Paula Xiberras
Cathy Kelly is one of the most amiable people you could ever meet and has an ease of connection with everyone she encounters, as evidenced in seeing how she was able to make everyone feel as if they had known her forever at her book signing in Hobart recently,
It was hard to guess who Cathy was greeting as a previous acquaintance and who she was meeting for the first time. I hope she forgives my eavesdropping but its testament to Cathy’s approachability and the way she puts everyone at ease that I observed some of the guests were comfortable talking to her even about the sensitive subject of‘hormones’ and for those who were meeting her for the umpteenth time she was happily taking photos with 3 generations of the one family and remembering how the first time she had met them the youngest was only a baby!
One of the meanings of ‘Kelly’ is ‘lively’ and ‘Cathy’ means ‘pure’.You could say that is a perfect description of Cathy who is’pure lively!’
Indeed when we chat she tells me the story of one of her visits to Tasmania when she went to Salamanca Market, one of her favourite artisan and food venues, and how she immediately connected and chatted for ‘ages’ to a lady involved in animal rescue. Cathy’s fans know that she is committed to both human rights through her work with UNICEF and with animal rights demonstrated in the love she lavishes on the beloved ‘pupplets’.
As an author Cathy says she has just the right amount of fame to get a table in a restaurant but not to be bothered while she’s eating her dinner.
As Cathy explains her new book ‘It Started in Paris’ is a novel about love in all it’s fascinating permutations, the new or young love which is at its peak before marriage, the older, long married and sometimes jaded love of couples that may not even be couples anymore, saying goodbye to the wrong love and the possibility of the hope of new or rekindled love.
A nice inclusion is a quote relating to love at the start of every chapter that encourages the reader to reflect on both Cathy’s characters and love in general.
Cathy says that her writing career can be owed in part to some special teachers, including a former nun turned very glamorous educator who would talk about classical music to her students and create extraordinary embroidery. Some of this influence has stayed with Cathy as she is often doing crafts and even though she says these may mostly remain incomplete Cathy’s clever craft is the true artistry of embroidering with words.
Unlike one of her more cynical characters that talks of rainbows (in a lovely piece of alliteration) being no more than ‘precipitation and physics’ Cathy’s constantly radiating rainbows.
‘It Started in Paris’ is out now published by Hachette.
