Carmel Harrington on road trips, The Wizard of Oz and her new novel My Pear-Shaped Life

"You know, the character of Greta Gale has always been there," Carmel Harrington admits as she opens up about her new novel, My Pear-Shaped Life. 

The author's eighth novel, My Pear-Shaped Life, was published earlier this week (you can read an extract right here) - and she recently spoke to Her about her inspiration behind the novel, the magic of road trips, The Wizard of Oz and how it feels to be releasing a book in uncertain and unpredictable times. "I've always wanted to write about a central character who was overweight, and I wanted her to be properly overweight - not to be curvy, or to have a few extra pounds - and all the things that go with it. But I never wanted to write a book about losing weight. It was never about writing a book about a character that needed to lose weight to be happy. I wanted to write a book about a character who needed to learn to love herself as she was to be happy," she explained, as she opened up about how the book came to be. "And that really always was the plan. But then what I did with it was the tricky bit, because that's not enough for a story. I had to kind of come up with what was I gonna do with it, and then over the last few years she was noodling away as I wrote other books - but I was always thinking about Greta and what I would do with her. "And then this inspiration hit me, about dual lives - people with the same name, and how someone with the same name as you could be living on the other side of the world. There's actually another Carmel Harrington, Dr. Carmel Harrington, and she's a sleep doctor in Australia. A few times, people had read my books and then sent messages and said, you know, 'you really helped me sleep; I had issues with sleeping and insomnia and you really helped me. I never knew you wrote fiction as well'. So, they obviously confused us - and I thought it was really interesting. "I came up with this idea, then, that my Greta - the Greta Gale in Ireland - her life would literally be pear-shaped. But she would be really fascinated with her famous namesake who lives in America, Dr. Greta Gale, who was leading this wonderful life on Instagram as she follows her. And that's where the story came from. I had to make things for my Greta in Ireland go really, terribly wrong for her - things crash around her in the most spectacular form. It's only when she hits rock bottom that she starts to ask questions of herself, about what's going on in her life. "Eventually, she ends up on this road trip to go in search of her famous namesake - it's kind of a yellow brick road of self discovery, she starts to learn about herself as she goes along and realises that she is enough, just as she is." Following a series of twists and turns in the characters' lives, they find themselves embarking on a road trip in the United States - one which the author replicated herself while working on the novel. "I know people tease me and say you deliberately chose is a great place for for their road trip so that you could do it, but I'm not sure that's true," she told us with a laugh. "I always wanted the road trip to start in Kansas because Kansas plays a special part in the book.  Greta Gale, her surname is the same as Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz, so [Greta] has this fascination with all things Oz." The road trip begins in Kansas (because with a surname like Gale, where else could it start?), before going through a number of other states - like Colorado, Utah and to Nevada. And Harrington admits that the "life-changing" road trip - beyond being a great experience in general - helped her bring the locations to life while making the edits on the book. "I did the exact trip that my characters do a year and a bit ago - myself and my husband, we took a week, hired a car, and we did the exact same road trip as my characters do. And it was incredible; it was it was life changing, actually, to follow in my character's footsteps," she continued. "When I did the edits on the book, I could really bring those places to life because I'd experienced them and I could add a little bit more colour and depth to something I would have just seen if I had jus't looked at Google Maps, for example." There are plenty of nods to L. Frank Baum's beloved The Wizard of Oz throughout My Pear-Shaped Life. And Harrington recalled how the books had influenced her a child - and ultimately, impacted My Pear-Shaped Life.  "There's 14 of the Oz books in total, and I read them all as a kid - they had been really important to me as a child, and I was always kind of fascinated as an adult then, when I revisited them. He was so wise, like for a guy who wrote his stories over 100 years ago. But he basically speaks about the fact of pulling back the curtain and exposing the reality of the wizard hidden behind the curtain. And really, you know, that's what we have to do now. There's so any filters in life, on Instagram, and so many people are showing the best version of themselves on social media - but it's not always the truth," she explained. "And The Wizard of Oz is really about that, in essence. It's about learning to be kind not just to yourself, but to others, and learning to really own your truth. And one of the quotes I love is, 'it isn't what we are, but what folks think we are, that counts in this world'. I just find that fascinating, because it's so apt for today as well. "I just think he's a very wise man. And he wrote a cracking friendship story - really, in essence, The Wizard of Oz is a road trip friendship story. And that's really what I wanted to create. It was only when I started writing and plotting out my characters that I thought, 'oh, actually, that there are similarities here'. So whether it was a subconscious kind of thing as I was plotting it, but then I decided to roll with it. I spoke to my editor and agents and I was like, you know, I just think that there's something here. So we decided we would look a little bit closer at the parallels between the two." And while the story of Greta and the rest of the Gale family has technically come to an end, the author told us how she would "love" to revisit them once again. "I think there's this huge scope [to return to the characters]. I mean, I've never done any sequels. Every book  I've written has been a standalone - and I'm asked by readers, 'when are you going to do a sequel?' There are some books which lend themselves to that, and this is one of them," she continued. "It would be really nice to see how Greta is doing in five or six years time; in my head, I wouldn't mind visiting her when she's a young wife or mother. It might be fun to see how pear-shaped her life is." She added that she hopes My Pear-Shaped Life can "give people a little bit of escapism" with the current situation, acknowledging that while it has some darker moments "ultimately the story is is very uplifting and joyous". "I hope at least that it just gives people a little bit of escapism, because we all just need that right now. Things are just so difficult right now. I hope that it makes people smile and just gives them a little switch off for a few hours," she said.

• My Pear-Shaped Life by Carmel Harrington, published by Harper Collins, is available now.