Michela was born in Milan , Italy Milan England
in 1994 and lives at the edge of the beautiful National Park of the New Forest with her husband and two sons.
Her greatest inspirations are ordinary people and real life
stories, and her novels and short stories centre on themes of friendship, love,
coming of age and self-discovery, human emotions and experiences everyone can
relate to. Michela is a member of the Romantic Novelists’ Association.
Playing on Cotton Clouds
When arty Livy falls for her sister's boyfriend,
she knows her dreams are unlikely to come true... Sensitive Seth thinks he has
hit the jackpot when the girl of his dreams finally looks his way... While
laidback Aidan is every girl's hero.
Fast forward twenty-five years as carefree youth
turns into adulthood responsibilities, relationships begin and end, music and
fashion change, and life moves on with its successes, failures and heartaches.
As the friends grow up, they discover life rarely turns out the way you
imagined it at fifteen. The rites of passage through years are eerily familiar
to every 1980s teenager in this moving, heartfelt novel.
A Summer of Love
Successful artist Jonah Briggs is a man who has
made mistakes. Aged just eighteen, he was sent to prison for two years, leaving
his family shattered and his first love, Sally, to wait for his return. But at
eighteen, two years seem like a lifetime, and some promises are hard to
keep. When Jonah reappears in her life, Sally finds herself torn between him and Ewan, the young Cornish farmer she has married, divided between loyalty and passion, duty and love.
Over the course of almost two decades, through meetings and partings, secrets and revelations, and two momentous summers, Jonah will have to confront his past and heal old wounds, while Sally will face the consequences of her choices – whether to follow her conscience or her heart.
My
review of Playing on Cotton Clouds
In
this superb book about friendship and relationship, we travel with the main
characters from 1983 through to 2008, with a poignant flashback to 1980. What's
interesting is that the author was born and lived in There are three teenage friends, Aidan, Livy (Olivia) and Seth who meet up at the bridge that crossed the town's river. Even when they move away into the big wide world, the bridge has significance, sometimes in their memories, sometimes when they visit the town again. It links them, it seems. Added to the mix is Livy's sister, Tara. First fumbling with sex and alcohol are depicted, inevitably, with humour and a core of truth. Indeed, truth shines through this book - we believe these people lived, we live with them for the duration of the novel, getting anxious in moments of crisis, becoming pleased in moments of happiness. Life isn't tidy, there are false paths to take, wrong turns to make, and they drift apart, yet return after years, an invisible thread connecting them. `Can you fall in love at thirteen, one rainy afternoon, in an old faded café, and find yourself at twenty-nine, sitting in the fragrant summer sun, feeling as you did then?' The answer, of course, is `yes'. That's the human condition.
Aidan isn't too bright, but he's attractive to women, which is his downfall, yet as one conquest says, `People can't stop loving you, even when they think they have.'
Seth is a little self-centred, wrapped up in his writing, early on suffering from depression (`... in the small hours of the morning, when he felt himself slowly falling and darkness seemed to chase him with cold, invisible fingers'), but with the help of his friends he defeats the Black Dog, though he's always going to be a `half-empty pint' kind of man: `I wasn't interested in collecting stamps, so I went for rejection letters. Fascinating. Some can be perversely creative.' (I have to agree with his praise for Philip K. Dick).
Livy is in love with Seth, but (fool that he is) he's infatuated with her sister, Tara. `Carefully tucked away feelings were scattered around Livy's mind, leaving her with the painful task of picking them up and hiding them again... contemplating old memories as they lay on the floor of her recollection.'
The narrative is from the perspective of these three, and at every stage there's a depth of character and an emotional resonance that rings true. Emotion in a relationship novel has to be felt by the reader, not simply observed - show, not tell, and Michela O'Brien does that brilliantly: she could have written `Livy felt hurt by him' or something similar; instead, she gives us `Her heart had taken a dive into her stomach and she briefly held her breath to fish it out and put it back in its place.' There are several clever allusions, to springs in beds and Jack-in-the-box and feelings like thorns, imbedded in the body, making themselves felt after time, which `he could not tear out without maiming himself.'
There is a birth and a death, both handled with exquisite restraint and all the more powerful and moving for that. This debut novel is excellent, the writing controlled and a delight.
Q&A
Michela, your debut novel has picked up an enviable
number of high-scoring reviews on Amazon. How does that feel?
It
feels great! I’m still taken aback by the praises the book received. I’m
especially moved when people say they loved the characters and that they felt
like “real people” and “friends”.
What was the initial inspiration for the
book?
The initial idea was to write about a male friendship. I started
out with Seth and Aidan and their relationship. It was interesting to explore,
as I was doing it from a female perspective, obviously. I then added another
element with a male-female friendship between Seth and Livy, another theme that
interests me.
Do you find that your characters – say,
Livy, Aidan and Seth - have become real people, that you remember them as such?
Or are they brief acquaintances who’ve drifted apart since you’ve moved on to
meet new characters?
They are definitely very real to me. I feel like they are friends
I have come to know well. Both my books span several years and I got to see the
characters grow and change from youth into adulthood. I sometimes think it
would be nice to revisit them and find out what they’ve been up to. I might
very well do so, in the future.
Most debut novels take a long time to gestate. How long did you
work on Playing on Cotton Clouds?
If
we are talking about the actual writing, it didn’t take very long. About six
months. If we are talking about “gestation” and how the story came together…
well, I subliminally wrote this novel since I was 19 – and that’s a long time
ago! I love choral stories, with different threads and subplots, and wanted to
write about a group of friends, how they start together as a unit, and how then
life splits their paths. Sometimes they run parallel, sometimes they meet and
part and meet again. I actually started this novel many times and never
finished it. Finally, I managed to get to the end.
In many ways, second novels are easier, because you’ve learned a
lot from the first. (Some feel cursed by the expectations implicit in a second
novel after a successful first one). At what stage did you begin A Summer of Love?
Funnily
enough, I wrote A Summer of Love
first. I sent it out to a few agents and publishers with no joy, so I shelved
it and moved to another project, what became Playing on Cotton Clouds. After the latter had been published, I got
back to the first novel and edited it, cutting a big bulk of the first draft
and rewriting entire sections, until it was in the current form, which led to
it being published too.
Excellent approach, to rewrite and rewrite, rather than just send
out the MS! Now that you’ve got your second book published, are you writing
another novel at present – and if so, can you tell us a little about it?
Yes,
the third novel is almost finished and ready for editing. It has the working
title of “Finding Paige” and it’s another story focusing on relationships, with
an exploration of “timing”, meeting the right person at the wrong time and
making what could be the wrong choice.
When you’ve finished your books, do you feel you’d like to see
where the characters go next, or do you leave them alone to get on with their
lives without your input?
Normally
when I reach the end, I’m satisfied with the journey my characters have taken
and happy to leave them where they have arrived. So, yes, I tend to let them
“get on” on their own. Plus, I’m always thinking about a new project, a new
idea. But you never know, one day I might like to revisit some of my characters
and take them on a new journey.
How long have you been
writing?
Forever!
I started writing stories as soon as I was able to, at about six. More
seriously, though, with a look at being published, about 12 years.
What influenced you to start writing?
As I said, it was something I started doing very
early on. I just love stories. Hearing stories, reading stories, watching
stories… so I started to create my own.
You obviously know Italy well. Do you
bring in other foreign places into your fiction?
Yes, I have done. In Playing On Cotton Clouds
the actions move between the UK, Italy, Amsterdam and New York. A Summer of
Love is based in the UK, switching between London and Cornwall, a county I
know well and love. My new novel moves between London, Devon, the South of
France and Northern Italy. Some settings like Cornwall, London and Italy, are
very familiar to me, others I make up – for example the Midlands town the
characters in Playing on Cotton Clouds come from, or the Cornish village
to which Jonah belongs in A Summer of Love, are fictitious amalgams of
similar towns and villages – and others I get to explore through research using
the internet and even Street View! I did that when describing places in New
York, a city I never visited.
New York is like you describe in Clouds,
like being in a film, it's so familiar! I believe that a sense of place is important in fiction;
how do you achieve that?
I share in your belief and as a reader I love books
that have a strong sense of place. I treat the settings almost as another
character, describing not just its appearance, but the feel it conveys and the
influence it has on the characters. Roots and belonging versus a sense of
adventure is a recurrent theme in my stories.
How do your family/friends feel about your writing?
They are very proud of what I have achieved, though
writing takes a big chunk of my time and that is not always easy on family
life.
Do you intend to stick with the personal relationship genre or
switch to other genres?
Writing about relationships and emotions is what I
like best and I will probably continue in this genre. But I have a few ideas
for more “topical” stories and I’d love to dab into historical fiction as well.
A tall order, I know, but what is your favourite book? And why?
That
is a hard question to answer! The first novel that made a huge impression on me
was Little Women by Louisa
May Alcott, which I read when I was about 13. It encapsulates everything my
writing is about: relationships, families, everyday life against big political
and social changes, ordinary people dealing with small and big issues. Jo March
was more than a heroine, she became a role model. An independent woman,
aspiring to be a writer, who also happened to become a teacher – which I am
too. I don’t know if it’s my “favourite” book, but it certainly occupies a
special place in my affections.
Other books that made a big impact on me were Joy in the Morning by Betty Smith and Rosso di Sera by Brunella Gasperini, an
Italian writer, journalist and feminist that shaped a great deal of the way I
write and view the world.
Where do you hope to be in 5 years?
Mainly alive and in good health! I’d like to take
my writing career forward and hopefully have my books in more homes!
You’re generous with giving space and
time to other authors on your blog. Can you tell us how this came about?
To be honest, they do me a favour
writing for my blog as I’m always stuck for ideas! And I’ve had some truly
interesting and fascinating entries. How it came about? I just asked “would you
like to write a piece for my blog?”
Where can readers find you?
My books can be found on Amazon
4 comments:
Wonderful interview. Ms. O'Brien's attention to detail in her writing makes all the difference between a setting that can be grasped or accessed and one that's lived in for the duration! I'm glad to make an acquaintance with her work.
Thanks for the comment, Richard. Michela infuses her characters with emotion that is felt, not simply told to us. That goes for her sense of place too.
I was most impressed with this interview with Michaela O'Brien, Nik. I love the premise for each novel... and they're absolutely my kind of character driven books. Hence, both are definitely now on my TBR list! Looking forward to reading them.
Glad you liked it, Jan. I hope your back's not too bad of late.
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