Writer with Cork connections shines a light on dark realities...

SOPHIE White must be the most prolific writer in Ireland. Since her first book, the non-fiction Recipes for a Nervous Breakdown, published in 2016, she has written another six books including a second non-fiction wok, the startlingly honest and often surprising Corpsing: My Body and Other Horror Shows.

This bestseller shines a light on the sometimes dark realities of motherhood among other subjects, including addiction and mental illness.

As well as writing books, Sophie produces a weekly column for the Sunday Independent’s Life Magazine and makes chart-topping podcasts. All this on top of rearing three boys, aged nine, six and three.

The author will read from her first literary novel, Where I End at the West Cork Literary Festival.

Not only is Sophie incredibly productive but she is adept at crossing genres. To date, she has written mostly commercial fiction as she calls it. She is currently working on another commercial novel and has a literary one on the backburner.

Where I End was very well received with a rave review in the Guardian. It’s about a young woman resentfully looking after the wreck of her bed-bound mother in a dark house on a remote island, along with her steely paternal grandmother. The mother is the survivor of a private disaster no one will speak about.

The Guardian described the novel as “A direct descendent of the folk horror tradition.....While it does, inevitably, sometimes feel over-ripe with disgust, its cumulative effect is powerful – and it is also genuinely frightening.”

On the phone from Wexford, where Sophie is on holidays with her children and husband, she says she doesn’t consciously push herself in either the literary or more popular-type novel.

“I tend to find that the story comes along and has its own way of asserting where it belongs in terms of voice and tone. There’s a really fun aspect to both sides. With commercial fiction, I really like the high comedy concept. Marian Keyes is a huge hero of mine and I like Maeve Binchy.

I’m very interested in how we live right now in terms of our relationship with technology and social media. 

When it comes to writing literary type things, there’s definitely a different type of freedom. In commercial fiction, you’re promising your readers a good time. Yes, there might be dark scenes that will make you cry but also, you might laugh. You almost have a contract with the reader to entertain them and not disturb them whereas when I’m writing more literary stuff, I feel all bets are off in that space. It allows a different type of story to be told.”

The bleak and wild setting for Where I End is inspired by Inis Meain with the environment intricately described, important as it is for the mood of the place and how that impacts the characters. In this regard, it’s reminiscent of Kevin Barry’s writing.

“I love Kevin Barry’s work and I’m inspired by Pat McCabe as well. I love their depictions of claustrophobic worlds.”

What is brave about Sophie is her willingness to test herself, to set challenges that she will gamely rise to. Some years ago, in a fish-out-of-water type challenge for the Sunday Independent in which some of the paper’s writers took on new experiences and wrote about them, Sophie tried stand-up comedy.

I had always been curious about it. It seemed like a great way to push me to do it. 

I really loved it actually but I found it logistically difficult because of kids’ bedtime. It’s really hard work. I have so much admiration for stand-ups because it’s so much graft. Then I got pregnant again and I was writing my first book. Writing is more family-friendly. I still perform though in one of the podcasts I do.”

Sophie has been very open about her alcoholism. Now in recovery, she doesn’t miss drink.

“Nobody in their right mind would miss alcoholic drinking because it’s so grim, so isolating and so painful. I don’t miss it at all but I sometimes miss having a crutch. I try to have other crutches.....I go to twelve step meetings because I need to never ever forget that I’m an alcoholic.”

Having been diagnosed as bipolar, Sophie is on medication and goes to therapy.

“I find that for me, the medication isn’t a total safeguard against episodes. It’s obviously part of managing it but I can still have symptoms and episodes of bad mental health, even when I’m totally on top of taking medication.

I have to be pretty careful about managing my stress and make sure I’m paying attention to the basics like eating well, sleeping and exercising. It’s like any kind of chronic illness. It’s constantly in flux.

As an only child, Sophie, a Dubliner, loved spending time with her relatives in Cork where both her parents come from. Her late father, Kevin Linehan, an RTÉ producer, came from Glasheen while her journalist mother, Mary O’Sullivan, retired from the Sunday Independent, is from Bishopstown.

Sophie regrets that her father, who was diagnosed with Alzheimers is his early fifties, didn’t get to read her books. (She has written a novel, ‘ Filter This’ in which the father character has the disease.)

“My father was such a creative, funny, intelligent and kind person. He wasn’t with it before I became a writer. I was so lucky to have him for the time we had. It’s such a cruel illness, for the person with it and for everyone around them. It’s so hard to lose everything. If your mind is gone, everything is gone.”

Sophie White will read from Where I End on July 10 at the Maritime Hotel as part of the West Cork Literary Festival.See www.westcorkliteraryfestival.ie.