Mary Kennedy meets author and journalist Emily Hourican Emily grew up in Brussels, and is a well-known Irish feature writer. She launched in journalism as the editor of a lads mag, Himself, and then edited the Dubliner magazine in its early days. For the past decade, she has been a regular with the Sunday Independent. Her first book, a memoir called How to (Really) Be a Mother, is a funny, honest account of how she learned to stop faking it as a mother, and become her own version of the real thing. She recently finished treatment for an unusual viral form of mouth cancer, an experience she wrote about in a six-part Sunday Independent Cancer Diary