Ireland has form when it comes to moving abroad, but if it hadn’t been for my parents retiring to Wales when I was a year into my nurse training, it is unlikely that I would have followed the trend.
I had a comfortable life in one of the best, if not the best, capital cities in the world. Moving somewhere where I didn’t know a soul and where I was, by necessity, moving back to live with my parents wasn’t in any of my plans.
It’s hardly surprising that a year after moving to Wales, I applied for a job further afield. Three of my Irish friends had emigrated to Australia and another to Canada, but that all seemed a little too far for me.
I’ll admit now that I had never heard of Guernsey, one of the Channel Islands, when I applied for the job, but it seemed a halfway house; a little foreign and with their own money, but not too scary considering I was travelling on my own. I’d moved once. I could surely do it again. The plan was to stay six months, and that is the reason I have given up making plans. They always backfire.
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It didn’t take me long to realise that I might have made a huge mistake. Guernsey is wonderful, a blend of French and English with foreign street names and surnames and with history seeping between every crack and seam, but nursing in the hospital is very different to holidaying on the island. All I seemed to meet were Irish nurses, who were doing the exact same thing I was.
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Where were the local flavours and tastes? The spirit and heart of an island occupied during the second World War. The Guernsey that had inspired the likes of Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Victor Hugo. I visited the local tourist attractions, the beaches and German fortifications but failed to find the pulse of the Island. The culture. The people. The soul.
A part-time job in a bar came next. A way of meeting the locals without having to thrust myself on the social scene in a frenzy of partying. A party animal I am not. I was working there a week when I met my husband. That was over 30 years ago.
I am still working as a nurse in the hospital, but I have a second career now and one that doesn’t involve pulling pints.
As well as nursing, I murder people for a living, at least on paper.
Writing was an accident. I hadn’t written fiction since school, but I had an idea for a character. A little boy who was being bullied.
With three children of five and under, including twins, it took me a year to find the courage, and the time, to pick up a pencil. There is nothing scarier than a blank page to the uninitiated, but once I’d started, I found I couldn’t stop.
That was 16 years ago.
Writing for me is now a way of life in the same way reading is. I was a late reader, but, like many children, I had to find the right book. In my case, it was discovering my mother’s stash of Agatha Christie paperbacks when I was about 13. It is hardly surprising that I seem to have settled on writing crime thrillers.
There are no rules about what books writers should read, only that they read as widely as possible, both within and outside of their chosen genre. I read every day and write most, even if it’s only 100 words. Words are like weeds. Write one and you’ll quickly find you have a notebook full of the things.
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I was lucky enough to be picked up by Harper Collins four years ago; I say lucky, but topping the Amazon charts with my self-published thriller had a lot to do with it.
Life for me is what I can make of it, a game if you like. Me against me. But, like all games, it comes with a strict set of rules. I’m not a socialite. Walking into a room full of strangers for me is akin to an acrophobic taking up mountaineering. My way around that was finding a bar job.
As a nurse living on a small island, I knew no one in publishing, no industry contacts. No writing friends apart from fellow Irish nurse Valerie Keogh. Instead, I wrote and wrote, book after book. It took a while to perfect my craft. Twelve years in total until I had that breakthrough novel. Time not wasted as I self-published a slew of books in the interim and learned about the publishing industry along the way.
I now have an agent, a new publisher, a new crime series and, of course, the day job. My dad used to say “to live is to work”. That’s about right.
Jenny O’Brien was born in Dublin. She moved to Wales aged 21, then to Guernsey at 23. She still works as a nurse, on a rehabilitation unit at Princess Elizabeth Hospital and writes thrillers.
If you live overseas and would like to share your experience with Irish Times Abroad, email abroad@irishtimes.com with a little information about you and what you do.
