The day Veronica Guerin was murdered, Deirdre Purcell spotted gardai on the Naas Road, scrumming round a sporty red car stopped near the traffic lights. Purcell copped instantly this was no ordinary accident, so she called the RTE newsroom from her car phone to report the scene - once a journalist, and all that. They knew the story, she put it in her book.
Purcell was the first author to publish about Veronica Guerin's death, but no one noticed, because no one expects her to record facts these days. In Love Like Hate Adore, now shortlisted for the Orange Fiction Prize, the narrator Angela happens upon the murder scene while driving to Birr to find her natural father. Purcell had been driving to Birr too. "I am very loath to get involved in this controversy because I know some of the people involved, but my personal view, without being critical of anyone, is that the dead should be left in peace." She didn't know Veronica Guerin, but Purcell knows media inside out. Former Sunday Tribune editor Vincent Browne poached her from the Sunday Press, who poached her from RTE where she had been a prominent newsreader, first on radio, then on television. Now she's outside what she calls "the consensus" of Irish media, but if her profile has dropped, her readership has increased massively. Every book she writes gets an initial print run in Ireland of 50,000 copies; her works are translated into 11 languages. The evening before we met, she attended a preview of her Falling for a Dancer, the novel she adapted for screen, now scheduled for broadcast in four episodes by RTE and the BBC this autumn. She loved it.
She swears it all happened by chance. "I don't have any ambition. I know that sounds really weird when clearly I've lived a life that shows I have ambitions. I come from the generation where modesty, humility and all that were the big virtues and you were trained that way. I was petrified much of the time. When I look back now, and I see these risks I took, unknown leaps really, I wonder how I did because I lived in fear and nerves and stress."
Was she rebellious as a girl ? Emphatically not. "I was a good girl, exceptionally good, but there's something in my personality that makes me . . . I don't rebel overtly at all, but if somebody expects me to do something I'll do the exact opposite. I went to an astrologer and he told me I took independence to an extreme degree and it was a huge fault. Now I don't fight against it."
What bothers her about the current Guerin controversy is what motivated her own journalism - a sense of being fair to people, of respecting their feelings most of all. "Who's perfect: are you perfect, am I perfect? No. Are we perfect mothers, wives, lovers, girlfriends? No. But once we die, we should be entitled to some privacy."
If journalism has changed since she stopped working in newspapers, she certainly doesn't think it's all for the good. "There isn't a dramatic difference between the papers, and there's a proliferation of columnists and people who are more and more just picking on people - very few will revise their opinions based on what they see and hear, Kevin Myers, I must say, being one of the exceptions." What that trend creates is a consensus she finds stifling, and agendas which can skew basic human values. "It's really sad that Veronica Guerin's memory is being used by one side or the other - by both sides, really. From my point of view, it's the family that counts, the little boy particularly: all of the fighting in the newspapers over whether his mother was a liar - that's going to be archived, that's going to be accessible to him when he grows up, it's going to be very upsetting for him."
Upsetting people was never what she was about. I talk about the need to go in hard sometimes, and she agrees thoroughly, with conditions. "Yes, I would agree with that, but I never wanted to. I kind of believe that if I were interviewing me and I was analysing myself, I would suspect I don't have an ego that gets between me and the subject, or the reader and the subject. My skill is to show people the person."
The way she reckons it, the relationship between writer and subject is almost sacred, with the writer more facilitator than mediator, devoted to reaching the truth from the subject's point of view. "I felt my way was different, I felt my way was to report, not to have opinions." Not coming over all ego is important to her: its absence, or subjugation, comes up again and again, to the point where she eventually corrects herself. "I'm not saying I haven't got an ego but I'm trying to make the ego serve the work, rather than me. I have goals, and I try to reach them - my goal now is to write a play." A shrewd intelligence supports her ostensibly gentle demeanour, ticking over constantly in small acts of calculation that don't miss much. She's warm, if slightly cagey, and says as much. "I'm quite a loner by inclination. I know a lot of people because of the jobs I've had and because of Kevin (Healy, RTE executive, her partner for nearly 19 years) but I'm outside them all really." Some people underestimate her.
Her Tribune interviews kept their eye on the target: people relaxed into her easy company, opening their hearts rather than spilling their guts. If they did spill their guts - it happens, people don't meet good listeners very often - Purcell never printed anything the subject might later regret. "I don't think I was exceptionally good - I just worked very hard, I promise you I'm not being falsely modest. I read some of the stuff now and I'm irritated . . . I hate the snideness, that's the trend now and I really hate it, I hate it, it's lazy, it's demeaning to the person who writes it. It's very easy to be snide."
Being snide is another Purcell bugbear. Snideness is a form of bullying and having been bullied mercilessly at least once in her life, Purcell will not tolerate even the slightest sign of it. Who bullied her? "Frank Dermody, and that's a whole other ball game. I never fought him, he just bullied the shit out of me."
Dermody was a staff director in the Abbey Theatre, reportedly good in his day but past that sell-by date by the time he encountered the 20-year-old Purcell, back in the 1960s. Purcell had left a permanent job in Aer Lingus - "the happiest days of my life, actually" - to join the Abbey company. She stayed only three years.
I ask her how she joined; she advises me not to use the story. "I would caution you against using it, Medb, it's been used so many times." Always remember the reader. Back to the bullying. "How did I deal with it? I imploded. I'd probably implode now too. He was an extremely personal man; he put the knife in personally. Women hated him. I'm tough with the work now, but not on personal or emotional issues. I get upset about those." Purcell was shattered, but she didn't become a victim - she hates the whole myth of victimhood too. Instead, she took off for Chicago where she had won a theatre fellowship to Loyola University, met her first husband, Rob Weckler, the day she arrived and married him one year later. Loyola was an extremely conservative place. Purcell arrived in the immediate aftermath of the 1968 Democratic Party convention, and found the students' protests rather tame, if inoffensive.
"Kent State and Paris had just happened and the response in Loyola was to sit in in the canteen and parade around with placards saying things like `Father Maguire, go to your room'!" The couple had two sons, but separated when the younger was 18 months old, by which time they had returned to Ireland, with Purcell the main breadwinner because her actor husband found it more difficult than she to get work.
"I was just looking for any old job, and RTE came up. I joined in 1974 as a radio announcer, then moved to the newsroom in 1977." State institutions weren't particularly hospitable to working women then - the ban on married women in the civil service had been lifted only a few years before. Expecting her second child, Purcell received no favours. "I did the late shift on the night of October 8th, 1975, closed down the station, went home, had a bath, went into labour, went into hospital, had the baby and went back to work. I took 11 days off against time worked in lieu. Eleven days off to have a baby? Rubbish, absolute rubbish. I didn't have time to enjoy them, and I regret that now very badly but I didn't have a choice and I had to get on with it. That's what we all did, it wasn't a big deal at the time."
Was she a feminist? "I wouldn't say I am or am not a feminist - I think I lived feminism without knowing it. But I think some feminism has been very harsh, and some of what went into Love Like Hate Adore came out of that distinction. Women had to push very hard and continue to have to push hard, but I'd love to take a breath and look round and gather up the lost, and I feel that some of the young men are part of the lost." In Love Like Hate Adore, Purcell's narrator has to deal with the fallout after her brother is convicted of rape, and then demonised by women's groups and the media. Purcell wanted to understand how that felt.
The novel is a clear departure from her previous works, focused through a single point of view, and rooted in the observations of that character. "The first 30 pages are hard going, but then Angela's discursive ramblings start to take shape - I absolutely loved the first-person narrative, I found it exhilarating."
I assumed Purcell had researched certain aspects of it, commenting that her inner-city female character picks up on the hugely increased interest in education shown by many women in that community. That's news to her. "I heard Angela's voice and I stayed with it. Sometimes that meant not writing in a way I would have otherwise, like when she is watching a sunset, and I do not spend four paragraphs in colourful description, because she would not have done so. What I love about her is that she is not a victim." She was pleased with the book, but stunned at the critical validation given by making the Orange Prize shortlist. Being shortlisted for the Orange Prize is a literary leg-up she didn't expect. "To say that I was gob-smacked is putting it mildly - I was totally chuffed. Nadine Gordimer was on the long-list of 20 and I was so chuffed to be in that company. Then the shortlist came out and I genuinely nearly dropped the phone when I was told."
Purcell does not see herself as a "woman writer", or even as a "woman's writer". "I'm a writer who is a woman. I don't see any male writer being called a man writer." She knows she can write, but still hasn't got the measure of what she may eventually achieve. "I started because Treasa Cody of Townhouse asked me to write a blockbuster, and that's what I tried to do. I could have written on subjects that would have pleased the consensus, but I didn't. A librarian once said to me only time will tell when fiction becomes literature on the library shelves - that's true. Was Charles Dickens literature when he was writing? I'm sure some of his generation would be surprised to find themselves on the literary shelves now." Purcell is viciously busy. Two other screenplays, two more novels contracted with publishers Townhouse and Macmillan, the biz of being an active board member of the Abbey Theatre and the Council for the Credit Institutions Ombudsman.
Yes, she's driven, she knows she is, but her workload feels heavy right now because "I'm not organised enough" "I'm like one of those people who while I'm waiting to live my life, my life is passing me by - all driven people never think they're doing, they're always waiting to do: I'm still waiting."
