Author Moïra Fowley-Doyle on why the YA genre is ‘pioneering’

Author Moïra Fowley-Doyle has opened up about the importance of the "pioneering" YA genre.

Recalling how becoming a writer was always something she wanted to do, she told Her:

"As a child, I had always written stories and poetry; I have kept diaries since I was four-years-old. "I always had the vague ‘I want to be a writer' ambition, but as a teen I wrote specifically with the goal of becoming a writer.  "I’m very happy writing for - and about - teenagers. I love reading Young Adult novels (YA), as well.

"YA feels pioneering - like it is tackling magic realism. I love the idea of truth and fiction being intertwined; unreliable narrators and being able to reflect trauma and difficult times, to speak about difficult subjects."

All The Bad Apples tells the story of Deena, whose seventeenth birthday is the day that she finally comes out to her family. It's also the day that her wild and mysterious sister, Mandy, is seen leaping from a cliff. The family is heartbroken, but not surprised. The women of the Rys family have always been troubled - 'bad apples', their father calls them - and Mandy is the baddest of them all. But then Deena starts to receive the letters. Letters from Mandy, claiming that their family's blighted history is not just bad luck or bad decisions, but a curse, handed down to the Rys women through the generations. Mandy has gone in search of the curse's roots, and now Deena must begin a desperate cross-country hunt for her sister, guided only by the letters that mysteriously appear in each new place. And what she discovers may finally heal her family - or rip them apart, once and for all. It was the idea of writing a family history that inspired Moïra to write All The Bad Apples -  particularly as the "aura of helpless rage" in Ireland after the commission into the Mother and Baby homes began in 2016. She said:

"I wanted to write a family history. "And when I started research into the book in 2016, that was when the commission into the Mother and Baby homes had just started. "There was an aura of helpless rage to the country, I think the atmosphere soaked into what I was writing."

The half-Irish, half-French author explained that she wanted to write a "generational trauma" about a teenager girl, who is made to retrace her family tree - and how she discovers she may be a lot more similar to her ancestors than she thought. She continued:

"I wanted to write a book about a teenage girl who was retracing her family tree; and about a family curse - which, really, was sort of about a curse on all the women in the country. "I wanted to write a generational trauma; without a clear idea on where I would go or anything like that. "I want the girl to be walked through her family history, to find out the similarities between her and her ancestors."

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