The Ryan Tubridy Show RTE Radio One
Some writers’ interviews feel stilted but this wasn’t one of them.
Anna McPartlin bubbles over with life and laughter.
Her books, she told Ryan Tubridy, may be dark in terms of subject matter, but the characters are never like that.
It was her childhood and her relationship with her mother that drew in this listener.
Her mum left her dad when Anna was five. In the 1970s, she said, nobody left their husbands.
Anna’s mother intended to go and re-educate herself. But she got MS and by the time Anna was 11, she needed to go into a home.
Yes, she had a carer’s role as a child but it wasn’t that simple.
“We cared for one another. She was the head and I was the body. I did the leg work and she did the head work.”
She described how her mum would fall over and struggle for a while before she could get up.
Once when she was seven or eight, she came home to find her mother on the floor.
Instead of crying, she invited her daughter to come and lie down beside her and talk about her day. When she was able, Anna helped her up.
The only time her mum freaked out was if she had left her cigarettes in one place and ended up stuck in another.
Her mother was terrified at what might happen as her illness progressed – she watched people who could do nothing, not even talk.
But that was not to be.
“On the day she died, she ate lunch, then said ‘I’m feeling a bit tired. I don’t feel so good’. The nurses called her sister and she said: ‘I’m going to sleep now, Molly’. Then she died.”
It was a happy peaceful death - a reassuring death in these Covid-19 times, Tubridy said.
Anna McPartlin’s new novel Below the Big Blue Sky promises wicked laughter and true honesty - a winning combination.
