So, who am I?  Let’s just begin at the most basic level, shall we? From Blackrock, County Dublin, in Ireland, I was schooled in St. Mary’s College, Rathmines where they tried with scant success to interest me in the macho game of Rugby. They tried with somewhat more success to interest me in joining the Holy Ghost Fathers who ran the school. I agreed to join the priests and straight away found myself isolated on a remote farm cum novitiate in the heart of rural Tipperary. It was a long long way from Dublin and little or no contact was allowed with the family I’d left behind in Blackrock. In those dark days of rigid censorship all outgoing mail was opened by those in charge and checked for anything that might show the novitiate in a less than glowing light. Incoming mail was checked for anything that might allow a tiny glimpse of what was going on in the outside world. No radio, needless to say, or TV or newspapers. All our thoughts were to be focussed on the affairs of heaven. Later I was sent to University College Dublin to study English and Geography, subjects which were to serve me well as a secondary school teacher. However it took eight long years for me to realise that my future lay not as a priest teacher in some prestigious college, nor even as a humble missionary spreading the light amongst the unenlightened. As the day of my ordination approached I jumped ship, bailed out, and ended up doing what I was qualified to do, serving as a teacher in a secondary school.  Within a couple of years though I had switched out of teaching and into counselling. I spent the rest of my career in a convent school south of Dublin acting as counsellor and careers adviser to generations of teenage girls. When the opportunity for early retirement came I was sixty and I seized this God-given opportunity to do something I had always wanted to do from an early age. I wanted to be a writer, more specifically a writer of fiction.  I was determined to write a novel and plots soon began to suggest themselves.  Ideas came to me from all sorts of random happenings, things read, things seen, things heard. Around this time I saw a TV documentary called Shattered Vows. It was based on a book by David Rice which described the experiences of priests who had left the ministry, in many cases to get married.  Thus the seeds of The Priest’s Wife were sown.  Later I was to read a memoir of the cellist Jacqueline du Pré. And from that controversial book came another idea I was to incorporate in my novel. Slowly the whole thing began to take shape in my head.  And in my head it remained for many years. When I decided to adopt a more disciplined approach and started to write it all down chapter by chapter it took a few more years of stopping and starting before I was able to see anything approaching a finished book beginning to emerge. Then one day a reader assigned by a publisher to look over my work said some encouraging things about the story.  It was those remarks, some sort of comparison to John Irving, that gave me the final nudge and The Priest’s Wife was on its way.