Racy scenes and a spiritual adventure in teacher's novel

THE SOCIAL NETWORK:Mary Elizabeth Coen's debut novel, Love the Goddess, was launched by Constance Harris at Lost Society, in the Powerscourt Centre in Dublin, on Wednesday.

Coen has combined her different lives in the book. Originally from Athlone, the former home-economics teacher is now settled in Gort, Co Galway. “My second subject was religious education, but I wouldn’t have been allowed teach the spiritual traditions that are the ethos of this book or I would have been thrown out of the school.”

Her son, Dr Mark Coen, a lecturer in tort and constitutional law at Dublin City University, watched proudly. Her daughter, Emily, who had boarded at Rathdown School in Dublin, and is now a transition-year student in Gort, has not read the book. “I’m proud that she has written it,” she said, before adding that there are “racy scenes in it, and nobody wants to read that from your mother’s perspective”.

Who we spotted:the journalist Anne Harris; the stylist Cathy O'Connor