Ahern, Cecelia

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Ahern, Cecelia

Career
Sidelights
Selected Writings
Sources

Author

B orn September 30, 1981, in Dublin, Ireland; daughter of Bertie (a politician) and Miriam (a bank employee; maiden name, Kelly) Ahern. Education: Graduated with a degree in journalism and media communications from Griffith College, Dublin, Ireland, c. 2003.

Addresses: Home—Dublin, Ireland. Office—Cecelia Ahern, c/o Hyperion Editorial Department, 77 W. 66th St., 11th Fl., New York, NY 10023.

Career

D ance teacher in Dublin, Ireland, after 1997; member of the pop group Shimma, c. 1999; published first novel, PS, I Love You, 2004; co-creator, with Don Todd, of the ABC television comedy Sa-mantha Who?, 2007.

Sidelights

C ecelia Ahern’s debut novel, PS, I Love You, gained her extraordinary literary fame in her native Ireland at the age of just 22. The uplifting tale of love and loss spent months at the top of the Irish bestseller lists in 2004, and was even made into a Hollywood film that starred Hilary Swank. Ahern went on to craft several more equally appealing stories which critics sometimes classify as “chick-lit”—a category she rejects, Ahern told Gi-nanne Brownell in Newsweek International. “Chick lit isn’t a nice term. Just because something is heart-warming and appeals to women does not mean it lacks intelligence.” Ahern is the daughter of prominent politician Bertie Ahern, who was serving as Ireland’s taoiseach, or prime minister, when her first novel was accepted for publication in 2003. Between Ahern’s birth on September 30, 1981, and the publication of her first novel, Ireland underwent a swift and utterly unprecedented transformation. In the early 1980s, the predominantly Roman Catholic nation was one of the poorer corners of Europe, hamstrung by a cultural conservativeness that even extended into the political sphere in the form of a constitutional ban on divorce. Political troubles also dominated Irish life: Ireland had been a sovereign state since 1921 after winning its independence from the English crown, but several pro-British, Protestant counties in the north chose to remain part of Britain. Thus the island nation was partitioned in two—the Roman Catholic Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, a smaller section dominated by pro-British Protestants. Sectarian violence flared once again in the late 1960s and continued over the next two decades. An underground organization, the Irish Republic Army (IRA), waged a campaign of political assassinations and bombings with the goal of uniting both Irelands; British military units and Northern Ireland paramilitary groups fought back with equal vigor. When Ahern was born in 1981, the year’s dominant news story was the ongoing hunger strikes by IRA prisoners in Northern Ireland jails in which ten men died in a four-month period.

Ahern’s father had risen through the ranks of Fi-anna Fáil, the political party whose name is sometimes translated as “Soldiers of Destiny,” and was serving in the Dáil Éireann, or lower house of parliament, the year his second daughter was born. He became party leader in 1994, and then the youngest taoiseach in Ireland’s history in 1997. In that role, Ahern’s father played a crucial role in negotiating a lasting peace agreement between the IRA and Northern Ireland.

Ahern and her older sister, Georgina, grew up in the public eye, and their family’s troubles were intensely scrutinized by the media. Their parents legally separated in 1987—the constitutional ban on divorce would not be lifted for another decade— and Bertie became involved in a 15year relationship with Celia Larkin, who often accompanied him at official functions. This was a rather unusual arrangement, given Ireland’s religious and social con-servativism, but others noted that the tacit public acceptance of the still-married politician’s partner was a sign that Ireland was undergoing a major cultural shift. Ahern and her sister reportedly saw little of Larkin, though they remained close to their father and spent every Sunday with him. Sometimes they attended sporting events, but other activities reflected their father’s rising political fortunes. There were frequent official events, Ahern recalled in an interview with Louette Harding in the Mail on Sunday, “where we had to behave ourselves and be very good.”

Ahern was a performer at an early age. She began tap-dance lessons in her early teens, moving on to hip-hop and even winning a national dance competition in 1997. Both during and after her time at Bruce College—a combination high school/junior college in Dublin—she taught dance, appeared on television and in stage shows, and joined a short-lived pop group called Shimma. Ahern eventually decided to enroll at Griffith College in Dublin to study for a journalism and media communications degree. There were few reports on her for nearly three years, until January of 2003, when news that she had secured a book deal with the U.K. division of HarperCollins was announced.

Ahern had finished her degree but was having little luck finding work in her field, so she began writing a love story. She showed a few chapters to her mother, who urged her to write more and then asked a golf-course acquaintance who was a literary agent for some advice. Ahern signed with the agent, and the unfinished manuscript sold for a little more than $200,000. Just two days earlier, she had started classes for a graduate program in film production, and was forced to drop out in order to finish the manuscript. The completed story captured the attention of U.S. publisher Hyperion Books, a unit of the Walt Disney Corporation, which signed Ahern to a two-book deal for an astonishing seven-figure sum, or at least one million U.S. dollars. The film rights to her debut novel, PS, I Love You, netted Ah-ern another $80,000 and then a further payout of $400,000 on the day filming started.

Published in early 2004, PS, I Love You recounts the story of young widow Holly Kennedy, who is grief-stricken by the sudden loss of her beloved husband after a fatal illness. She has said that she would be bereft if she were ever to lose him, and with this in mind he wrote and arranged to send ten letters to her in the ten months following his death. Each one contains a surprise or gift for Holly as well as a message of support and guidance for her new solo life.

Ahern’s debut spent nearly five months at No. 1 on the Irish bestseller list, but more than a few critics were unkind and sniped that her success was due only to her family name, not her literary talents. “I’ve met people who’ve said, ‘I didn’t want to buy your book because I thought you only got the deal because of your father,’” Ahern once told a writer for the Independent on Sunday, “and I’ve met people who’ve bought the book because they’ve said they are big fans of my father. I would be stupid to say it had not helped, particularly in Ireland.”

Ahern had already finished her second novel by the time she was on the publicity blitz for her debut. Where Rainbows End earned equally scathing reviews for its tale of long-distance friendship-turned romance, but a critic for Booklist, Kristine Huntley, reviewed its U.S. edition—titled Rosie Dunne—and found it an “engaging follow-up” to her debut. Huntley asserted that “readers will enjoy the breezy epistolary style and likable characters.” In Ginanne Brownell’s Newsweek International article, the literary editor of the Irish Times reflected upon the larger significance of Ahern’s success, noting that until Ahern arrived on the scene, Ireland’s bestselling women novelists had usually made their mark writing about beleaguered heroines who suffered because of political, religious, and economic repression. “With its economic transformation, Ireland has fast progressed from a victim culture to latte culture,” Caroline Walsh explained to Brownell. “To some extent, the women popular fiction writers have best encapsulated this, with Cecelia serving as her generation’s head of this school.”

Ahern’s third novel, If You Could See Me Now, followed the trials of Elizabeth, who comes from a dysfunctional family long plagued by acts of casual but devastating abandonment. Her own mother walked out when Elizabeth was still very young, and now the adult Elizabeth must take care of her young nephew left behind by her thoughtless sister. The boy’s imaginary playmate serves as a catalyst to help the family begin to heal. In Ahern’s next work, A Place Called Here, a former police investigator known for her tracking skills goes missing herself, and finds herself in the dimension where all lost things are temporarily housed. It was published in the United States as There’s No Place Like Here.

In Ahern’s fifth book she deals with yet another unexplained phenomenon: 2008’s Thanks for the Memories explores the issue of molecular memory. This is when marked personality changes occur in a recipient of a donor organ. In Ahern’s novel, a pregnant woman falls down a flight of stairs, loses her baby, and receives a sizeable blood transfusion. Once recovered, she leaves her husband and strikes out on her new life, but finds that she is plagued by odd thoughts and has a newfound expertise in art history, which leads to romance. Again, British book critics for the mainstream newspapers and literary supplements savaged it, but Ahern’s work was a bestseller in both Ireland and England, and op-tioned for film, as were her previous three titles.

Thanks for the Memories appeared in April of 2008 just as the political career of Ahern’s father was coming to a close. Bertie Ahern announced that same month his coming resignation as taoiseach in the midst of an official inquiry regarding financial improprieties. Ahern herself, meanwhile, had been deemed one of Ireland’s wealthiest citizens under 30, according to the Irish edition of the Sunday Times. She was worth an estimated $10 million, with her fortune amassed through book sales, movie deals, and her involvement in an television series for the ABC network in the United States (part of the same Disney corporate empire as her U.S. publisher, Hyperion). The sitcom Samantha Who? debuted on the network as part of its fall 2007 lineup and pulled in terrific ratings before the season was truncated by the Hollywood writers’ strike of 2007-08. It was renewed it, however, for the 2008-09 season.

Ahern described the process of working with other writers and development executives at ABC as a stressful process in an interview with Bookseller’s Benedicte Page. Recalling the “three days of pitching to studios, I was so scared I almost dropped dead,” she said, and was also counseled not to have too many hopes for the project. “Then it was picked up as a pilot and they said: ‘There’s a very slim chance it’ll actually go to air,’ and then it was picked up. At every stage, I’ve been going: ‘I don’t know what’s going on!’”

Samantha Who? was the brainchild of Ahern and series co-creator Donald Todd, a television writing veteran whose credits include ALF and Ugly Betty. Christina Applegate was cast as the title character, a Chicago real estate executive who suffers retrograde amnesia after an accident. This means that she cannot remember anything about herself, and is unsettled to discover she was not a very well-liked person. “In flashback, she lives out the high-flying moments that won her pre-accident self a reputation as a no-regrets party girl who could be counted on for little except stingingly thoughtless behavior,” noted New York Times reviewer Margy Rochlin.

Ahern has been romantically involved with athlete-turned-actor David Keoghan for several years. Her sister, Georgina, married Nicky Byrne, a member of the hugely successful Irish pop group Westlife, in the summer of 2000. The daughters still spend Sundays with their father, who by all accounts has been intensely supportive of his author-daughter’s career. Neither he nor any other family member appear as fictionalized persona in any of her works, she asserts, a habit that stretches all the way back to PS, I Love You. “When I wrote it first, it wasn’t for anyone,” she told Sunday Times journalist John Burns. “The only people reading it were my mom and sister, so that was even more of an incentive not to put them in. They would have said, ‘What am I doing in your book, take me out.’” Her books are also noteworthy for a chasteness that seems almost old-fashioned, but Ahern said in the same interview that the omission was understandable. “If I really really really wanted to put it (sex) in there, I would, but there would be that extra ‘oh my God, look what the taoiseach’s daughter has done,’ and that would be really embarrassing.”