Sheila Agnew
About Author
Sheila Agnew was born in New York and grew up in Dublin with her sister and two brothers. After graduating, she practiced as a lawyer in London, Sydney and New York and worked in such far-flung places as Accra, Cairo and Bratislava.
Sheila had wanted to be a writer since she was seven and fell in love with Danny, the Champion of the World. In 2002, she took a break from her legal career to write and to travel around Asia. In 2011, she moved to Argentina to learn Spanish and work on a horse farm. The following year, she relocated to Dingle in County Kerry where she wrote Marooned in Manhattan. Sheila based the character of Ben in the book on her own black-and-white spaniel of dubious lineage.
Sheila now lives and writes in New York City.
Author link
Interview
MAROONED IN MANHATTAN
O'BRIEN PRESS
APRIL 2014
Marooned in Manhattan is the first in a series of books about 12-year-old Evie by debut author Sheila Agnew. Following her mother's death, Evie has to leave her life in Ireland to live in Manhattan with her uncle. Step by step, through a series of mishaps and adventures, she grows to love her new family in America and, eventually, to come to terms with her bereavement and to accept her new life.
Despite Evie's loss, the novel is full of dry humour that, along with Evie's distinctive voice, make this a funny and beautifully-written story about love, loss and identity for children aged nine years plus.
Author Sheila Agnew answered the following questions for ReadingZone:
Q: What made you want to write for children?
A: Although I retained my passion for children's books long after I became an adult, it had never occurred to me to try writing a book specifically for children. One snowy night in February while I was blow-drying my hair, the idea for the Evie Brooks novels just kind of leaped into my head. I went with the story in the form that it came to me - a children's story.
Q: What was the starting point of this novel for you?
A: The starting point was the two central characters, Evie, and her uncle, Scott, and a transatlantic journey.
Q: Why did you tell the novel in first person and how well did you feel you knew Evie?
A: Evie's voice is the essence of the novel. I wrote it in first person because I thought that writing it in third person would dilute the power of her voice. I know her as well as a very good friend. And like many of my good friends, she constantly surprises me.
Q: Why did you decide to 'remove' Evie's mother and how hard was it to write about Evie's bereavement?
A: There is a suspiciously high number of orphans in children's novels. I think that is because it gives children's authors a lot of flexibility to send their child heroes off on extraordinary journeys.
Initially I was tempted to deal with all of Evie's bereavement upfront in the early chapters of the novel and almost try to get it out of the way. But I found that I could not. Grief doesn't work like that. It tends to come in waves and it's a long process. Evie is in deep shock at the start of the novel. It takes the entire book for her to come to terms with her Mum's death.
Q: Why did you choose to take Evie out of Ireland and to send her to the US?
A: A major theme in the novel concerns self-identity - Evie is reluctant to leave Ireland because she doesn't want to leave behind her friends and all that she has known. But she also has an underlying fear that she will somehow become less Irish. Gradually she realizes that her sense of self is not dependent on her geographical location; she can be whoever she is, wherever she happens to be.
I moved from New York to Ireland as a child and I've lived and worked in many different countries. I have always been attracted to the idea of being a stranger in a strange land. But I am also powerfully drawn to the concept of home and I always knew that Evie would choose to remain in New York. Home isn't about bricks and mortar; it's about the people who live there. Evie's uncle loves her. She grows to love him. They belong together.
Q: How much fun did you have with the lawyer character, Leela, and is she based on anyone you know?
A: Evil characters are terrific fun to write. No, Leela is not based on anyone I know but I did use her as a means of showing how very unfair the legal system can be to children. She so deserves to be used and exploited. Ha!
Q: How important is humour for you when you write?
A: I'm a huge fan of humorous children's authors like Roald Dahl, David Walliams, Eoin Colfer and John Corey Whaley. I have a dry sense of humour and it is a big part of who I am. My first novel, a literary effort for adults, concerned a group of female prisoners on hunger strike in Northern Ireland in 1981. The scope for humour in that story was pretty limited.
When I got a call from my agent to say that The O'Brien Press wanted to publish the Evie books, he passed on a message to me from the publisher: "Give our congratulations to Sheila. You can't teach people how to write humour." That compliment meant so much to me. It encouraged me to write to my strengths.
I love the idea of being able to make children laugh. As I say on my website, I don't agree that wit is the only wall between us and the dark..... but, it's a good one!
Q: In your book you have a vet, a lawyer and an actress - you've been a lawyer, but would you have preferred either of the other career choices?
A: I had a dream the other night and woke up, muttering, 'Aunt Polly, Aunt Polly, it's me Tom, I'm coming home'. I was Tom in Tom Sawyer, the school play when I was thirteen. It was an all-girls school, which was a good thing because all the juiciest roles were male so I got to play lots of them, like King Lear. I can't remember where I put my car keys but I remember almost all of my lines as King Lear. Sometimes I wish that I could forget them!
You don't realise it when you are a teenager but the choices you make and the things you do and don't do, live with you for the rest of your life. I loved acting. I loved everything about it but I knew that I wasn't tough enough or talented enough to pursue it as a career. And I loved writing more.
I never considered being a vet because I didn't want to deal with very sick and dying animals. I don't think that I could erect a professional wall between me and an animal in pain.
Q: What was the writing process for you with this novel?
A: I frequently read articles that talk about how brilliant women are at multi-tasking. Gulp. I'm terrible at multi-tasking. When I initially got the idea for the Evie Brooks novels, I was a junior partner in the litigation department at a large law firm in Manhattan. For me, it was impossible to combine my job with creative writing. I can only throw all of my energy into one big thing at one time. And while I very much agree with the idea of having a balanced life, almost everything that I have achieved in my life followed on from periods of living an extremely unbalanced life.
I worked full-time on the Evie novels except for helping out in the local riding stables on a part-time basis. I wrote a single page outline for each of the five books in the series. So when I wrote the first book, I knew where I was going. I just wasn't sure how I was going to get there. I wrote two drafts and then the third draft mainly involved polishing.
Q: What are the highs and lows of being an author?
A: The writing part itself is fantastic. All authors are able to bend time. I'd often start writing at 7am in the morning and then get an urge to break for coffee, look at the time and realize that five hours had passed.
The money part is the trickiest part; scrambling around at very odd jobs to earn the cash to buy writing time. There's nothing enriching or noble or glamorous about poverty. It's tedious and a bit of a nuisance.
Sometimes I wish that I was built like the pragmatic Charlotte Lucas in Pride and Prejudice, so that I could settle down to a comfortable writing life financed by Mr. Collins. But I am not Charlotte. I'd take up residence in a cardboard box under a bridge before moving in with Mr. Collins. Besides, I can do this under my own steam; at least, I hope I can.
Advances from my publisher help. I read somewhere that the industry is considering eliminating advances against royalties for authors. ARE THEY TRYING TO KILL US? GOOD GOD! NO!
Q: Are you now writing full time? How does your writing day go?
A: I arrived in Ireland on March 1st for the launch here of the first Evie book. I have spent the entire month working full-time at promotion. It's been a huge amount of fun. I especially love interacting with kids at the school and book shop events. They come up with the most interesting questions. I also found it super cool to hang out in a radio studio to do an interview. And I've been busy writing heaps of articles and guest blog posts for newspapers and magazines and book-related websites. I am hopeful that I will be able to spend most of this summer writing my new book. I don't look too far ahead or I'd probably get paralysed. I just concentrate on one book at a time.
Q: Do you have any bad writing habits?
A: I don't write at a desk. I tend to balance my laptop on my, em, lap or on the arm of the chair or couch. That bad habit hasn't done wonders for my already poor posture.
Q: You live in Manhattan now; what is your favourite place to visit?
A: I love taking my dog to Central Park in the mornings. It is leash-free before 9am every day. The sight of thousands of dogs running around completely free in this oasis in such a big, busy city is very joyful and often very amusing. Surprisingly, there are very few fights.
I love browsing in the Strand Book Store. It probably doesn't have the 18 miles of books as advertised. But it certainly feels that way. And I enjoy taking visitors to Brandy's Piano Bar, a dive bar on the Upper East Side, staffed by out-of-work Broadway actors and actresses. They sing show tunes all night. They are much more talented than the X-factor hopefuls. It's always a lot of fun.
Marooned in Manhattan
