Irish author, Vicky Notaro speaks to Natter.
Most of us have fantasized about dropping everything and vanishing somewhere far from the demands of everyday life, and for bestselling Irish author Vicki Notaro, that urge arrives roughly twice a year. It became the seed of her third novel, Anywhere But Here, which sends three women at life-changing crossroads to Donegal only to show them that a change of scenery does not leave your problems behind.
There are very few of us, if any, who haven’t fantasized about dropping everything and disappearing somewhere far away from the everyday demands of life.
For bestselling Irish author Vicki Notaro, those moments come around “maybe once every six months”.
“You know when you just don’t want to be in your present skin, even?” she says. “You just want to not be where you are.”
That feeling became the starting point for her third novel, Anywhere But Here, which follows three women at life-changing crossroads who escape to Donegal, only to discover the inconvenient truth that while you can change your location, you can’t necessarily leave your problems behind.
Speaking on the first episode of the new season of the Irish books podcast Natter with Kate and Michelle, Notaro explains that Donegal was always going to be the destination.
Growing up in a housing estate in Tallaght, she first visited the county as a teenager and remembers it feeling “like another planet”. She had friends with family connections there who brought her to a disco in Glenties, "a real eye-opener". Years later, when she started thinking seriously about the book, those memories came flooding back.
When the idea for Anywhere But Here began to form, she returned with her husband and dog Jacko, renting the kind of Airbnb she imagined her characters staying in and spending four days soaking up the landscape.
“I thought, yes, perfect. This is exactly where they should go.”
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Despite visiting in February, they were very lucky with the weather, enjoying blue skies and beach walks, which reinforced Notaro’s memory of Donegal as somewhere both remote and magical.
That mix of escapism and real life lies at the heart of her fiction. Anywhere But Here is funny, glamorous and entertaining, but the three women at its center are dealing with marriage breakdown, career uncertainty and the pressures of living under other people’s scrutiny.
“I really want to always not educate but relate,” she says. “A bit of aspiration, but a lot of relatability.”
Notaro knows the media world she writes about particularly well. Before turning to fiction, she spent 17 years working in Irish journalism, starting at the age of 22 with KISS, the teenage girls’ magazine that will bring back a wave of nostalgia for a particular generation of Irish women. She describes those four years as some of the happiest of her career. There were interviews with pop stars, beauty features, advice about boys, sex, spots, and all the things teenage girls wanted to know about.
“We were like their big sister,” she says.
Looking back now, she worries that teenagers no longer have that kind of trusted middle ground. “All they have now is TikTok,” she says, pointing to the avalanche of unvetted information and misinformation young people encounter every day.
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From magazines, Notaro moved into newspapers, where she witnessed the industry changing at extraordinary speed. First came the recession, then social media, smartphones, and the pressure on newspapers to turn reporters into all-purpose digital journalists.
That changing world of journalism has found its way into Anywhere But Here through Sadie, one of its three main characters, who is watching the profession she loves change around her. Notaro laments the loss of the ‘wisdom by osmosis’ when younger journalists had learned from people who had been doing the job for decades.
By the time she had worked her way up to management in publishing, she realized she was burnt out and increasingly removed from the writing she had always loved. So, doing what every budding novelist is warned not to do, she left her job without a book deal or any guarantee that writing fiction would work out.
“My husband was like, ‘Look, just leap and I’ll support you and figure this out.”
When Penguin later approached her about pitching a novel, Notaro grabbed the opportunity. Her debut, Reality Check, entered the Irish Times fiction chart at number five in 2024. Long Story followed a year later and Anywhere But Here has become her most successful novel yet, spending five weeks in the Top Ten.
Three books in three summers sounds exhausting, but Vicki says the pace suits her. She generally starts writing in January, hands in a draft during the summer and then, almost immediately, begins wondering what comes next.
If anything, she says, writing novels becomes more frightening rather than less. With her first book, she was simply thrilled that somebody was giving her the opportunity. By the second, the commercial realities had landed that books have to sell, foreign deals aren’t guaranteed, nor is continued success.
“I don’t think the terror is ever meant to leave you,” she says. “If you get too used to it, then you can get a bit jaded. That's what happened to me with magazines, I found myself getting a bit bored by it all and that was something I never thought would happen because I loved it so much….I find that fear has always kind of galvanized me as opposed to paralyzing me. Like the feel the fear and do it any way mentality.”
It is perhaps that combination of ambition and boundless energy that has powered Notaro through several careers already – journalist, magazine editor, novelist, interviewer and podcast host. Next, she would like to add a screenwriter to the list. A film studies graduate, she is currently tinkering with ideas for a sitcom or romantic comedy while awaiting news on her fourth novel.
“I’ve always wanted to work in everything,” she admits.
Asked the traditional final Natter question – if she had only one page and one day left, what would she write and who would she write it to? – she answered without hesitation that it would be a love letter to her husband.
“I adore him and I couldn’t do any of this without him,” she says, crediting him with making her career change possible.
Vicki Notaro was speaking to writer friends Kate Durrant and Michelle McDonagh on the books podcast Natter with Kate and Michelle, produced in association with Bookstation, Ireland’s fastest-growing and best-value bookseller, and Irish Central, your daily source for all things Irish. You can buy Vicki’s new book Anywhere but Here at Bookstation.
Listen to Vicki’s interview on Natter with Kate and Michelle now at Acast or on Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts. Make sure to follow us on Instagram @natterwithkateandmichelle or Facebook.