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From trying to be a nun, to pole dancing, to being married for 30 years, to now living with her partner Marie, Newry woman Cara Finegan has experienced it all.
The mother of three has recently published her first crime novel 'Don't Call Me Baby' and characters from her life journey have contributed to making it a book you just can't put down!
As Cara explains: "I wanted to be a nun. At the start I was very much into religion, I used to do the youth ministry with Peter Devlin and would have gone to Taize meetings and went to the convent for a short spell, back and forward but then realised that I liked the convent because I like women. It wasn't so much the religion, It was more the whole community of women. Women have been a really big part of my life the whole way through, even from the pole dancing - the burlesque days, surrounded by this community of women who have so many stories and so many things to tell"
Cara recalls her time in the pole dancing studio in Francis Street in Newry. After their practice sessions the women would stay on and chatted for ages about their lives and what they were doing. "It's that whole community of women that got me, I thought I was holy, but I was actually looking for this female community." she explains.
She is now happy being true to herself. "I was married for 30 years, now divorced and I'm with my partner Marie now, which is lovely. She's absolutely brilliant. It just makes such a difference when you're happy and you're yourself".
Cara has three children, now adults with the eldest boy coming 34, a girl coming 28 and an 'amazing' 25 year old girl who has severe hydrocephalus and epilepsy and is in a wheelchair. She also had a stillborn baby.
Mother Inspired Writing
Cara believes she has her mother to thank for her lifelong interest in writing. Her mum would have made up poems and stories for the children when they were wee and Cara wrote them down. Thanks to encouragement from former Newry Democrat editor Caroline McEvoy she ended up self publishing a poetry book a good few years ago. From then she has written short stories and won competitions and has had stories and poems published in different anthologies.
Seventeen years were spent teaching P3, P4 and P5 in Clontifleece Primary School and she loved it. "It was all about the holistic value of children and it was just lovely". Currently she teaches in St Monnina's PS Cloghogue but has cut down to three days a week to give her two days to focus on writing.
Sixteen Days
Explaining how Don't Call Me Baby came about Cara said: "My first book, the first draft, only took me 16 days to write on those two days off a week, because I was so focused, and I'd spent years going through all of the story in my head before I even put it down. I knew what I was starting with, I was starting with something that had happened me in real life, but I was taking that story and changing it to a better outcome for the victim of that story.
"Because I like crime writing, I like psychological and serial killer thrillers, I thought, I'm going to use this to my advantage. And I changed it into that. I also wanted it to be female led, because a lot of the crime books that I read, the women were always the victims. It's always the women getting murdered, always the women getting raped. There's very few of them where the women come out on top. So I wanted to change that, the woman is the protagonist, because women can be just as bad as men - sometimes."
Cara tends to base her characters on people she has encountered. The daughters of the book's protagonist are based on her own daughters, with some changes. "I've based a lot of my characters in the book on people I've met. Not all of them nice, some people, some characters from the town, some characters from relationships, things like that and a lot of it is from real life."
Don't Call Me Baby was originally destined for the London Book Fair in 2020 but then Covid hit and it didn't happen.The book is dark but it is humorous as well. A publisher suggested that it should be lightened up a bit 'more like Derry Girls' but that thankfully didn't happen. "I like the dark. I think that's an Irish thing, I think that's like when something really bad happens and Irish people can take this real bleak humour out of it. It's humorous as well. it's not all grim."
Not a spoiler alert, but Cara does point out that "some of the bad people end up dead"
"I'm not really a Derry Girls writer, unfortunately, so all of my books are kind of dark, and there's always an undercurrent of like autofiction in them, because there has been quite a few traumatic things happened to me in life, as happens to everybody, but I try to work those in, because that's where you get all the reality. And all the places in the book are places that I visited deliberately to go and get the proper feel of things. There's quite a lot of clubs across Europe mentioned in it" she says, adding "It's over 18".
Published by Troubador - The book synopsis:
Katy’s life will forever change when her new boyfriend, Brian, assaults her after a prayer meeting, one that was supposed to help her to stay ‘good’. Her guilt, shame and the blame she suffers after this ordeal, pushes Katy towards a completely new path. Instead of letting this horrific incident make her a victim, Katy vows to get revenge, not only on her boyfriend but on anyone trying to coerce or manipulate women. Unfortunately for some, Katy doesn’t do things by halves.
Katy’s respectable job as the principal of a primary school, her polite, composed manner and her seemingly perfect family life with her two daughters and husband prove a worthy screen for her crusade. Katy’s intimate stream of consciousness, sometimes moral, reveals the dark wit of a woman who maintains her light and breezy attitude to life whilst leaving in her wake the perfect storm – the ideal multi-tasking femme fatale.
When the opportunity arises for Katy to meet up again with Brian, it’s inevitable that she tells him the truth. They have a daughter. Katy’s nonchalant attitude contrasts starkly with the vicious ends that befall her victims. But her story, and events, will take a shocking turn.
Base Camp Everest
If you look at instagram you could be forgiven for thinking that Cara has travelled the world with her book as post after post shows it in one exotic location or another but unfortunately for her a lover of travel, the only place she has taken the book is Barcelona, and it's readers that have done all the travelling, with it popping up (to date) at Mount Everest Base Camp, Morocco, Dubai and New York.
Cara has already written seven books with Don't Call Me Baby being the first one published. Crime is a genre that encompasses them all and one she plans to stick to.
If you want a copy you can get it in The Bookshelf or Waterstones in Newry. You can buy it online from the publisher themselves and it's a e-book as well.
On Friday 27 March from 7-10pm The Bookshelf in Monaghan St Newry is hosting three women crime writers including Cara. Entitled 'Crime Queens in Conversation' Cara will be joined by Kelly Creighton and Sharon Dempsey.
