As would befit any chick-lit author worth her salt, Marisa Mackle shares her Dublin apartment with her beloved cats and a resolutely ‘single-girl’ outlook.
“It’s hard to keep an apartment when you have cats, but I wouldn’t have it any other way,” she reveals. “I don’t think my apartment would be a home without them. There’s something clinical about not having another life in the house.
“Every writer should have a cat,” she continues. “In fact, I’ve rarely met a writer without one. I’d love 100 cats. It’s probably why I’m still single, my mother is always saying you’ll never get a man with the cats, and I’m like, ‘I don’t care!’ Men come and go but the cats stick around.”
As creatively stimulating and calming an influence as her two cats Skip and Mother are, life with them is hardly without its trials.
“Actually, the younger cat has taken to swinging out of the curtains as a great adventure,” she says. “It’s a nightmare. My life is on my laptop, and last year the cat knocked over the laptop and I lost a book I was writing…about 40,000 words.
“Plus, I go out on the road, calling for ‘Mother’, and the neighbours think I’m mad!”
One of these neighbours, as it happens, is best friend and Fair City actress Tatiana Ouliankina.
“She’s as mad as I am,” laughs Marisa. “I met her when her dog was chasing my cat. I went out and saw this blonde sticking her head under my hedge. I thought, ‘This one is a bit mad’, and I asked her what she did and she told me she was an actress. I said I was a novelist, although I had no book deal at that stage. I’d never seen Tatiana act in anything at that point, so we both thought the other was a bit of a chancer. I see her from my window and we wave to each other every morning when she’s having a cigarette out the window.”
Scratch the surface of Mackle’s cosy existence however, and all is not what it seems. Running her one-woman publishing empire from her apartment, she admits that there is dischord between her entrepreneurial side and her fabulous, girl-about-town self.
“It’s not easy running a business from home,” she admits. “I actually wake in the workplace, and when I come home at 4am from a nightclub, I stumble into the workplace. My bedroom is the one place I don’t have any work stuff, because obviously that’s where I have fun. No copies of books or invoices to look at in there!”
She’s obviously doing something right; at the moment, Marisa calls the salubrious suburb of Donnybrook home, and her apartment is a shrine to minimalist zen (“well, have you seen the price of couches in Arnotts recently?”).
“I’ve had the apartment for years, but I’m not one of those annoying people who sits at dinner parties telling people that,” she proclaims. “It’s the one thing that really annoys me, people saying they bought property right before the boom.”
Naturally, the apartment is overflowing with books, of which Mackle admits she may well have over 1,000.
“I read about five books a week,” she explains. “If I were on a desert island and I had books I wouldn’t care less if I never met anyone ever again. I love Marian Keyes, and I liked Nickel And Dimed by Barabra Ehrenreich, which is about a woman who decided to try living on the minimum wage for six months. It was fascinating.”
As an ex-employee of the music industry, Mackle’s CD collection is predictably varied.
“I worked in Warner Music Ireland, and I’d be asked if I want the free CDs and I’d just be like, ‘well, alright then’,” she laughs. “I love all music, I adore country & western, heavy metal and classical music. My favourite band would be Def Leppard, and Vault is my favourite album. I love Dolly Parton, and my dad is a big fan, so I’ve been listening to her since I was a tiny child. It sounds a bit naff but I like Garth Brooks, but then so do a lot of other people.
“I even listen to Joe Dolan, a guy took me to see Joe Dolan on Valentine’s Day and I met him and I was delighted. I always thought I’d marry a country western singer, someone who’d sing me to sleep.”
In spite of, or perhaps due in part to, her sole existence as a full-time writer by day, Mackle is also renowned for her voracious partying and home entertaining skills by night.
“I have two disco balls and disco lights, and the parties start at 4am after Renards and Lillies,” she claims. “At that stage, I wouldn’t be able to do much else; I can just about open the fridge for them. I wouldn’t recommend it but some of my best chapters have been written when I’m hungover. Alcohol is a depressant, and it’s only when I’m in bad form that I want to write. Then again, there’s nothing like the wolf at the door to keep you disciplined.”