All of the 'Sex and the City' girls rolled into one or her own woman? Alison Jameson tells Róisín Ingle about finding her voice as a writer.
A couple of years ago Alison Jameson lived a double life. During the week she was a director of a prestigious advertising agency in Dublin. That life meant sharp suits, breakfast meetings and snap decisions. After 14 years she feared early burn-out and knew something had to give. It was a life she was sure she could not sustain. It was around this time, realising that change was necessary and feeling that it was sinful not to use all her talents, that her other life began. On Fridays she refused offers of after-work drinks, or nights out with friends, in preparation for this other life. All weekend, every weekend for the guts of a year, she closeted herself at home, creating the work of fiction that eventually became This Man and Me, her debut novel. The writing life contained none of the glamour of the advertising life - no jetting off to Buenos Aires for campaign shoots. It was slow and deliberate and sometimes lonely. It consisted of the careful crafting of sentence after sentence, because that was her style and because when she finished there would be barely any need to edit. She cut up food - "sausages, I ate a lot of sausages" - into bite-sized pieces and worked through meals.
When she finished she contacted an agent, who carved a deal - a "healthy" two-book advance is all that Faith O'Grady, of the Lisa Richards Agency, will say - and then flowers arrived at her office from Penguin Ireland, with a note that read: "Welcome aboard." Since then, after leaving her job, she has had just one life. At 39, Jameson has become an author.
We meet in a hotel on a sunny Thursday. This Man and Me is a modern love story set in Paris, Dublin and Amsterdam, but it is written with such intelligence, quirky humour and acute observation that I am looking forward to meeting the woman who created the book's bright if romantically hapless protagonist, Helen Wilton Fournier.
The book's publicist described Jameson as all the women in Sex and the City rolled into one: a bit of Miranda, a dash of Carrie, a soupcon of Charlotte and a pinch of Samantha. You see what she was getting at, but Jameson, in her demure pink jewellery, Chanel-style white jacket, crisp white vest, jeans and trainers - after all the elegance, the trainers are a lovely surprise - strikes you as someone who is resolutely herself.
She grew up in Ballyjamesduff, in Co Cavan, and, later, in Co Westmeath; the first inkling that she might want to be a writer came as a seven-year-old, at primary school. "A teacher read out a paragraph I had written, and the class went suddenly quiet. I was amazed that you could write and get that kind of reaction," she says. Later, at boarding school in Navan, she was encouraged by one of the teachers, Sr Mary Ball, who read out her essays. When she went to study English at University College Dublin it brought a kind of freedom. After years cossetted in her "down-to-earth" boarding school, she embraced the social freedom of college. "We were kind of protected from the world at boarding school, and then there were guys sitting beside you in a lecture hall. In the beginning it was bizarre," she says. At college she discovered American writers. "I read Catcher in the Rye for the first time, I read Carver and Capote and it was lovely to find out that you could write in a voice that was your own. It opened up everything for me."
She wanted to write, so she tried journalism after leaving college, but a stint on the Westmeath Examiner, writing articles about "prize-winning cabbages" and "the local whist drive", showed her that journalism was not the kind of writing she wanted to do. She wandered into copywriting, rising quickly to become an account handler. Then, with the germ of an idea in her head about a girl with serious doubts about her impending nuptials, she gave writing a proper go. "People who waste their talents are the kind of people who really annoy me, so I decided to really focus on writing a book," she says. "If I was going to do it I wanted to do it right. I wanted to treat the writing with respect, so I shut myself away."
This Man and Me is a book about contradictions and relationships and how dangerous, unreliable men can be more intoxicating than those who offer safety and security. "It's a dilemma," says Jameson, who is single at the moment (and has almost finished her second novel, after a two-month research stint in Manhattan).
The book is being given a big push in the UK and internationally. Curious, I ask about her book deal, but Jameson refuses to be drawn. "It was never about the money for me," she says, smiling. "If what I write brings pleasure, if people can relate to it, that will always be much more important."
• This Man and Me is published by Penguin Ireland, £12.99