Love Lives - Author Louise O’Neill on redefining boundaries in a post-Me Too world

Episode Date: December 9, 2022

This week on Millennial Love, we’re joined by author Louise O’Neill to discuss her latest novel, Idol.Idol is about Samantha, a hugely successful wellness influencer who, determined to speak her truth, writes an essay about a sexual experience she had as a teenager with her then best friend, Lisa. But it backfires when Lisa gets back in touch and says that her memory of the night is far darker than Samantha’s.We chat with Louise about the Me Too movement, whether one person’s “truth” negates the other’s, and how wealth, power, and race play into who we choose to believe. Check out Millennial Love on all major podcast platforms and Independent TV, and keep up to date @Millennial_Love on Instagram and TikTok.Rape Crisis offers support for those affected by rape and sexual abuse. You can call them on 0808 802 9999 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland, and 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland, or visit their website: www.rapecrisis.org.uk. If you are in the US, you can call Rainn on 800-656-HOPE (4673)Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/millenniallove. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Acast powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend. will not die hosting the Hills after show. I get thirsty for the hot wiggle. I didn't even know a thirsty man until there was all these headlines. And I get schooled by a tween. Facebook is like, and now that's what my grandma's on. Thank God phone a friend with Jesse Crookshank is not available on Facebook. It's out now wherever you get your podcasts. Acast helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast helps creators launch, grow and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com Please bear in mind that this episode features a discussion on sexual assault.

There will be links to various organizations for support in the show notes. Hello and welcome to Millennial Love, a podcast from The Independent on everything to do with love, sexuality, identity and more. This week, I was joined by author Louise O'Neill. For those who aren't familiar with Louise's work, she is the best-selling author of six books, including Asking For It, which tells the story of an 18-year-old girl in rural Ireland who was raped. She joined me on the show to discuss her latest novel, Idle, which is about a social media influencer forced to revisit an unresolved relationship from her past.

Now, that's quite a vague introduction of the book, so I'll go into a bit more detail now. So essentially, the book is about a character called Samantha Miller who is a social media influencer and for her she has these young fans who she calls her girls who kind of follow her every move and want to be her essentially. To them she's a sort of oracle telling them how to live their lives, how to be happy, how to find and honour their kind of truth. So Samantha's career is booming, she's just reached 3 million followers. She's got a new book that's come out that's gone straight to the top of our seller list.

And in order to promote that book, she writes an essay about the sexual experience that she had as a teenager with her female best friend, Lisa. She's never told anyone about what happened with Lisa, but now she is telling the world in this essay. The essay then goes viral. And then after years of not speaking, Lisa gets in touch to say that she doesn't quite remember the story with Samantha, how Samantha remembers it.

And actually her memory of that night is much darker and possibly not entirely consensual. And it becomes the story where it's Sam's word against Lisa's. So the whole book kind of examines whose story we believe and whose truth we believe and the book kind of interrogates our relationship with these social media heroes and influencers and examines all these really important questions about consent and sexual violence. So I began by asking Louise about the character of Samantha and where she got the inspiration for her from because to me she's this sort of wellness guru that's sort of a mixture between Willis Paltrow and then all of the kind of fitness influences we see online but on a very

kind of different scale and I used to be obsessed with, you know, these kind of health and fitness influences and the wellness world. So I wanted to hear a bit about where this idea for this character came from. I think that like millennial and Gen Z women in particular are very, like seem to be like very drawn towards like wellness and alternative therapies. And I think part of that is because,

you know, we know that there is like a gender gap in medicine and the way in which women's pain is often belittled and dismissed in traditional medicine. So they sort of, you know, look to these other modalities for help. But I also think that, you know, when you think about things like the law of attraction or when you think of the idea of the secret, we're living in an incredibly, we're living in unprecedented times, as they say, you know, we're living in very uncertain times. And I think this idea that we have more control um or that we have I don't know if there's more responsibility or that we we are in charge of what is happening to us I actually think is so just compelling and alluring um for a lot of us

because the world feels you know increasingly out of control um and for me like I've been really into wellness um since I was a teenager um I was a very devout child um very religious and I suppose like my relationship with Catholicism really soured um when I was a teenager and I suppose you know the sex abuse scandals you know that that broke um and I think I learned about the Magdalene laundries um and the mother and baby institutions you know here in Ireland where like the church and the Irish state conspired to demonize female sexuality and to control women's bodies um and yeah so I think that really as I said soured my relationship but I suppose I I just always had this yearning to believe that there was something greater than me that there was more

than this um and you know new age spirituality I think really just came at the exact right time I read a Louise L. Hay book when I was 15 and it just came at just the right time um and you know so I've been reading a lot of these books for a very long time and when you talk about it like Samantha Miller if Samantha Miller had come to Dublin 10 years ago I would have been sitting in the front row you know my hand raised like to ask her a question um and it's really only been I think over the last few years that I suppose you know particularly in 2020 um when I think you know a lot of white people were really beginning to think about and interrogate um their own white privilege I suppose I started to look at like the wellness industry and all

of these alternative therapies um and think oh you know I've actually never really noticed before but like the people who are the most successful in this space tend to be white blonde women and isn't that interesting and you know before you even got into I suppose conversations around cultural appropriation when it comes to yoga or ayahuasca or you know any of these like modalities that I have been really interested in. So, yes, I think I started to kind of look at that. And then the idea of this character who would be hugely successful, but would really see that, like,

who would really believe that her success was as a result of, you know, the American dream and her hard work and her talent, rather than ever questioning, oh, I wonder how my whiteness played into this or I wonder how my beauty played into this or I wonder how you know my wealth or my privilege played into this and I just thought it was something so delicious um about about a character like that um and you know she felt like I could make her really complicated um and complex and sort of exasperating and toned down like you know, she felt like I could make her really complicated and complex and sort of exasperating and tone down. Like, you know, all of the things I think make a character like a really enticing prospect for a writer to sink their teeth into. Yeah, I mean, she is she is really fascinating.

And I think because she's not just that sort of vapid caricature of social media influencer she's someone who who you know is kind of forced to confront her what she does and how she has benefits from it like you said and I think it's it's interesting because you do see it it does affect her but then there's also the kind of self-delusion to it as well and and like you know even just the idea of the gut like my girls it is so culty it's so interesting it's like my disciples it's really really interesting but I'm the same like I would have been sat in the front you know at one of those talks as well I think there's this kind of like constant pursuit for meaning yes and also you know I had an eating disorder for such a long time and I think I I wanted someone to cure me

rather than having to actually you know do the hard work and go to therapy and do all that I was like I just want someone to sort of come along and be like you know here's a healing or here's a you know sort of a Saint Paul and the the road to damascus type of overnight conversion um and i suppose that is what what what people like samantha are promising it's like abundance and love and joy and that it's just kind of within your grasp and you just have to believe hard enough i think that is just so irresistible that sort of that idea totally and it's like you don't have to actually do any hard work to get there you can just buy a crystal and it's yours I see how I had like about 20 crystals like in the back I do too I'm

still so into it you know I just got back from San Francisco a few weeks ago and it's a very kind of spiritual city there as well. And I went to this kind of famous witch shop. I had a witchy reading. But I want to talk to you a bit more about social media, because I know that you've had, like, personally really difficult experiences with it after the publications. Some of your books, specifically the one I mentioned in the intro, asking for it. How did that, I mean, tell us what happened and how did that affect your relationship with those platforms with asking for it I remember my dad was the first person

to read it out of my family and he said you know it's brilliant but I really hope you're ready and I said what do you mean by that he said, there will be people reading this book and some people will realize that they've been raped and other people will realize that they've raped someone. And some of those people will not want to have had that realization and you are the messenger. And I think before a book comes out, you know, you can't really absorb that.

You can't really understand like what that would be like and I think once it was released like there was so much positive attention as well you know like there was like you know amazing reviews and people wanting to talk to me and offers of you know a documentary and like you know and I think and more importantly because all of that is lovely but it's surface but like more importantly were the people who came to me and told me how much the book had meant to them the comfort that I had given them or people who had had a loved one who was raped and said it taught them what not to say or you know or what would be helpful and gave some sort of understanding of what their you know their loved one might be going through. But I think very quickly, you know, after that, you know,

after the documentary and then I got a national column and it was a stage adaptation of it produced, I suppose, then I began to see maybe the darker sides of that, you know, and a lot of it was on Twitter. I mean, I heard that there were message boards, like, you know, a lot of it was on Twitter. I mean, I heard that there were message boards. Like, you know, I was told people had said to me, I think you should get legal advice. And I said, I don't want to hear about that. I don't want to know about that.

I'm not going to look at that. So I thought I could kind of protect myself. I think with Twitter, it felt like every time I opened the the app I would sort of be like holding my breath and I started to feel really afraid and the worst thing was was that I think I was also kind of addicted to it and it was funny because I'd had a after asking for it came out like it was the most like I was sort of enjoying success that I think I'd always dreamt of and I almost had a nervous breakdown and I had a massive relapse with the anorexia and the bulimia like it was just it was really bad um and I felt in a way that like my relationship with social media was really mirroring my relationship with my Asian disorder in that I was like this is really harming me this is making

me so unhappy and I can't stop. And I suppose they were both nearly like forms of self-harm, you know? And once I started, I went into recovery, like proper full recovery in sort of 2017. And then like a few months, I suppose maybe, I don't know how long afterwards, I was like, I can't, I can't. I mean, if I'm making a concentrated effort to recover and to heal this can't be part of my life anymore I mean I've

experienced like a tiny tiny bit of what you're discussing I've written about sexual violence before just in articles and you know you get inundated with these vile messages people um but I guess I wonder with fiction what is it that is their big bugbear because with me it was like you're lying you're making this up you know how dare you you're so pathetic but with fiction is it like do you think they conflate fan like fiction with reality and I think if it had just been the novel it might have been easier but you know I also had the documentary and then I also had a column and it was the same you know it was funny I was I was talking about this recently because I was giving a speech and I hadn't realized that it was going to be

used on social media afterwards and I actually said to them I was like can speech and I hadn't realized that it was going to be used on social media afterwards. And I actually said to them, I was like, can you not put it on social media? And they said, you know, why? And I said, because the last time I said, I've become really careful about sharing my own personal story. Because I said that last time I did it, it was it's the same thing. It was you're a liar. This never happened. And I suppose it's so invalidating. you're a liar this never happened and I suppose it's so invalidating number one I really have felt this so strongly like in the last few years following me too there's something so grotesque in the way in which women stories have been used for content or entertainment and it's almost like you know okay well we've heard this story so now this story has to be you know even worse and you

know it's not enough that you were you know raped at a party now it has to be you know you know like everything just feels like it has to be even more heightened because people become so desensitized to these stories and like they need it to become you know as I said more gory or more just traumatic and and I don't know I just wish like that sometimes that that you could say you should be able to have empathy and you should be able to understand that rape is wrong you should be able to understand that you know a culture that normalizes or um I don't know like like ridicules rape is wrong and you shouldn't need women to cut open barely healed wounds to bleed in front of you to think oh wait oh you're human too sorry i'm very very passionately about this no so do i so

do i and that's what it is and i think i think actually what's really interesting is you know just hearing you say the word rape so many times, I think that is a really strong word, that if you ask anyone, is rape wrong, they're going to say yes, you know, but actually, if you take the amount of people who can describe what does rape look like, what is it, they would give you a very warped, very very simplistic man drags women down the alleyway yes kind of story which is what you know I think I was certainly raised to to think that that is what it is and obviously that's not the case um but the problem is so often unless you have been sexually assaulted or someone you know has been sexually assaulted or you've watched shows like I May Destroy You or you know or you've you know read your book assaulted, or you've watched shows like I May Destroy You,

or you've read your book or engaged with popular culture in that way, you're not going to know. And it's a real problem. And that's why I think there is this really aggressively strong reaction to it. And it's so bleak that we're still there in 2022. ACAST powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend. I'm Jessie Cruikshank, and on my podcast, Phone a Friend,

I break down the biggest stories in pop culture. But when I have questions, I get to phone a friend. I phone my old friend, Dan Levy. You will not die hosting the Hills after show. I get thirsty for the hot wiggle. I didn't even know what thirsty meant until there was all these headlines. And I get schooled by a tween. Facebook is like a no. That's what my grandma's on.

Thank God Phone a Friend with Jessi Crookshank is not available on Facebook. It's out now wherever you get your podcasts. Acast helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com any time that there has been any sort of forward momentum in the feminist movement there has been this sort of i think very quick attempt to sort of stabilize or to equalize the um or you know the status quo because as soon as me too happened we were barely given a few months before people started saying do you think it's gone too far and like it feels like a witch hunt and you know well what happened to um oh you know innocent and to prove you know it just felt like

it was it was a very quick um i think rebuttal to it and now you I said it's very clear that we are watching an attempt to completely silence Me Too and to completely reverse any of the progress that has been made and I mean you can see that so clearly in the States with Roe v. Wade

being overturned but you know particularly with the Amber Heard and Johnny Depp case, which I found very unsettling. And I think that the reason why I found it so unsettling is because so much of it is really predicated, so much of the backlash, I think, to that was very much predicated on her not being a perfect victim and I didn't grow up with abuse in my immediate family but there was some quite close to me and

honestly the way it was discussed was always she gives as good as she as she takes and you know she's as bad as him and they're just both very fiery and I think it was only really as an adult that I could look back and think no that wasn't like that's just not right not not you know and I'm not going to go into details but like you know what I saw I'm like that that wasn't right what happened there um and I suppose it has really made me think around who we decide is worthy of sympathy and who we decide is worthy of being believed and because I mean look it's fine you might not like Amber Heard I mean I don't know her personally but like it's fine not to think she's a bit of a dick or to think she's an asshole or think what you know whatever you want but that doesn't negate her experience of um of abuse and I suppose with um After the Silence which was my book before Idol

it's about course of control and it's a thriller but like there's kind of elements of course of control and I did a lot of work with the West Cork Women Against Violence Project and it was a really it was really eye-opening actually because this was they talked a lot about like reactive abuse um where someone who's abused will fight back and how often that attempt to fight back is used against them is sort of used as proof that you know as I said that they're both as bad as each other and I think what's really interesting at that time there was a phrase that a lot of people were banding around just like mutual abuse and a lot of people I spoke to because you know this is one of those very rare yes cases of violence against women where actually a lot of people are engaging with it but in a way

that is very much not the way that is that you would hope that they would be engaging with it kind of watching it as sport um yes but they were banding around this phrase mutual abuse and people would just say oh you know i think they both were as bad to each other as you know and they would say she's awful he's awful and and like like you said she wasn't this perfect victim because you know maybe she lied maybe she was a bit of an arsehole maybe she did this that doesn't mean that she still can't be a victim of domestic abuse yeah and that's that like you said like unless she's cutting herself bleeding on the stand no one's going to look at her and think you're a victim of domestic abuse yeah and that's that like you said like unless she's cutting herself bleeding on the stand no one's going to look at her and think you're a victim because i

was just about to mention like you know the very credible um allegations of abuse against brad pitt um you know towards angelina jolie and i think it's really easy to dismiss this as celebrity gossip but i actually think the way in which we interact with celebrity gossip tells us so much about where we are as a society it's like if it can happen to a woman like you know let's say Angelina Jolie who you think has incredible you know wealth and privilege and resources I mean it can happen to anyone I think that violence against women gendered violence it just it it knows you know no class no race um you know there's kind of no sector of society that that isn't that is an impact by it yeah I think the way that you

address it in Idol is really interesting because I know that the plot was kind of loosely inspired by something that Lena Dunham said a few years ago wasn't it yeah I mean I remember when Lena released Lena my friend Lena and her first name on a first name basis um when Lena released her collection of essays there was an essay in it I think I'm trying to remember what year that was was it 2013 um so she released this collection of essays and in it there was one where she talked about when she was a child when she was eight and her sibling was maybe one two and um Lena spread open her sibling's vagina to to look inside and the reaction to this essay like pretty much everything that lena dunham says or does was like incredibly divisive you know so you had one sort of half of the internet saying this is just kids being kids and you know it's sort of normal you know developmental behavior and then

you had the other half of the internet saying this is abuse and she should be in jail and that both were so adamant that their side was the white one and I think there was just something in it where I thought god it's so interesting that like because it's just it's the same passage on on the page it's the same words and the way in which people interpret that in such wildly different ways and I suppose over the last number of years particularly since 2016 the idea of truth has become very malleable you know it's sort of like your truth and my truth and which is something that Samantha kind of constantly says in Idol well this is this is my truth and her mother says at one point well if it's not the truth you know

the what is the point um and then I think after asking for it was released and as I said there were so many people who came up to me and wanted to share their stories with me like sometimes you know if I was on a panel there was three of us at the signing queue afterwards mine would always take about like an hour longer than everybody else's because people would want that kind of moment of saying you know this happened to me I was so struck by the amount of people who would say you know who tell me this terrible story and then would say something like but the worst thing is is that I don't think the other person sees what happened as assault or as rape and which is something I suppose that was

quite that felt very close to the home from my own experience and I think I kept thinking about that idea that you could have two people that go into a room together and when those two people leave that one of one of them might never think about what happened there ever again and for the other person that it could be one of the most traumatic devastating experiences of their entire life and you really see that with idol with like you know you have samantha and you have lisa these two best friends and that night that they spent together like in samantha's eyes it was, you know, the sexual awakening, like the time that she felt closest to Lisa. And for Lisa, it has been just this hole in the center of her that she has never been able to fill since.

And it was so much of when we talk about these stories, like when we talked about Amber Heard and Johnny Depp or like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie is who do we choose to believe? And I think it says so much about us not just as people but as a society at whole about who we choose to believe. It's interesting that it's it's two women in the book because you kind of automatically erase those obvious power dynamics because it's like traditionally when you talk about this it's it's male perpetrator female survivor um and with this there are power dynamics there because of their various roles and their careers you know samantha is a successful influencer and lisa is a stay-at-home mom

essentially and they have these kind of i guess the optics would be that Samantha is in a greater position of power and I guess maybe autonomy um so perhaps that's one power dynamic and way of looking at it um but it's interesting that you haven't got a man and a woman here and I think you know if we're going to have these conversations and because you're writing about it from Samantha's point of view it's almost like if we're going to have these conversations about sexual violence and we're going to try and move forward to a point where we do reduce we do prevent these things from happening we need to be talking not just to survivors but to perpetrators and that's really difficult because it's like how do we do that without undermining the experiences of survivors and also, I guess, getting perpetrators

to recognise themselves as perpetrators? Because really, actually, how many alleged rapists are going to say, yeah, I'm a rapist? Such a good question. I suppose the first part of that that I will say is that the choice to have two women at the heart of this story was very deliberate. Firstly, I suppose because I love writing, you know,

those kind of quite obsessive teenage friendships between girls um because I suppose that I went to an all-girls school so like that dynamic is is very familiar to me um but secondly I suppose after my experience of of writing Asking for It um and whenever I felt like we were trying to have nuanced conversations about sexual violence or against you know um violence as a whole I felt as if they it very quickly sort of fell apart and there were just a lot of accusations of man-hating and misandry and I think that doesn't really take into consideration that of of course, there are male survivors of sexual and domestic violence,

but the majority of the perpetrators are male. And I think unless we can sort of have an honest conversation about that, it's very difficult to move that forward. But in Idle, I think I wanted to have quite a clear-eyed look at these issues, like this idea that, you know, false rape claims are very prevalent or I think those kind of clashing memories

that Lisa and Sam have. And I thought it would be more interesting, but also just more straightforward in a way if I could remove gender from that dynamic. And I really loved your question about, I suppose, how do we move forward? And you're right. And you said this already, you know,

you said rape is such a strong word. And I think that's very true. I think a lot of people who have been raped don't, you know, either don't see it as rape or will say I was assaulted. And I definitely think that the people who have perpetrated those crimes, that many of them do not see it in that way. And actually, that's not always there. I mean, I think because a lack of education and this sort of portrayal of rape,

as you said, again, you know, like in a dark alleyway at knife point that when it is something that happens in a room at a party with two people who know each other um and there's a lot of drink taken and and that maybe someone says no and someone else kind of ignores that it's actually can be very difficult for the two people involved in that scenario to even understand what happened in that room as sexual violence and I think that this squeamishness around talking about sex the squeamishness of it talking about rape culture particularly in Ireland where there is still not you know a comprehensive inclusive sex education in all schools you know regardless of religious orientation it's really failing I

think those young people to sort of give them the tools that they will need to navigate um but with it was after silence i i came i i became really interested in the idea of restorative justice often you know i think people are kind of uncomfortable with the idea of restorative justice because they feel as if it's letting abusers off the hook and of course then there are legitimate concerns when it comes to the safety of survivors and the comfort and safety of the survivor in that situation is always that has to come first and not every survivor is going to want to have that conversation or wants to be part of that

conversation or you know is anyway comfortable with the idea of restorative justice but actually for a lot of people and so many of them didn't want their partner or the father of their child to go to jail they just wanted the abuse to stop and if they could have seen a way forward where, you know, the person learned some sort of, I suppose, a mechanism to control their own behavior and could, you know, be reintegrated back into the family unit and that they could move forward without this kind of, you know, I suppose, specter of fear and violence hanging over them all the time. But a lot of them would have really loved that. And then for others I think often they say all I want is an acknowledgement all I want is an acknowledgement of what happened to me because the denial of it and the gaslighting which I think is a really overused term but I think it's it's the the invalidation of our experiences it just feels like another layer of trauma on top of

everything that we've experienced um so far so i think the education of young people particularly young men i think is going to be key in trying to make this shift over the next generation um and then you know i often say like you know in ireland you know we have And then, you know, I often say, like, you know, in Ireland, you know, we have the jail time for people who have committed these kind of crimes is can often feel like devastatingly minimal for people who've gone through the judicial system. And I often say, if these people are going to be back on our streets within two or three years, how do we want them to reintegrate into society? Do we want them to reoffend or do we want to take steps to ensure that the risk of that is as low as we can sort of attempt to make it?

And I think that really is at the core of restorative justice as well. It's so interesting what you were saying just about the the desire for validation because I think it's actually such a simple thing yeah but really that's what undercuts all of this because like you said there are so many instances where you will feel violated by something and you don't know if you have the right to feel violated by it and so that's another like you said it's another level of trauma where you're questioning your own recollection you're questioning your own memories you're questioning

your own sanity and it's like all you want is for someone to just turn around the person who did it to you that's really yeah the only thing that's gonna that's gonna do it is to say this happened and I suppose the hard thing about that is that and gonna do it is to say this happened and I suppose the hard thing about that is that and like I think you really see that with Samantha and Idol is that we all think of ourselves as good people and I think when someone comes to you and says you have done this to me this has caused me enormous harm often I think people's reaction is to get completely it gets so defensive and it's easier to say you're a liar because I think actually like that that idea of of um I suppose I don't know sort of like unpicking that way in which we view ourselves or something that

comes along and contradicts our idea of our ourselves as a good person can actually be so incredibly destabilizing but I think for the person themselves that it is easier just to say no you're you're a liar and I think it's really and I suppose again I'm doing a lot of work with restorative justice Ireland um it's kind of lobby group here and it's not perfect and it's not for everyone um and i think it'd be really simplistic to say this is you know the kind of the silver bullet um but i think for a lot of people there is healing it that's all we've got time for for today thank you everyone uh for listening if you are a new listener to millennial love you can subscribe to us on apple podcasts spotify acast or wherever else you get your podcasts Please do comment and leave us a rating too

so that more people can find us. And if you are more of a visuals kind of person, you can now watch Millennial Love on independent TV and you can keep up to date with everything to do with the show on Instagram. Just search Millennial Love. Acast powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend. I'm Jessie Kirkshank, and on my podcast, Phone a Friend,

I break down the biggest stories in pop culture. But when I have questions, I get to phone a friend. I found down the biggest stories in pop culture. But when I have questions, I get to phone a friend. I phone my old friend Dan Levy. You will not die hosting the Hills after show. I get thirsty for the hot wiggle. I didn't even know a thirsty man until there was all these headlines. And I get schooled by a tween. Facebook is like a no, that's what my grandma's on. Thank God Phone a Friend with Jessie Crookshank is not available on Facebook. It's out now wherever you get your podcasts. Acast helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com.