Irish author Karen Perry has revealed that having a baby kickstarted her crime fiction writing, because motherhood tapped into a newfound “fear”.
Perry – real name is Karen Gillece – told the PA news agency she “only became interested in crime” when her first daughter Rowen, now 14, was born.
“There’s something about motherhood that taps into that fear, it’s that we’re imagining dangers,” said the author. “It wasn’t until Rowan was born that I suddenly started seeing danger and risk everywhere.”
Perry, whose new book The Worst Thing You Ever Did is published on October 26th, said: “There are so many dangers in the world, a lot of things are way beyond our control. But I think crime writing is a safe space to explore those fears and find resolution.”
She speculates that “it might be one of the reasons women are so attracted to writing – and also reading – crime”.
The 49-year-old from Dun Laoghaire, south county Dublin, has published a total of 12 novels, eight under the Karen Perry pseudonym, including Girl Unknown, Can You Keep A Secret, and The Boy That Never Was, which is due to be made into a TV show for RTÉ.
“When [Rowen] was born a friend of mine who has children said that the two things that people don’t tell you about having children – the fear and the guilt,” said the writer, who also has a second daughter, Freya, 11, with husband Conor.
Now that the girls are approaching or in their teenage years, she said the ‘fear’ hasn’t gone away – but does change.
“The fear used to be things like how you know crossing the road or getting stolen. Now it’s more that [Rowen] has independence and goes out, so it’s worrying about what experience she might have. It’s worrying about the internet, who she’s engaging with, online bullying. I suppose you learn to manage [the fear] a bit more,” said Perry, who will appear at Ireland’s crime writing festival Murder One on October 6-8.
It’s informed her writing so much that Perry’s last novel, Stranger, was about teenage girls. “I was looking ahead to the time my girls were approaching becoming teenagers themselves, I was suddenly in that sphere and teenagers are fascinating, rich grounds for writing.”
Meanwhile, her new book took Perry back to the experience of young motherhood. “When your daughters take on that new independence, and you see them approaching adulthood, and suddenly time seems to speed up. And then you think back to being pregnant, having a newborn baby, and I felt a little wistful for it.”
The Worst Thing You Ever Did sees Faye, who is married and expecting her first child, but then her ex-boyfriend, Michael, gets in touch.
A decade ago they got stranded in Barcelona when the Icelandic volcano erupted and the ash cloud halted all flights across Europe. While there, something catastrophic happens and when the couple return to Ireland they realise they can’t tell anyone about it. When Michael comes back into Faye’s life, he sets her off on a dangerous trajectory.
“I’m interested in the way that people deal with trauma,” said Perry, who previously co-wrote four books with Paul Perry – hence the pseudonym – but has since gone solo.
“Faye has pushed it way down in the dark, she’s locked it away in a little box, she’s never going to open it. Whereas Michael, he’s kept prodding at it like a sore all these years, and he’s very psychologically damaged, which makes it even more dangerous to her.”
Most of Perry’s plots involve a murder, so do the dark storylines affect her? “It does take its toll, it’s cumulative. When I finished the last book I actually took a break and stopped writing for a while.
“Because I was writing a lot of it during Covid, it was hard to get away from it. It’s a dark subject matter and there was so much dark stuff going on in the world as well.
“There were news stories that were really affecting me, like Sarah Everard’s murder and here in Ireland Aisling Murphy’s murder, they happened around the same time I was writing this very dark material, and it did get to me a little bit.”
“Most of the time, I am able to just step away from the desk. But for this book, strangely, I couldn’t, I felt I was carrying it around with me quite a lot.”
She added: “My kids always say to me that I do this kind of glazed thing. When I pick them up from school, they can tell if I’m actually still working. For maybe an hour after they come home from school, I find it really hard to actually click back into motherhood – it’s not an on/off switch for me.”
Perry keeps the plots completely private during the writing process. “I think you lose the magic if you talk about it too much,” she said. But enjoys the solitude – “I’m an introvert definitely, and I consider myself really lucky to have a career when I can just work on my own.
“Before I was a writer, I worked for a telecommunications company for years in an open plan office. And it’s only really after I left it that I realised, oh my God, I was dying in there! It wasn’t the right environment for me.”
Murder One is running October 6-8 at the Lexicon Library in Dun Laoghaire, featuring some of Ireland and the UK’s most loved and bestselling authors. Visit murderone.ie.
The Worst Thing You Did by Karen Perry is out October 26th.
