Catriona Lally: ‘I’m not great at arguing or fighting but that has its limits when defending my children’

The An Post Irish Book Awards nominee on how quitting running made her a writer, who she’d cast as the main character in her book Eggshells, and the dangers of scramblers

John O'Connor

Sun Nov 01 2026 - 06:46 • 5 MIN READ

Mostly agreeable. I tend not to complain or demand off-menu items in cafés or restaurants because the workers are not paid enough to have to deal with added nonsense. If it is a carvery situation, however, I will be asking for an extra jug of gravy. I’m not great at arguing or fighting and can’t be bothered with the drama of conflict, but that has its limits when it comes to defending my children. Years ago I told an older kid in a playground I would kill him if he threw stones at my toddler again. Disagreeable never felt so good.

Second of four. I do not think it has defined me in any meaningful way because the four of us were born within five years, too close in age to have a spoiled youngest or any of the archetypes. The middle child doesn’t seem so middle among four. My parents managed to rear us without favouritism, or without obvious favouritism anyway, which is the main thing. If my own children grow up knowing they are equally loved I will be doing well.

Mary. In primary school in the 1980s, half the class had Mary as a middle name and a Mary-mother, as I do. I loved reading comics as a child and I felt a connection with The Four Marys in the Bunty comic, even though they were characters from the 1950s in a British boarding school solving mysteries and having midnight feasts in their dormitories. In later childhood, I probably would have preferred Kylie or Madonna as a middle name, Mary seemed a bit too grounded in dull Irish reality. But now I like it.

The last time I was angry was when a gang of scramblers raced each other through a red light I was waiting to cross at yesterday... It was scarier when my children were small; now they do understand that a green man is more of a hypothetical crossing situation than a definite one.

Cartilage. I used to be a marathon-runner in a previous life but a meniscus tear during a marathon and a subsequent ineffective surgery put me out of action. I miss running so much. There is nothing like it for sorting out the world in your head, and I get an awful hankering every October to be part of the marathon action. Having to suddenly stop running in my early 30s and needing a new hobby led me to join an evening writing course, so I might not have become a writer if I hadn’t stopped running. Whether that’s a good or a bad thing I’m not sure.

My uncle’s house in Gladree, five miles west of Belmullet, Co Mayo, where my dad grew up. We spent the summers and the school holidays there when we were children and the place was its own kind of idyllic. We’d go roaming the fields and bogs – such freedom. I love the remoteness, the ferocity of the weather, the wildness of the ocean on the cliff-side of the peninsula. Our extended family gathered there in a small pub in Corclough for my cousin’s 50th in August, a few weeks after the All-Ireland win. The conversation was all, “where were you when it happened?” I hadn’t known The Green and Red of Mayo could be sung so many times in one night. Sheer joy.

Not the most original answer but the agonising wait on Christmas Eve, counting the hours till bedtime. Time never moved so slowly as on that day. I shared a bedroom with my sister and I remember tormenting her awake if she fell asleep first: if I was too excited to sleep, I wanted company. Maybe I should rethink how I answered the agreeable question. The memory is so imprinted on my mind that part of me still believes, when I look out my childhood bedroom window at Christmas, that I might just glimpse the shape of Santa and his sleigh, heading for the chimney.

It is very hard to pick just one time. I had a lovely, uneventful and contented childhood; I enjoyed my college years; I loved working in Japan and travelling around Asia in my 20s. I was happy before I had children but now that they have landed, I can’t imagine happiness without them. That happiness is sometimes tinged with low-level worry though, so it is not a pure emotion. I reckon I was very lucky to have experienced my teens and twenties in the 1990s and early 2000s, before the complications of social media and climate change and AI and housing fears and employment uncertainty. I felt able to spend four years studying English in a time of economic optimism, but I’m not sure I would have veered towards the arts today.

Not a notion. I’ve managed to get to the age of 47 without having lost someone very close to me so I have had the luxury of not thinking too much about it. I imagine those thoughts will come with loss. At the moment, I have enough to be doing by thinking about this world.

When I am asked who would play my character Vivian from my first novel, Eggshells, which has been adapted into a screenplay, I always say Helena Bonham Carter. For her joyful eccentricity and general dishevelment, and I’ll say the same actor’s name to play me, Helena all the way.

I’m not sure if it can be classed as regret because it would involve an entire personality transplant or competence reset but I’d love to have a trade or some kind of a useful skill which would bring steady employment. I like the idea of being a plumber or electrician but I’m not handy. And I can’t drive; lugging my tools around on the bus doesn’t seem feasible. Imagine the satisfaction of building or fixing something, the power of that.

Catriona Lally has been nominated for Biography of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards for her memoir Home Economics. The An Post Irish Book Awards 2026 winners ceremony takes place on Tuesday, December 1st, 2026 at the Convention Centre Dublin, with RTÉ One broadcasting the ceremony on December 10th.

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