Cecelia Ahern says she has finally destroyed the diaries she kept every day between the age of 10 and 21.
riting every day during her childhood, into her adolescence and then into her early 20s, the bestselling Irish author stopped writing in her diaries when she officially became an author.
She “ripped and shredded” the books so “nobody could read a word”, she told Ryan Tubridy on RTÉ Radio 1.
“I destroyed them a couple of weeks ago. I did start reading back over them. I was so in my head, obviously I still am, but I was always looking ahead, always wondering what if this, what if that, always looking ahead and wondering what was in the future. It was less about what was happening that day. It was interesting. Where will I be, what will I do? That kind of thinking.
“I felt so good doing it. I didn’t feel bad. They served their purpose.
“Ì kept them for a really long time and then I was kind of concerned at the heaviness that they were there in a box for people to read and I thought, ‘no they’ve served their purpose’.”
Ahern added that writing the diaries was really helpful growing up, giving her an outlet to express herself.
“They helped me process from a young age, and I had a lot of thoughts in my head, and it helped to get them out. But I didn’t need to keep them,” she said, adding that they were for herself and not for anyone else to read.
“The dreams I was having after doing it was insane, it’s like when you come across an old family photo album, and you just go down this wormhole of what your life used to be. And that night I just forgot that quite significant things happened. So reading back over them was really interesting. But then it was a lovely release to let them go, it wasn’t a bad, evil thing,” she said.
The PS, I Love You author, has now found a new outlet to entertain herself in the form of an allotment, where she grows vegetables and fruit with her family, including her own children and her mother Miriam and father, former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern.
“It’s a family place, we absolutely love it. My mum and my dad are central to it,” Ahern said.
“Basically, on Sundays we eat everything that we have grown ourselves. It’s such an important place. We bring the kids. They plant their food, we see it growing, we know where our food comes from. It’s where we gather. I just love being there. It's so good for the head, soul and heart.
“I just love eating what we grow, there’s something so good about that and for the children to see where food comes from, not just from supermarkets, getting their hands in the dirt and collecting worms is a really healthy and good thing to do.”
Speaking to Tubridy about her latest book, In A Thousand Different Ways, she said she is feeling “really excited about it”.
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Her latest work is her 19th release, however, she says this one is “even more special because I think I put heart, soul and emptied the tank into this novel”.
“It’s about a character named Alice who has the ability to see people’s moods and emotions in the form of colours around their bodies. She sees auras, in a sense. And if that colour gets on to her or touches against her, then she can feel exactly how people are feeling,” Ahern explained.
“It’s about her just trying to navigate her life and carve out her own path despite feeling easily overwhelmed by the people, the hopes, dreams, fears, hurt and pain of everybody else around her. And it’s her life story, so we meet her at about eight years old and it’s all the way to her final days.”
