Niamh Greene's romp through family life is like Bridget Jones with kids, writes Kate Holmquist
So many mothers fantasise about it, but few achieve it. While she was caring full-time for her two young children, Niamh Greene snatched a few hours every morning, while they were at school, to "have fun" at her laptop. "I was only ever writing for myself, to make myself laugh," she says.
The 36-year-old's writing started as a diary of humorous things her two children, Caoimhe, who is six, and Rory, who is four, said and did. As every parent knows, if you don't write them down you do forget. But her musings soon found plot and structure, and Greene instinctively created a heroine to embody her unique comic voice.
About a year ago she finished her diary-style novel, an accomplished Bridget-Jones-if-she-had-kids romp through the chaos of family life. "I didn't think Bridget Jones's Diary. I didn't think what would be good to read. It was just me typing out my frustrations," she says.
It was her husband, Oliver, an accountant, who printed off copies, bought envelopes and stamps and sent the manuscripts to several Irish publishers. Penguin Ireland snapped it up and gave Greene a two-book deal - the second book is nearly finished. She subsequently got an agent by sending the book to agencies she found in Writers' & Artists' Yearbook and soon found herself in London iwhat authors call a beauty parade, with three agents vying to sign her up. Easy-peasy lemon-squeezy, to quote from the book, Secret Diary of a Demented Housewife.
"It gave me such a boost. I thought, maybe here is something that I could do. Up to that point I didn't want to try to write anything with the intention of trying to be published. I kept thinking that if I do this and I fail I will be upset. Then, when the book was accepted, I was terrified, thinking, how will I do more? I'm glad I wrote the second book before the first came out."
She is understandably nervous about how her first novel - so perfectly formed it needed scant editing - will be received. She needn't be, however: the book has all the qualities of a mommy-lit bestseller, with the publisher's faith shown by the fact that Penguin is simultaneously bringing the book out in hardback in the UK and trade paperback here.
"I don't mind the mommy-lit tag," says Greene, whose literary heroes are Marian Keyes, Cathy Kelly, Maeve Binchy and Sheila O'Flanagan - all great, strong Irish voices.
Greene and her family recently returned to live in a rented house "in the middle of nowhere" near New Ross, in Co Wexford, where she grew up. She loves walking the fields with her children and dog, Charlie, and limits the children's TV time to half an hour a day.
Married at the age of 26 to Oliver, the college sweetheart she met while studying English at University College Dublin, Greene followed her husband's career in 1997 to London, where she worked in public relations for an accountants' organisation, and in 2000 to San Francisco, where she became friends with Sharon Stone.
It was Greene's daughter, Caoimhe, and Stone's son, Roan, who made the link, in a trendy restaurant one Sunday afternoon, as the Hollywood actor dined with her then husband, Phil Bronstein, editor of the San Francisco Chronicle. The children began playing, and their mothers chatted, which prompted Stone to invite Greene to coffee mornings at her home.
By then Greene had fallen into her role as stay-at-home mother by default rather than by design, as she became pregnant shortly after arriving in San Francisco, and there was no point trying to climb the career ladder in a new city.
"I decided that I'd just be pregnant and enjoy it," she says. "Motherhood for me has been one of the hardest jobs and also one of the most rewarding. Friends who work outside the home think you're so lucky, but there are days when if I see another child I'm going to lose my mind."
Greene's heroine has been driven by parenting stress, the benign neglect of a workaholic husband and a diet of junk food to the point of paranoia that her husband is having an affair, while she exchanges flirtatious text messages with an attractive lone father from the weekly play-group. Her only relief is the guilty pleasure of reading celebrity magazines and watching Dr Phil.
"I didn't think about plot or structure. I just let it flow. I knew that if I overthought it I wouldn't enjoy it, because it was a hobby for me."
Greene's best friends are still the girls she was in junior infants with, plus a few mothers from the school run. None of them has read her book - and none of them is in it, she hastens to add.
"I wanted to make people laugh, and if they do enjoy the book, great. I'm not going to please everyone all the time, and not everyone will love the book, but hopefully some will," she says.
"When you are in your 30s and have a couple of children, you're not afraid of anything any more, because you think, if I can do that I can do anything. You can only laugh. Life is too short."
• Secret Diary of a Demented Housewifeby Niamh Greene is published by Penguin Ireland, £10.99 in UK