I was born in a town called Kabwe, in Zambia. My dad was working for the Irish Department of Agriculture, so he was posted over there. I left when I was about three. It’s probably about the most interesting thing about me and I don’t remember any of it.
The majority of my childhood was spent in Navan in Co Meath. It was a pretty ordinary childhood. When I look back now at photographs of the 80s, or look at movies, or read books about it, it looks pretty dreary, but I think like a lot of kids, I was pretty happy and had my friends and family, so it was fine.
In 2004 I was working in a bank and living in Chapelizod in Dublin. I had just bought myself a little flat, and a little car, and I thought this is it, this is my life, I’m never going to leave. Then I met a guy – my now husband, Matt, who is a Kiwi. We were working together in the bank, and we’d been going out for a couple of months, when he said: my visa is about to expire, so I’m going to go and do a bit of travelling and head back to New Zealand. Are you up for it?
Honestly, I never envisioned leaving. I’m such a homebody. All my friends used to hate going on holidays with me because it would take me about a week to acclimatise. But I just thought, okay, to hell with it, I’ll give it a go.
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If you’d told me that I was never going to come back, I don’t think I would ever have left. But a few weeks into the one-year work visa, when we were in Auckland, I found out I was pregnant, which was such a curveball. It was completely unplanned. We were both in shock, and it just seemed easier to stay.
Once you have a child somewhere it’s very hard to go back. And I’m very happy here. I’m almost like the accidental emigrant. I seem to have fallen into it, rather than making any grand plans.
I’ve been here 20 years now, and three kids later, I do love it. But the strange thing about it is the longer I’m away, the harder it is to be away. I don’t know is that because you suddenly have this awareness of how finite time is as you get older. Or it could be a kind of middle-aged nostalgia. I’m not sure, but I find that I’m missing Ireland more now than I did when I left 20 years ago.
Friends and family are the main thing I miss. I miss the architecture. I love being back in Dublin and walking around the streets and the cobblestones. I know it sounds so cliched, but parts of Georgian Dublin I just think are so beautiful. I promise I won’t say Tayto. I miss the pubs. There’s a certain sense of humour that I miss.
[ Anne Tiernan: ‘You can quickly become a tourist in your native country’Opens in new window ]
I’m always struck by how much my friends in Ireland take the piss out of me. I think New Zealanders are more reserved than Irish people. I got a bit of a shock the first concert I went to here. I was singing along, which is what I thought you did at a concert, and the woman in front of me turned around and said: “I’ve paid a lot of money to listen to Simon & Garfunkel, not you.” That was a bit of a shock.
Irish people will strike up conversation more readily than New Zealanders. But at the same time, New Zealanders are deeply sincere. If they say to you: let’s go for a drink or meet up for lunch, they actually mean it, or if they invite you to their house, they’re so hospitable.
A lot of the issues I would have had with Ireland seem now to be getting resolved – you can get an abortion, you can get divorced. It surprises me how much the church still seems to be involved in education. I look at my friends and family and all their kids seem to make their First Holy Communions and Confirmations, and that [seems] a bit strange when you’re removed from it. Maybe it’s the ritual of it that people enjoy. Here it’s so secular. At Christmas, if [schools] want to show anything Christian to the kids, they send a letter saying: there’s going to be a play and it’s going to mention the Nativity, are you okay with [that]?
I feel like an Irish writer. My new novel The Good Mistress is set in Ireland in the present day, but it also dips into 1990 when the main characters were teenagers. I set it in a fictional town of Ballyboyne, but anybody who reads it is going to say it’s very recognisably Navan. Even though I wrote it over here, memories of the place where I grew up are so strong, it was easy for me to picture it. My heart just feels very Irish, and it feels quite natural for me to write about Ireland. The pull is very strong.
In conversation with Niamh Donnelly. The Good Mistress by Anne Tiernan is published by Hachette on April 15th.
