Author and screenwriter Jo Spain is on a tight schedule when she arrives at the Phoenix Park Café in Dublin on a blustery April day.
Here today to promote her latest novel, Spain is also working on the fourth season of the television series Harry Wild, and she is fielding queries from the set of another show she is involved in, which is being filmed in Australia.
A hardworking woman, brimming with energy, Spain generally has a few projects on the go at any one time.
“I like to keep active,” Spain says, which is just as well. In the last 10 years she has written 13 novels as well as multiple TV scripts.
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The Trial, her new novel, is based in a fictional Irish university, and begins withTthe disappearance of medical student Theo Laurent, an event which haunts his girlfriend Dani. Along the way, Big Pharma comes under scrutiny and Dani, recently returned to the university and whose mother is suffering from dementia, struggles to come to terms with her past and her mother’s illness.
Spain has partly dedicated the book to her two grandmothers, Julie and Maureen, both of whom suffered with dementia. She handles the subject carefully and with empathy. The yearning a family member can have for a loved one with dementia to be restored to their former selves is palpable on the pages. There is also an engrossing mystery here with a satisfying denouement.
While Spain’s maternal grandmother developed dementia quite late, in her paternal grandmother the illness emerged earlier.
“I remember as a teenager sitting beside her and your roles are completely reversed. They’re now the child and you’re the adult. And she kept trying to escape from the house,” she recalls.
Spain’s grandfather, “a real gentleman” who worked in the Civil Service, became his wife’s carer.
“My granny used to sit there with her pearls on and her face powder, and I thought she was the epitome of class. But when the Alzheimer’s came everything changed. She would swear, she would pick her nose, things like that, it would shock you,” Spain says.
[ Jo Spain: ‘It wasn’t a peaceful childhood. I saw a lot of drugs and crime’Opens in new window ]
It felt to Spain as though she was watching her grandmother deteriorate from the inside out. “She had lucid moments, which I thought was worse because she knew it was happening. It really affected me. You think, ‘I just hope I get hit by a bus’.”
She sips her tea and talks about the third woman her book is dedicated to: “Kathleen”, her father’s birth mother, whom he never met. Spain’s dad was born in a mother and baby home, St Patrick’s on the Navan Road, Dublin, in 1951.
“She kept him for four years. She refused to sign the adoption papers,” Spain says.
Her dad died in 1995 when she was 15, and later, when she discovered his background, she considered contacting Kathleen’s family, but didn’t want to “open a Pandora’s box”. “Then a couple of years ago, her family found me. It was absolutely lovely.”
They told her about her biological grandmother, who was from Leitrim and worked in a hospital before she “got caught out”, as she was told.
“They showed me a photograph of her and she looks very like me, which is lovely because my dad had no brothers or sisters,” Spain says.
There were some people who definitely felt it was not just their privilege to be in university, it was their entitlement to be in university
Kathleen died in the 1980s, alone in England. “She went to London to earn enough money to get him back, she told her family. It was so tragic.”
Meeting her relatives, though, was a joy for Spain. She could see her dad in them. When they first met, one of her father’s cousins was in a hospice and it was he who “properly” remembered Kathleen. He used to go walking with her, Spain says.
“He spent his whole life looking for my dad, because he knew she was pregnant and he always knew there was a family member out there.”
When Spain met the man, he kept looking at her. “He was like, ‘God you’re the image of Kathleen’. It was weird, it was one of those moments where everything comes [full] circle,” she says.
She told him about her life and her four children and how happy she was. He died shortly afterwards. “His brother was saying that he died because I met him; he’d found his cousin.”
Spain has been told that Kathleen was “always on the go”, “a really hard worker” and “a powerhouse of a woman”.
Such things are often in the genes. The Dublin woman’s work ethic is breathtaking. If Spain is not writing or on set, or with her children, she’s running or playing piano, an instrument the 44-year-old came to only in the last few years and now adores.
Her strong drive also stems, she says, from her working-class background. “I was driven from an early age, by fear of poverty, and I still worry about it. I still worry because of the industry,” Spain says.
“I rely on the next book, the next contract, or the next TV show coming my way to keep paying that mortgage. I’ve no guaranteed salary every year. So I work very hard to save, you know, I run just to keep walking.”
As with all of Spain’s work, there’s an element of social commentary in The Trial, as she takes a wry look at privilege. One of the characters, a student from a wealthy background, expects to coast through his course. It was very different for Spain.
“I went to Trinity, but I worked to get into Trinity and I worked when I was in Trinity,” she says. She lived alone in a flat in the city and had jobs in a betting shop and a clothes shop to pay her bills while studying politics. The vast majority of her fellow students were lovely people, she says.
“But there were some people who definitely felt it was not just their privilege to be in university, it was their entitlement to be in university, and they were there for the social life and, you know, they’d scrape a degree at the end, but they expected to be helped every step of the way.”
I’ll never do it again. You get paid nicely for it, but you’re making somebody else look good
Spain found it fascinating from an “anthropological perspective”. “You just think, ‘will that be your whole life? Will people help you out all through your life? Or will there come a point where you have to do something on your own?’.”
She has a theory that people only appreciate what they work for and they also probably do it better than anyone else. “Maybe that theory is wrong, but I’ll stand by it,” she laughs.
If Spain is right, she certainly embodies it. Aside from The Trial, and season four of Harry Wild, she’s been working on Mix Tape, the project currently filming in Australia. Meanwhile, her adaptation with David Logan of The Boy That Never Was, based on the Karen Perry novel, is due to air in the autumn. She’s also adapting her own detective series, featuring Tom Reynolds, for TV.
Earlier in her career, Spain accepted work as a script doctor, a role similar to a ghost writer, with someone else getting the credit for her work, and it’s not a job she’d recommend.
“I’ll never do it again. You get paid nicely for it, but you’re making somebody else look good. And you’re not really allowed to talk about what show you worked on,” Spain says.
The show she worked on gave the credit to another woman and had multiple seasons with other script doctors working on it when Spain left. “I don’t have that much of an ego, but I have an ego,” she says. “I want the credit.”
Screenwriting generally pays well, she says, considerably better than novels, but a person must be comfortable with collaboration. A writer either learns to fight her corner, or leaves. “You have to go in humble and earn your stripes.”
[ Jo Spain: ‘It wasn’t a peaceful childhood. I saw a lot of drugs and crime’Opens in new window ]
She loves writing novels and sees it as “the truest form of writing for yourself” with “your world, your words, your ideas” brought to life, while screenwriting is a series of consultations with many people, “all of whom know how to do everybody’s job better than anybody else”.
“Nobody can stay in their lane, everyone and everybody is a writer.”
She grins. “The producers are telling me what they really want from the show, and I’m like, ‘you mean the show that I conceived and got greenlit?’. There are lots of arguments and it’s panic and chaos, but in the end, after all the screaming, it’s ‘oh, you’re my best friend’.”
It doesn’t bother her that the public rarely knows the name of the screenwriter on a project. It only matters that people in the industry know who she is, and they do. She thinks Mix Tape could break her in the United States.
Might she be tempted to move to Los Angeles if the opportunity arose? No. She’s been there and doesn’t care for it.
“I was standing on a corner across the road from a really expensive shop and there was a Lamborghini going past and there was a guy dying on the pavement beside us,” she says. “We’ve people begging on the streets of Dublin, but over there you really are invisible. Society is so divided.”
The Trial by Jo Spain, published by Quercus/Hachette, is out now
