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Paullina Simons has never been to Ireland. She was born in Russia and moved to the US at the age of 10. However, her books have made it to this island. The author was delighted to get a report recently from a friend visiting Cork that her books were front and centre on the trip.
“A friend of mine said, ‘You know Paullina, I was just in Cork, Ireland, in a tiny little town. There was a tiny little bookshop and it was just like a little small thing. I go in there and what do I see on the shelf? All of your books displayed – like, had their own shelf’,” says Paullina, her New York twang full of animation as she recounts the tale.
The Tiger Catcher, Paullina’s latest book, has just been released. It is part of The End of Forever trilogy, the other two instalments of which will be released between now and the end of the year. The books centre on Julian and Josephine’s romance.
Unusual for the romance genre, the story is written from Julian’s perspective. Paullina decided to tell it as such, firstly, because she wanted to explore male emotions when it came to love and secondly, to afford Josephine an air of mystery throughout the tale.
“It’s really Julian’s quest and so we see his soul very clearly. Her soul, we don’t see, so we kind of depend on him to discover her with us. She remains a mystery to us, to him and even to herself until the end of the story,” explains Paullina.
“It’s because it’s his quest that I saw the story from his perspective. What does it mean for a man to love a woman? To lose a woman and to turn the world upside down to try find her again? I really wanted a story about what it was like for a man to love a woman, because he didn’t know what that was like either. It was new to him. I wanted to show that.”
International flavour
Despite the fact she is yet to visit Ireland – which she intends to change – Paullina has something of an international air about her.
At present, she lives happily in New York with her husband and children. Previously, she resided in England, where she was first married and had her first child.
But most interestingly, she grew up in Soviet Russia during the 1970s. Irish Country Living asks what this experience was like as a young child?
“Well here’s the thing, when you’re a kid you don’t really know much. This is your life and everybody is living the same life.
I used to spend my summers in a little fishing village off the Gulf of Finland
“So the fact is, you don’t have bananas, you don’t have meat, you don’t have chocolate, you don’t have coffee, you don’t have tomatoes, but you don’t know that you’re supposed to have these things.
“You stand in line for two hours first and then you get a banana. Your mother gives you the only banana that she buys and that’s just how you live. I had a mom and a dad, they both loved me. I had grandparents that loved me. I used to spend my summers in a little fishing village off the Gulf of Finland.”
Paullina’s father was imprisoned for three years for anti-Soviet agitation. It was after this he decided to get his family out of Russia. They lived in Italy and Austria while waiting to enter the US. When the family arrived in New York, both positively and negatively it was a culture shock.
“I was 10 right, not like 20, so my culture shock was, ‘Oh my goodness, there are potato chips and I can have them anytime I want. There’s chewing gum and I can have that’. Because we didn’t have chewing gum in Russia. Chewing gum was like an amazing thing. Or Coca-Cola, we didn’t have that, so that for me was a delight. It wasn’t so delightful not to be able to speak the language, it wasn’t so delightful to be an outcast.”
I became an American citizen right before I went to England
It was only when Paullina moved to England as part of an exchange programme that she started to really feel American.
“In England, they couldn’t hear my Russian accent, all they heard was New York and so they made fun of me for being an American. I was like, ‘Oh thank God’. It was great.
“I became an American citizen right before I went to England too, so that was a big deal for me and then after I came back from England I was already basically international.”
Although she left Russia a long time ago, Paullina can still speak Russian and celebrates that aspect of her cultural heritage. However, she also has strong feelings about her birth country today.
“They’ve a lot of things they need to work out. They spend half a millennium under one authoritarian rule right, and then they decide to throw that off in 1917. They spend most of the 20th century living under the worst conditions that human beings should really live in.
“You live with that and then they threw that off in 1991, but they don’t know how to live under freedom. They don’t know how to live under democracy. This is why you have these constant troubles with people taking power and getting control over this or that.”
Although New York feels like home, Paullina certainly has a number of influences the world over, making her writing accessible to many people. Hopefully she’ll come to Cork soon too, to see her bookshelf.
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