when she had encephalitis, an inflammation of the brain most commonly caused by a virus, which kept her off school between the ages of eight and 10.

“I still have some neurological damage, but it’s nothing I can’t live with,” she says, stoically. “I do have to keep working at the body, though, to keep it ticking over – I swim in a loch outside Edinburgh and I do yoga and certain exercises. There are some issues with balance and perception, but nothing major and I’m quite used to it now.”

Whether she believes she had a snow angel watching over her or not, O’Farrell isn’t saying, but her enduring equilibrium has been tested many times since. She lives in a constant state of hypervigilance over her daughter’s allergic reactions – which can tip over into full-blown anaphylactic shock just by sitting beside someone eating peanuts – and has developed an intuitive ‘sixth sense’ as a mother.

There is a nod to this in one section of Snow Angels when Sylvie’s mother suddenly awakens and comes in to check on her sleeping daughter, the same thing having happened to O'Farrell on the night her son, then aged four, became dangerously ill with meningitis.

Another time the book's young heroine finds herself out of her depth at sea and this again mirrors the terrifying time the writer's youngest almost drowned during a family holiday in Spain. The child was grabbed to safety only after her frantic mother spotted the ends of her curly hair floating between the waves.

It’s all real-life stuff, but is meant to open children’s eyes to life challenges all around them, says O’Farrell who grew up in Wales and Scotland, lived in Hong Kong (a year, working for a computer magazine) and London (as an arts journalist), but still cherishes her Irish passport and visits 'home' regularly.

“Many children’s books now grapple with quite big and challenging themes,” she argues. “We read fiction because it gives us a road map on how to respond or how to behave in certain situations. I think it’s important that children are given books which tackle important issues like illness, danger and the fragility of life. That’s how they learn to assess the risks and learn about danger and their own limitations.”

In her own case, she has certainly surpassed all limitations predicted in the bleak prognosis left by her encephalitis and after 17 near-death experiences, is now more than happy to live a quiet life.

“My narrow escape after severe illness maybe did make me more a risk-taker, especially when I was in my teens and 20s, because I always felt I was living on borrowed time,” she reflects. “I had found a loophole out of the death that was expected for me and then, when I did live, they thought I would never walk again.

"I found two amazing loopholes out of those two destinies that were mapped out for me, so I’ve always felt like the luckiest person alive. Maybe I did have a Snow Angel. I've certainly made enough fun ones in the snow over the years.”

Where Snow Angels Go, illustrated by Daniela Jaglenka Terrazzini, is published by Walker Books (hardback) £14.99.