Emma Heatherington: 'I couldn't lift my head off the pillow. I couldn't see. I couldn't speak'
Emma Heatherington, back home in County Tyrone, following her recent cancer treatment. Pics: Alan Lewis
Emma Heatherington flickers into view, her beaming smile lighting up my computer screen.
Even over Zoom, the 48-year-old writer radiates warmth and heart, qualities her bestselling novels have in spades.
Her latest, 'Maybe Next Christmas', the book equivalent of a bear hug from your bestie, is a perfect festive follow-on from 2023’s stupendously successful This Christmas, her first book for Penguin.
The fiercely ambitious Tyrone woman had even bigger dreams to manifest in 2024, and began writing 'Maybe Next Christmas' unaware that life was about to throw an almighty spanner in the works.
In March, Heatherington was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, an incurable, rare blood cancer.
She had been feeling unwell on and off for over a year, but put the tiredness down to perimenopause.
Until, one morning, she woke up and couldn’t move or see. Her partner Jim had gone to work and her youngest, 10-year-old Sonny, was sleeping soundly beside her.
“I couldn't lift my head off the pillow. I couldn't open my eyes. I couldn't see. I couldn't speak.”
Heatherington somehow managed to ring her sister who came immediately.
“At this stage, I was starting to panic. I couldn't move my head. My sister got into a panic, then my other sister [arrived]. Because I live in the same row of houses that we grew up in, it was starting to remind me of that morning of Mummy being sick, the sisters coming in and the ambulance being called.”
In 1991, when Heatherington was 15 and the youngest of her five siblings was just a baby, their mum Geraldine died from an out-of-the-blue heart attack at just 36.
“It was a normal Saturday morning. I remember her asking me to get up and help with the baby because she wasn't feeling too good, and I was being a typical teenager wanting a lie-in.
It all happened very quickly. Her sisters were called in [to help with the kids] but we didn't realise how serious it was. She was taken away in an ambulance, but by that afternoon, she had died.”
Geraldine was buried on her husband Hugh’s 41st birthday.
The resilience and inner strength forged in grief is now standing to Heatherington, who acknowledges “It's been a mental hard year”.
Following her diagnosis, she underwent six months of chemo, and then, in October, was admitted to hospital for “a massive blast of highly toxic chemo” — the resulting hair loss was, she says, “a real gut punch” — and a stem-cell transplant.
“I was in isolation for four weeks. I had one nominated visitor allowed in, but I was too sick to even want anybody near me,” she says. “
It's been a challenging journey thus far, but Heatherington’s family — and fans — have all rowed in behind her.
Worried her newly bald head might upset Sonny, her youngest, Heatherington hid her hair loss until the 10-year-old matter-of-factly told her, “’Mummy, at this stage of the game, no hair is the least of our worries’.
So then I showed him and he didn't even flinch. He just was like, ‘There now, that's done’.”
It's clear Sonny gets his practical nature from his mum, who, through the months of gruelling treatment, continued to work on 'Maybe Next Christmas', the captivating story of Bea and Ollie, who meet by accident in Heathrow on Christmas Eve.
“I wanted them to meet and know immediately that there is something special, that they're almost meant to be.”
Writing it was like therapy, she says. “It allowed me to step outside of the horrible reality I was going through.
"Don't get me wrong, there were days when I simply was not fit, because the chemo was tiring, the fatigue was like nothing I'd ever experienced before. But somehow, I was doing this rewrite on the book.”
That ability to press on despite the odds helped Heatherington deliver 'Maybe Next Christmas' on deadline. Getting on with it is just her way.
After her mother’s death, Heatherington stepped up to become a de facto parent to her younger brother and sisters, went on to complete her A-levels and, having studied for a degree at the University of Ulster — punctuated by the birth of her daughter, Jordyn (now 28) when she was 19 — landed a PR job with the local council.
“It was very creative, so I was always writing, but I always wanted to do something on my own. But at this stage, I was in my mid-20s and I had three children.”
At 30, she finally pursued her dream of becoming a writer, prompted by a Woman’s Way short-short competition her aunt suggested they both enter and which Heatherington won.
In 2007, the success of her first book, Crazy for You, led to an agent and, then, a three-book deal with an Irish publishing house.
Heatherington took a career break and in 2010, her marriage broke up. Despite her success, she had to supplement her income with freelance gigs to make ends meet.
In 2013, an open-call tweet from HarperCollins — her “dream publisher” — led to the break she’d been looking for.
A refreshed Crazy For You became her first e-book of a three-book deal with the publisher’s digital-first imprint, but for her second, Heatherington — now happily coupled up with singer-songwriter and artist Jim McKee; their son, Sonny, was born in 2014 — knew she needed “something really special”.
And she found it. E-book two, The Legacy of Lucy Harte, was a huge hit in the US, marking an “absolute turning point” for Heatherington.
She moved to HarperFiction, where she thrived, bagged her dream agent, who, a few years on, when the time was right, pushed for the move to Penguin. Last Christmas was a smash and then… came cancer.
Heatherington spent a year in and out of A&E before she was diagnosed. She’d just completed the first draft of 'Maybe Next Christmas' when she awoke, unable to move.
“They got me to hospital, did a CT scan and it was fine,” she says of that day. She was discharged, none the wiser.
In October, she collapsed. Again, her brain scans came back clear, and again, she was discharged. As the weeks passed, the symptoms kept stacking up.
She began experiencing a “strange sensation” in her hips and “awful pressure” in her chest bone at night. Her periods stopped suddenly. But as busy women are wont to do, she continued “just getting on with things” until a further incident that caused her to slur her speech landed her back in A&E.
“I heard a doctor saying, ‘This lady has been in four times. There's something going on. We have to get to the bottom of this’.”
Scans showed a cyst on her skull, which further investigations revealed to be a bone lesion that had been present a year previously but was then too small to spot.
Heatherington was then told that protein had been found in her blood. “I said, ‘what does that mean?’ [The doctor] said, ‘it means something potentially nasty, potentially very nasty, or potentially seriously nasty’.
There was no good option.” She went through “another weekend of tormenting myself through Google.
Once you put in ‘bone lesion’ and ‘protein in the blood’, there's absolutely no other way out; this blood cancer, multiple myeloma, was coming up.”
Multiple myeloma attacks the bone marrow, causing lesions in the bone, making it fragile and fracture-prone.
The pains Heatherington had been experiencing in her hips and chest were caused by her bones breaking. “My hips, this shoulder, and of course the skull. It all lit up like a Christmas tree on the PET scan,” she recalls.
The stem-cell transplant has given her hope, the hope of more time, and Heatherington is taking that hope and running with it.
She knows Christmas this year will be different, but her awareness that the ‘most wonderful time of the year’ can often be anything but is what makes her novels resonate so deeply with readers.
For now, Heatherington is healing — “I'm being looked after like an egg” — and choosing to live in the now. “I’m taking it one day at a time, not thinking too far ahead.
The big thing I've taken away from it all is that I've seen the good in people this year, the kindness that we all hope is out there, I've seen that so much.”
They always have a lovely family Christmas, she says, and Sonny can’t wait for Santa to come.
“We're looking forward to it in a different way, just glad to have me home. I know they're all going to club in, and make it as special as it always is.”
- ‘Maybe Next Christmas’ by Emma Heatherington, published by Penguin, is out now.
