New author Anne Tiernan: ‘Writing makes you remember, it makes you reflect’

Author Anne Tiernan.

Three-nation book deals don’t come from nowhere, but Anne Tiernan is still bemused by the speed with which she has become the debut author for the brand-new imprint, Moa Press.

The Tauranga-based author, born in Zambia and raised in Ireland, sent her manuscript for The Last Days of Joy to Hachette Aotearoa (Moa Press’ parent company) in February 2022, with zero expectations. It was unsolicited, and the book had been rejected several times before, by book agents and publishers in the UK and Ireland. She had already written a second manuscript because she was convinced this one was no good. And yet, hope remained.

Two days after submitting it, 49-year-old Tiernan got a call from Moa Press senior publisher Kate Stephenson offering her a two-book contract. “I said, ‘Kate, are you serious? Have you read it?’” recalls a laughing Tiernan. “She said, ‘That’s my job, Anne. That’s what I do.’ I had Covid and a fever and I thought I was hallucinating.”

Stephenson was immediately impressed by Tiernan’s contemporary family drama set in New Zealand, told via multiple viewpoints and featuring a collection of stroppy, funny, tortured Irish characters. Having just returned from London, where she worked for Headline/Wildfire, Stephenson could see big potential for the book in the UK market and the appeal to Irish readers was obvious, especially as the author’s older brother is the famous comic Tommy Tiernan (Gerry on Derry Girls and host of an eponymous talkshow). He’s the one who encouraged the author to get words on paper.

“I had this idea in my head that before I started writing I needed to have fully formed characters and a fully formed plot,” says Tiernan, “but I didn’t. I had this one single image of a woman in a coma surrounded by her three adult children. My brother said, ‘Just sit down and see what happens’ - and literally that’s what I did.”

It’s a technique she’s employing for her next book, another family drama that “doesn’t know where it’s going”. Each morning Tiernan sits down in her writing space, a desk in a snug tucked behind sliding glass doors, and thinks, “Let’s see what happens today.”

Before moving to New Zealand in 2005 with her Kiwi boyfriend-now-husband Matt, an investment adviser, Tiernan worked in banking in Dublin for nearly a decade. “I don’t know if I would say I built a career out of it because I was terrible at it, I’m not even kidding. I used to get sent on these accountancy courses all the time because my basic skills were terrible.”

Having “bobbed through” her 20s focused on the pursuit of fun and dedicating her 30s to parenting small children, she decided to make her 40s the writing years. She had studied literature at university and always assumed that at some point she would write – it was the only thing she had any ambition to do. Then her middle child asked her sweetly, “Mum, why didn’t you grow up to be anything?”

Chastened, she began writing articles, including one published in Canvas in 2016. “In many ways my mother was a terrible one,” reads the first line, grabbing readers firmly by the collar.

The essay reflects on Helen Tiernan’s struggle with motherhood, depression and alcoholism. She died by suicide in 2010, the day after Tiernan gave birth to her son. “I felt like she had a big well of love to give but she wasn’t available to us,” says Tiernan, who watched the funeral on videolink, baby in her arms. She felt disconnected, both geographically and emotionally.

“Our house was a sad one, because so was our mother,” she wrote. “My father was a steady, loving presence but I don’t think it’s possible for one parent to compensate for the inadequacies of the other.”

It’s a beautiful, bittersweet essay and its success encouraged Tiernan to write more, placing stories with The Irish Times and other publications until she hit a wall. “I went through a period where everything I wrote was rejected, it was like death by a thousand paper cuts. I thought, I’m going to go for the big one, a big rejection instead of lots of mini rejections. I am going to write a book and have it mercilessly rejected and feel terrible about myself.”

The experience of grieving a mother she didn’t really know as she nurtured a new baby percolated until she began writing The Last Days of Joy.

The titular Joy Tobin, a misfit who emigrated to New Zealand to escape tragedy, is in hospital, her two daughters and son holding bedside vigil as they face their own crises.

“Writing makes you remember, it makes you reflect and I had to really get inside the mind of someone who was suicidal,” says Tiernan. “What would it be like to believe that the people you love would be better off without you? I gained a lot more compassion for her. I have been on the same journey as the characters in a way because they start off angry but gain a real sense of peace.”

Tiernan’s mother was a creative soul. She attended art college but had to leave early when her father died. “You’d always find little sketches she’d done around the house, and she sang.” That artistry runs in the family. Tiernan’s sister Niamh is a photographer who is writing her first screenplay. Cousin Eleanor Tiernan is a stand-up comic and actor. Her aunt is a writer, her uncle a poet. Her father, an agronomist, has written and published work since retirement. And her brother Tommy, famously productive, has been proudly promoting his sister’s book and saying “the nicest things”.

Tiernan will launch the book in Ireland accompanied by her brother, before returning to New Zealand to promote it here. It’s all very exciting, although there is the inescapable fact of the second book to finish and the promise of more to come. It seems that Tiernan’s 50s will also be writing years.

The Last Days of Joy, by Anne Tiernan

The Last Days of Joy by Anne Tiernan (Hachette Aotearoa, $37) is out on March 28.