Pulling on the Heart Strings

Ella Griffin has become the latest star writer in Irish women’s fiction. I caught up with the advertising executive in the Radisson Hotel in Dublin to discuss her breakthrough debut novel Postcards from the Heart.

Photograph by Brian Meade

Postcards from the Heart contains everything that’s right about good women’s romantic fiction and is a very impressive debut. At the heart of the book are two very different couples, Saffy and Greg and Conor and Jess and all of the people connected to them play vital parts in the story. The novel is in equal parts hilarious, gripping, a little bit weepy, and always engaging.

Since Griffin has had a very successful career in advertising for many years, I ask her was writing a novel always something she had in the back of her mind to do. “Writing a book was a long time coming. I always wanted to write a book since I was really small.”

When asked where the idea for writing her first novel came from, Griffin remembers the moment of inspiration exactly: “I was at a meeting and I was kept waiting for about forty five minutes and it was out in an industrial estate in the middle of an industrial wasteland, before GPS. It was so bleak and it just struck me that people think advertising is so glamorous - there are of course glamorous aspects to it - but there are very down to earth aspects to it too and that’s what kicked me into my character. I wrote a scene in my head and took out my laptop and that’s where it came from.”

Although the novel really focuses on the protagonist Saffy, there is something about her hilarious depiction of befuddled and ridiculous soap opera heart throb Greg – who was just voted the 9th most eligible man in Ireland - that steals the show. I ask Ella where the inspiration for the characters came from and was Saffy, an advertising executive like Griffin, based a lot on herself: “I really like her but she’s not based on me. There are parts of me in all the characters. I think I related to Conor (who is a struggling writer and teacher working on his debut novel) the most. I liked writing all of them, I liked writing Greg also. There are tiny details of people in them but the person that is in most of them is myself.”

Ella Griffin has had an impressively successful career working in advertising, with one of her campaigns for Bernardo’s being voted Ireland’s ‘Best Ad of All Time’. Since Griffin is still working in advertising and with the news that she was offered a two book publishing deal, I ask does she find it difficult juggling the two careers. “The last few years in advertising haven’t been as wildly hectic as before. It’s balanced. I love doing both. I’m freelance and I work on projects so I might have a week or ten days where I’m not working on a project so it wasn’t so much juggling as it was switching from one to the other. It’s one of the great things about freelancing. What I did a couple of times was take a month off and throw myself at it completely as I didn’t have a deadline but at one point I decided I would take some time off and finish it and two days in to that time I fell and broke my wrist so I couldn’t do any advertising work either. That put me back by about a year.”

When it comes to writing, Griffin has been lucky to have made two very important relationships that have really helped with her writing. Firstly, her other half is also a writer and has been hugely supportive of her. “My husband has written a book recently so that was amazing. We actually met on a writing course in Greece. I’ve met someone recently who also met her husband on a writing course so I suppose when you hear someone reading you get an insight into them, especially if they’ve just written it.”
 
Griffin also had the opportunity to have one of the most successful women’s fiction writers champion her after she had completed the novel. “Marian Keyes gave me a lot of help. She’s very encouraging to female writers. She offered to read it which, given Marian’s schedule, was so generous. She gave me some really useful feedback; just small things that helped me so much. I remember she said about Saffy, the main character, two things; number one I don’t know what she looks like - and sure enough I went through the whole book and there was no description of her appearance. She also said it was really important to make your main character very likeable and I had made Saffy severe so it was some small important things like that. She’s one of the loveliest people you could ever meet and it’s so amazing because she’s so prolific and loved, she’s so sweet; she’s helped a lot of others too. For someone who is so busy and has to do so much travelling and publicity work she makes time for people.”

One of the great joys of reading Postcards from the Heart is that you really care about what's going to happen to the characters and that marks a unique skill in Griffin’s writing that makes her novel stand out among a market that is currently overflowing with romantic fiction. It’s exciting to hear that she is already working on her second novel, which sounds just as promising as her debut. With Postcards from the Heart, Griffin had completed it before ever sending it off to agents and publishers but she is now working with the comfort of knowing she already has a deal. “It’s another romantic fiction. Again, there are four main characters and it has a sort of family aspect to it too; there’s a brother and sister who are almost estranged; they don’t get on well at all. It’s about the brother and his wife and the sister and her best friend. I’m really enjoying writing it.”

Postcards from the Heart is out now in paperback, published by Orion