Mary’s ‘chick-lit with wisdom’ hits the shelves

INTERNET dating has become increasingly mainstream but it is not without its pitfalls as Gort woman Mary Coen learned while researching her novel, Love and the Goddess.
Mary’s experience of internet dating has been diverse. She met wealthy men offering her a lavish lifestyle, needy men, as well as artists and musicians and even a “cyber stalker”.

Love and the Goddess centres on the tale of Kate Canavan, a cookery teacher, and her journey from one life-changing experience to another. Mary acknowledges that she borrowed a little from her own life for the book but it is by no means an autobiography.

“Throughout the book, Kate is learning to love herself and that you don’t need a man to validate you. I don’t have a man in my life. I have come to a stage in my life where I don’t need a man to validate me. I am perfectly happy being celibate. Most people find that hard to understand. Women, more so than men, have put me under pressure in social situations saying ‘surely you need a man, surely you are lonely’. This perpetuates through life this idea that you have to be in a partnership to be complete.”

“Sometimes people are frightened to move out of their comfort zone and I felt that initially. Through the internet dating, I met a few very wealthy men who offered me a very lavish lifestyle. I met everyone from down-at-heel musicians and poets, who were very talented, to multi-millionaires, who wanted me to sign up to a relationship immediately, who showed me their boy toys like BMW convertibles, helicopters and private planes. I have been offered these opportunities but I have chosen to say no,” she says.

“There may still be a bit of a stigma about it now but internet dating is gone fairly mainstream. There is a huge element of it being in line with the consumer society we live in.

“It does feel like shopping for a mate on some level and people have set criteria of what they are going out to shop for. It perpetuates our consumerism; we want a product that ticks certain boxes. That is something that came up over and over again. Men would say to me ‘oh you are ticking all the right boxes’,” Mary recalls.

“I had an element of being cyber stalked after my time internet dating so that is another side to it and it can be quite creepy,” she adds.

However, the Athlone woman accepts that hers is not the universal experience.

“I have met women who have met their partners through internet dating and they met them when they were just about to give up and they found it was so normal. So there is the other side of it, that it can be free and as normal as bumping into someone on the street,” she explains.

Mary has been living in Gort for nearly 30 years, where she taught home economics until 1999. She then moved into public relations and fashion styling but she has always wanted to write – she just didn’t know what.

“First I was very interested in writing a self-help book but from the time I was a child, I would write plays and have friends to act out the different parts. I was interested in writing drama but I thought I would rather tie these two elements together in a novel,” she recalls.

After being diagnosed with Fibromyalgia, a condition associated with widespread muscle and joint pain and stiffness, as well as fatigue, Mary began examining alternative therapies and personal development. Then she began to concentrate on writing.

“I am a big fan of Paulo Coelho and I played around with writing plays and self-help books. Then I did novel writing courses and they were a big help,” she notes.

“I went and did a course with a lady from Oxfordshire and I found that absolutely brilliant. She told me I could definitely write and that was very inspiring and said I had a way with words and encouraged me to pursue it further. Then I did other courses run locally in Galway, including one by Susan Millar DuMars and I found her excellent as well. She had lots of good techniques for getting you into writing.

“I became obsessed with mythology. I would say it found me rather than the other way around, especially in my quieter times. I became obsessed by Greek myth, especially the myth of the goddesses Persephone, Demeter and Hecatate; of the triple woman where every woman has within her the three parts, the inner child, the mother and even women who are not mothers have that and the wisdom of the crone or the older woman within her. These emerge in different phases of our lives. Those three archetypes are in every woman,” she explains.

When she began to write, Mary got in touch with writer and director Ferdia McAnna and asked him to consider some of her work.

“I had 11 chapters at the time and he said I had a gift for writing comedy, so he said he would work with me. That was good to know that I could write a book that is light and funny and incorporated wisdom too in terms of what people are looking for in self-help books and they find them quite heavy. That is the feedback that I am getting now too.

“Someone described it as ‘chick-lit with wisdom’. At first I thought that was derogatory but now I think it is a compliment and while some people do consider it ‘chick lit’, the men who I have met who have read it have really enjoyed it too,” she says.

As well as eagerly exploring creativity, Mary has always been interested in psychology, especially the theories of Jung.

“I thought of studying psychology and I was interested in becoming a Jungian psychologist. That identification with archetypes is based in his teaching and that runs through the book very lightly. Kate, the protagonist, uses each of the names of each of the goddesses at different times during the book on internet dating sites,” she reveals.

Mary’s years in PR gave her an insight into writing but it also made her consider society’s perceptions of women.

“I always got incredible feedback, even from press releases I wrote. I wrote one at one stage for a shop that catered for larger ladies but the shop owner told me later that people approached her asking her who wrote the piece, adding that they felt really wonderful when they read it, that they felt good about themselves and about their sexuality.

“That is something that would drive me, making women feel good about themselves and men too,” she reveals.

“Society expects women to conform to certain things that are very limiting, like that you need to be a size zero or very thin and you need to wear the latest designer clothing, that you have to conform to a certain beauty aesthetic, usually Caucasian, and that you need to be validated by a man.

“I love shattering those misconceptions and making women feel they can think outside the box and that they can have self belief, which defies all of that and step outside all the expectations and get in touch with their inner self worth and validation,” she outlines.

Love and the Goddess by Mary Elizabeth Cohen is available in shops around Galway and in Ennis. Mary is donating 10% of the profits from the first six months of sales to breast cancer research.