Tracy Martin did not begin writing So Not Me as a novel. The book started life as memoir, an attempt to make sense of a life divided sharply into before and after.
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Martin was eighteen, preparing for her Leaving Certificate, when a car accident changed everything. Her boyfriend was killed instantly and she sustained spinal injuries that left her paralysed from the chest down.
“It absolutely fractured my life completely,” she says. “It’s like the girl before, the girl after, and the girl stuck in between.”
The accident came on top of an already difficult childhood. Martin’s father died when she was three and a half and her mother died when she was fifteen, leaving her to navigate grief and survival from a very young age.
“I was one of those people who kind of suppressed everything and just kept moving,” she says. “I was really good at shutting things down and getting on with it.”
There was another layer to the trauma that she had carried privately for decades. At the time of the accident she was eight weeks pregnant. During the early weeks after the crash, the pregnancy became her reason to survive.
“That feeling became everything,” she says. “I thought this baby was the reason I had to keep going.” Weeks later, in hospital, she was told the pregnancy had not survived. That was the line that broke me,” she says quietly.
The emotional truth of those experiences forms the foundation of So Not Me. The novel follows Faye Mahoney, a young woman left paralysed after a car accident which also kills her boyfriend, Rob. The story moves between Faye’s perspective and Rob’s voice from beyond death, still connected to her, still trying to help her find a way through grief and survival.
Martin says the shift from memoir to fiction happened after working with editor Suzanne Power, who encouraged her to expand the emotional world of the story and bring Rob’s perspective into the narrative.
“It’s about a love that transcends everything,” Martin says. “But it’s also about learning to let go.”
The novel also introduces another voice, what Martin describes as Faye’s higher self, an inner presence urging her towards survival and healing even when she cannot yet believe in either herself.
“There’s always this voice saying you will find a way through this,” she says. “Sometimes we look outside ourselves for that voice, but sometimes it’s already there inside us.”
Although the material is deeply personal, Martin resisted writing the story for years. The book took almost fifteen years to complete, partly because revisiting the memories meant reopening wounds she had spent a lifetime containing.
Yet So Not Me is not simply a story about trauma. Martin speaks openly about motherhood, about rebuilding her life and about the complicated relationship she still has with disability after decades of living with paralysis.
“The whole disability thing, even now, I still think this is so not me,” she says. “There are parts of me I lost along the way in order to become this person.”
The title arrived unexpectedly while she was living in Madrid, another chapter in a life that has often been shaped by instinct and movement. After her daughter left for college abroad, Martin packed up her car and moved to Spain alone, despite not knowing anyone there.
Writing, she believes, came from years spent observing life differently after trauma and paralysis changed her relationship with the world.
“Writers are observers,” she says. “When you’re paralysed and lying flat for so long, you observe life in a very different way.” She describes herself as someone who writes emotionally and instinctively rather than structurally, which explains why the novel moves between grief, humour, longing and hope with unusual fluidity.
“It’s not perfect by any means,” she says. “But it’s written from the heart, and that’s all I can do.”
So Not Me is available through BuyThe Book.ie and selected bookshops in Monaghan and Dundalk.
