Books: Always look on the bright side of life

She continues: “Now I believe in ecology and the beauty of the universe, but also I believe in the beauty of human beings. And I’m always upset when somebody doesn’t live up to my expectations, yet conversely I don’t really expect that much. I just feel everybody is doing their best.”

Two decades on, her professional life might have changed, with the putative career as a serious news journalist long abandoned for a late-blooming vocation as a middle-brow novelist, but the instincts and values that drove Purcell to turn her back on her Catholic faith are as visible as ever.

The 60-year-old Dublin-born writer frames her loss of religion not as an act of despairing scepticism or existential crisis but as a reaffirmation of basic principles of decency she felt were being lost. Correspondingly, her career has been largely marked by an avowed indignation at the distrustful and sneering tone of modern Irish life, often accompanied by an attendant defensiveness at personal criticism.

It is a theme that gets another outing in her latest novel, Tell Me Your Secret. Purcell wanted to use her unlikely yet vividly written tale of Violet, a young Protestant girl imprisoned in 1944 by her parents for 35 years for her illicit but enduring love for a Catholic boy, to show how much Ireland has changed over the past 60 years. And not necessarily for the better, either, she seems to suggest: in the novel, the modern-day couple who befriend the elderly Violet have a far emptier emotional life despite their affluence and independence.

“Well, that’s how I see modern Ireland,” she says. “We’re losing a lot. This is a pet hobbyhorse of mine: I hate cynicism. I’m sick to the teeth of people being cynical, because if you actually scratch the surface, people in Ireland are still the same. There is a core cynical cohort waiting with their finger poised on the dial button to be outraged about everything, but if you stand back from that, and go to your local shop in a country area, everyone is friendly, everyone is relatively happy. The infrastructure and hassle of daily life has changed, but the basic human stuff is still there. And I really wish people would celebrate it a bit more.”

Purcell’s work, both as a novelist and journalist, has long followed such a path. Her new novel contains as uplifting a denouement as any airport romance, albeit with a slightly bittersweet back note, while the long-form personality interviews in which she specialised as a journalist invariably painted sympathetic pictures of her subjects. Indeed, as she tells it, her exit from the world of journalism in 1991 was due largely to what she saw as an increasing inability to do her best for those she interviewed.

“I have impossibly high standards in terms of journalism. I believe that anybody who gives you the time deserves the absolute same attention to detail and same high standards as you gave for the first one, 400 interviews ago. I found myself wanting to take short cuts and refusing to do it. So I burnt myself out, basically.

“And I knew I wasn’t as good at anything else (in journalism), so I was in a bit of a panic. At the same time, coincidentally, I was offered a contract to write a novel. When it first came up, I was afraid to take that: it was so out of the blue and frightening in terms of profile and people taking pot shots at you that I hesitated for about six months. But then I took the plunge.”

It was a risk worth taking: since the publication of her debut, A Place of Stones, she has had 11 novels published, becoming one of Ireland’s bestselling authors in the process. While she may indeed have endured a few stinging barbs as her books became more successful — “If I believe the criticism is unfair, I do get very upset,” she says — Purcell has never let the perils of a high public profile get in the way of her career. “There is something to my personality: when someone expects me to do something, I’ll do the exact opposite,” she says.

If Purcell’s work can sometimes display a certain beige positivity, it belies her stubborn, defensive streak. Her optimism has, at times, been hard won: her earliest experiences at national school were hardly inspiring: “I was bullied badly by the teacher. It was absolutely horrendous, I have nothing but bad memories of that,” she says. Although her secondary education as a boarder at a Co Mayo convent school was altogether happier, she still shunned the rigours of university for the opportunities of the workplace.

Purcell was soon working at Aer Lingus, before her aptitude with the airline’s drama society landed her a job as an actress at the Abbey. “It was the end of the bad old days in the Abbey and I was kind of lost there,” she says. “I was being bullied again and I’m not good at being bullied — I don’t fight back.”

A five-year spell in Chicago followed (where she met her first husband), but by 1974 she was back in Ireland, working as the main breadwinner for her two children, first as a continuity announcer at RTE and then a newscaster. And along the way to her journalism career, her initial obduracy was gradually replaced by another quality: “I get very loyal. I’m loyal to Aer Lingus, the Abbey, RTE, everything I’ve ever been in.”

Such loyalties have come at a price, with Purcell sometimes portrayed by detractors as “official Ireland” personified, an image aided by spells on the boards of the Abbey, the Arts Council and, latterly, the Central Bank. “Yeah, maybe I’m a securocrat,” she says. “I’m anything but.”

The jaded tone of such remarks aside, Purcell has got less spiky about public perceptions of her. She used to be annoyed at the lack of critical respect she commanded, but says she no longer is, particularly since her novel Love Like Hate Adore was nominated for the 1998 Orange fiction prize.

“I was inclined to be dismissed over here as mass-market chick lit, blah blah blah. But to be nominated in that company (alongside Carol Shields and Anita Shreve), I didn’t care from then on, because I was put in there by people who didn’t know me at all.”

While Purcell sometimes misses the adrenaline of media life, she has no intention of returning to journalism, an area she now sees as overwhelmed by cynicism.

“When I left journalism, the invasion of people’s privacy was starting. I would have resigned if I had been asked by an editor to include something that I felt was invading somebody’s privacy.

“The public has a right to know about corruption, but not about people’s private lives. I was absolutely outraged by the Liam Lawlor thing. There used to be a kind of honour in Ireland that you don’t actually speak ill of the dead, at least until they’re buried.”

Little wonder, then, that Purcell is happier writing fiction. She may be disillusioned by the cynical mores of contemporary Ireland, but she seems set to tread her own stubbornly optimistic path.

“I’m essentially a glass-half-full person, but I wasn’t always,” she says. “I don’t think anyone creative is ever really happy. Happiness is a decision. You do your best to see things in a happy way and be happy for small things. But contentment is a large component of happiness, and no creative person is content. Creation means you do things for yourself and express yourself. It means you’re trying to improve things.”

Tell Me Your Secret is published by Hodder Headline Ireland