Stella Duffy interview copyright Victoria Mary Clarke 2005

Stella Duffy is something of a celebrity.  I knew I had seen her before, when we met in Dublin this week, but I couldn’t figure out where.
‘Yes,’ she admitted.  ‘I am on television, advertising Typhoo tea!’  Stella is a well known actress, it turns out, who has appeared in ‘The Bill’ as well as on stage in her own improvisational theatre company, and in her own plays.  She’s also a successful novelist with seven novels published and the titles for fifteen more stuck to her fridge.
‘I’m great at titles,’ she laughs.
Stella is clearly a woman of spirit, a woman with attitude.  Our photographer discovers this, when she abandons the usual cheesy poses and stretches out, full length on the boardroom table and gives him a cheeky smile.
‘That’s the filthiest laugh I’ve ever heard,’ he tells her.  ‘Give me more of it!’
But there is a serious side to Stella’s visit to Ireland.  Five years ago on this very day, at the age of thirty six, she discovered a lump in her breast, which was discovered to be cancer.  Having survived to tell the tale, she is attending the first Irish conference on young women with breast cancer and she will be performing her own play ‘Breaststrokes’ at the event.  The play, a one woman show, is a black comedy about her experience with cancer.  Some of it is funny, she says.  Some of it isn’t.
          Previous to writing the play, Stella also wrote a book called ‘State of Happiness’, which is about a woman who is dying.
‘You can’t write a good story without something being heightened,’ she says, after she has finished rolling around on the floor and flirting with the photographer.  ‘Dying heightens everything.
Obviously I couldn’t have written so coherently about being sick if I hadn’t been sick, but its not a novel about cancer, it’s a novel about a woman dying of an unspecified disease.’
The disease is unspecified, she says, because there are so many different diseases that you can be dying of, but it is the idea of dying that shakes up people’s lives.  Of course we are all going to die.  But somehow, we assume it will be when we are very old, unless a disease comes along and the doctors tell us we have only a short time left.   It makes a big difference to people, the idea of one’s life span being shortened, there is suddenly an awful lot to do, an awful lot to hang onto.  And there is another problem, especially with cancer.
‘Most deaths from cancer are very painful,’ she says.  ‘My personal fear is not so much about getting cancer again, it’s the thought of the pain.  I am scared of dying a painful death.’
But she’s not scared of dying.
‘So if someone said you are going to die next week?’  I ask.
‘I would do a bunch of fun things!  I would go to the beach.  I was brought up Catholic and I have been practicing Buddhism for eighteen years. So either I am right and there is something after death, or I’m not and either way it doesn’t matter.  I truly don’t have a problem with death but I do have a problem with wasting your life.  Making compromises in order to keep people happy.’
She would rather not have a long, lingering death. 
‘You get run over by a bus, and hopefully it’s all over very quickly.  It’s ghastly for your family though. I think we have to think about death from those two perspectives, what do you want for yourself and what do you want for those you love?
My choice would be to at least say goodbye to the people I love.’
Did she go around saying goodbye to everyone, when she was diagnosed?
‘No!  I went around trying to stay alive as much as possible.  I decided to get through it.  I also decided to see the gift in it, to work with it.’
The lump appeared overnight.  A two and a half centimetre thing, sticking out of her breast.
‘It had got infected and swelled up which was brilliant because I wouldn’t have found it otherwise.
Stella tried to get on with her life, by doing a radio interview, while her partner Shelley got on the phone trying to get a doctor’s appointment.  Initially, there didn’t seem too much cause for alarm.  ‘It didn’t look like cancer, so I didn’t get a mammogram for two weeks.  Only twenty percent of women with breast cancer are under forty so it was unusual.  Also it was sore and traditionally breast cancer lumps are painless.  Everyone was being very nice and telling me not too worry.  But I felt that I was sick.  I was terrified.’  Eventually they discovered there was cancer.  Stella had a lumpectomy and her lymph glands removed and then she had six months of chemo and a month or so of radiotherapy.
‘ I kept working while I was sick because I am physically strong and I didn’t want to go to bed for six months.  It was shitty enough, as it was.  And besides, the theatre job I had was going to San Diego and New York!’
What is interesting, as an actress is that having cancer in real life is not like it is on the telly, she says.
‘A friend of mine died of breast cancer and even her death wasn’t like it is on telly.  None of it is as over the top. 
  At times it does take over, but the rest of the time you just get on with it.’
When she didn’t tell people she had cancer, they didn’t notice.
‘  The night after my first chemo, I went to see a friend’s play and didn’t tell her.  She said I was looking fantastic.  The reason for that is the drugs I was taking make your skin look redder!’
The biggest tragedy for Stella was that she had been trying to get pregnant, but chemo had damaged her fertility.  She and her partner are gay, and they had found a father for the child, but several attempts at conceiving had already been unsuccessful.
‘ I am forty one now. We spent a year finding the right person and having counselling.  My partner did get pregnant, but miscarried, but she is five years older than me.  So it looks as if my chances of being a mother are gone.  Such a lot is talked about designer babies, but the success rate is very low and it’s been very sad and very difficult.  I had always wanted children and because we were two healthy women you would have assumed that one of us would be able to get pregnant.’
Like a lot of successful career women, Stella had put motherhood on hold, assuming that she could do it in her late thirties. 
‘We got together when I was twenty seven and I wanted to have kids straight away.  But it seemed like we had time.  And had I not got cancer, I would have got pregnant.’
The whole subject is still a painful one, but luckily for Stella, her latest book has nothing to do with disease, even though it does feature a murder.  It is the story of a famous Hollywood actress who also happens to be a lesbian, who is desperately trying to cover up her sexuality, in order to remain popular.
‘I understand about needing to keep being gay quiet,’ Stella says.  ‘And I do know a couple of not-out gay people.  In Hollywood, gay men tend to be out more than gay women.
In movies, women tend to still play wives and mothers!’
Despite the fact that being gay, Stella and her partner won’t be likely to have a ‘happy accident’ and become mothers, she still believes that cancer gave her gifts.
‘I do think it is important to treasure the life I have, even if it isn’t the life I planned for myself.  This is the life I have and I am better at finding the best in it now.  Also,  it’s been really good for my relationship.  We already thought that we had a very good relationship, but it has become deeper and stronger and more important and we have said things that we might not have said, about how important we are to each other, things that people say when they might be dying.  I thought I knew about death through grieving for other people, but I didn’t know about my own mortality and that’s a different thing.’
‘Parallel Lies’ is published by Virago on February 13.