Jo Spain: ‘I rely on the next book, contract or TV show to pay that mortgage. I’ve no guaranteed salary’is on a tight schedule when she arrives at the Phoenix Park Café in Dublin on a blustery April day., and she is fielding queries from the set of another show she is involved in, which is being filmed in
The Trial, her new novel, is based in a fictional Irish university, and begins withTthe disappearance of medical student Theo Laurent, an event which haunts his girlfriend Dani. Along the way, Big Pharma comes under scrutiny and Dani, recently returned to the university and whose mother is suffering from dementia, struggles to come to terms with her past and her mother’s illness.
Screenwriting generally pays well, Jo Spain says, considerably better than novels. Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill “They showed me a photograph of her and she looks very like me, which is lovely because my dad had no brothers or sisters,” Spain says. “He spent his whole life looking for my dad, because he knew she was pregnant and he always knew there was a family member out there.”
Such things are often in the genes. The Dublin woman’s work ethic is breathtaking. If Spain is not writing or on set, or with her children, she’s running or playing piano, an instrument the 44-year-old came to only in the last few years and now adores. “I went to Trinity, but I worked to get into Trinity and I worked when I was in Trinity,” she says. She lived alone in a flat in the city and had jobs in a betting shop and a clothes shop to pay her bills while studying politics. The vast majority of her fellow students were lovely people, she says.
Earlier in her career, Spain accepted work as a script doctor, a role similar to a ghost writer, with someone else getting the credit for her work, and it’s not a job she’d recommend.
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