And my boyfriends have never been nice middle-class boys!" "I also joined the Dublin Youth Theatre, and worked in Portlaoise prison, where 90 per cent of the inmates were working-class criminals. "I went to a school in Sandymount High, with kids from all kinds of backgrounds," Mia says. She may be middle-class, she says but that doesn't mean she hasn't experienced other worlds. "All she said was 'I wasn't always a bad girl.' I wrote five pages of her, immediately and it developed from there into a monologue for theatre and then the book." "Lucy Dolan literally just walked into my head one day, while I was working in the prison," she says. I wonder, though, how a middle-class girl like Mia knows so much about small-time smack dealers and teenage convicts, if that is not her world? You find yourself hearing Lucy in your head, telling you her shocking story, and you find yourself staying up all night to be with her. Written entirely in the vernacular, it is easily compared to Irvine Welsh, with its energy and raw, compelling narrative. Joseph O'Connor describes Mia's writing as "audacious and brilliant". "I really didn't see the need to try it," she says. And she's never even tried heroin, not even in the interests of research. She's never done time, she assures me, except as a life model for the inmates at Portlaoise prison. She has noticed it, she tells me, and assures me that she is, in fact, quite an obsessively-tidy person, especially when it comes to kitchens. I find myself pointing out the dirt on the teapot, and realising that I have been rude, I apologise. "I'm no ghetto princess!" she jokes, pouring tea out of a rather dirty teapot. Tall, with long platinum-coloured hair (she tells me it's actually grey) she has a dancer's elegance and an edginess to her physique which causes her to position herself pointedly, as though she were dancing in the chair. An underworld.īecause first-time novelists usually write about themselves, people are surprised to find that Mia is a middle-class southside girl. A world of suspicion and fear, theft and violence, drug addiction and drug-dealing. This is a whole world, in which the inhabitants are not contemplating what to spend their SSIAs on or whether or not to buy a holiday home. And as I leave my flat, I hear about yet another prisoner dying in jail, and about yet another drug-related shooting in a part of Dublin that I avoid going to. I am on my way to meet Mia Gallagher, the writer who invented Lucy, the heroine of her debut novel Hellfire.
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