Love Lives - Caroline O’Donoghue: ‘I shouldn’t believe in love at first sight’

Episode Date: June 22, 2023

This week, we’re delighted to be joined by Sentimental Garbage host and New York Times best-selling author, Caroline O’Donoghue. We discuss her latest book, The Rachel Incident, which follows a young woman’s crush on her professor, and a subsequent plot to seduce him. We loved talking with Caroline about the book, as well as the hidden power of channelling female rage in writing, the Taylor Swift phenomenon, and the best food to boost productivity.Check out Love Lives on Independent TV and all major podcast platforms, and follow us on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/millenniallove. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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I shouldn't believe in love at first sight but I think I do because that's what it felt like and I've never felt it before. Why do you think you shouldn't believe in love at first sight? Because it doesn't feel like a smart thing to believe in. site. Because it doesn't feel like a smart thing to believe in. Hello and welcome to Love Lives, a podcast from The Independent where I, Olivia Petter, will be talking to different guests each week about the loves of their lives. Today I am delighted to be joined by one of my favourite authors and podcasters, Caroline O'Donoghue. She is the New York Times bestselling author of Promising Young Women, Scenes for Graphic Nature, and the All Our

Hidden Gifts series. She's also the host of the wonderful Sentimental Garbage podcast, and her latest novel for adults, The Rachel Incident, comes out in June. I absolutely adored it, and I can't wait to ask Caroline all about it today, as well as hearing about the loves of her life. So let's get started. Welcome, Caroline. Hello, Olivia. So nice to be here. Thank you so much for joining us.

So I have been a fan of yours for a while, as I said before. I think I might have messaged you after your first novel came out, Promising Young Women, which I just loved. It came out a few years ago. When did that come out? That came out in 2018. I just loved it and I just loved it came out a few years ago when did that come out I came out in 2018 I just loved it and I just loved the Rachel incident as well so could you start us off by telling us what the Rachel incident is about sure the Rachel incident is us it's a strangely enough it's a period novel set set in 2010 um which is weird to think that like now as millennial women

we're kind of old enough to look back on our youth as being of a time period yeah and the kind of defining things of this time period is that it's um you know this character called Rachel she's 21 years old she's living in Cork City which also happens to be where I'm from and she's working in a bookshop it's kind of the um the financial crash of 2008 has really started to trickle down to her and the people she loves her parents uh are going broke the bookshop that she's worked in all through uni it's like you know the kindle is coming book sales are down it all seems quite bleak and she's really um you know for a young person she's old before her time at the beginning of the

novel and um then she meets james who is is a Christmas temp who is made permanent by sheer force of charisma and he is a closeted guy originally from the UK who is now living in Ireland and these two meet each other and fall deeply in love a deep platonic love that lasts the rest of their lives. And what happens next really is that this, their first kind of bonding ritual, their kind of, their blood-packed thing is like every best friendship needs that one big crazy act to solidify its longevity. It is, James realises that Rachel has a massive crush on her English professor, this man called Dr. Byrne.

And Dr. Byrne has a very unreadable book coming out that is like an academic book that's trying to have crossover appeal, which is the worst kind of book. And is trying to be like the Simon Schwarma of Ireland, but is failing. And anyway, they put on a kind of a book launch in the shop and they think that she's going to like seduce Dr. Byrne at this book launch. And then what ends up happening at this book launch is very different to what they expected. And it ends up sort of propelling the novel in a totally different direction of sort of

friends and lovers and betrayal and unpaid internships and um everything that we associate with our early 20s I think yeah it's great it really captures that kind of spirit of of being in your early 20s in particular you said at that time like it's so weird to call it a period piece but you're so right yeah it very much is um but I know that so you originally started writing a different book. Yeah. And you were on deadline for that. And that's kind of how this story came to be. So tell us a little bit about what happened there and how you ended up shifting from one book to another. Yeah.

So it's this thing where, so I wrote two novels for adults with my publisher, Virago. And I was contracted to write a third one. And in the meantime, I got swept up in doing a trilogy for young adults. It's kind of my other career. And I love it, but it's so rewarding, but it's also so demanding because when you're writing a trilogy,

what people don't know is that you have to get all those books on the shelves within that first generation of the first set of young people who are reading it you know so something that you're interested in at 13 you may not be interested again at 16 or 17 you know so you have to really grab that first generation and so my adult publishers were very understanding about the fact that you know okay you just need these sort of three or four years to work on that we won't be too pushy but you do always a

novel and so the novel I had outlined to them was um very much a kind of a black mirrory type thing um focusing very much on sort of commercial capital feminism you know something I think you and I are probably very familiar with and had like bumped off the edges of and I felt was a real defining thing of the sort of um you know the late sort of me too in the post-me too era up until now um and I worked in an office that was like a you know built itself around that ideology that something can be feminist and commercial at the same time and I wanted to really explore that using a kind of a black mirror type of framework. And I worked on this for years and I was 75,000 words into this novel. And I cared very much about the characters and I really had it all plotted out and everything.

And then a bunch of things happened. One of which was, I think, you you know if you've ever probably had this experience where a piece of work that you keep picking up and putting down loses momentum really easily and that's just you know often you can get that momentum back by just going on holidays with the book kind of thing you know going to a writer's cabin and really focusing on it and what was happening with me was like the momentum was not coming back because I realized that there is a type of book that I really enjoy that is not my destiny to write. That's so interesting. I've been speaking to a lot of writers about that as well, about how, you know, it's weird because I think you're often told to write the thing you want to read. But actually, it's sometimes it's like I want to read

books that I could never possibly write and that's part of the appeal that's part of it right like so I think what I wanted to write was the kind of um millennial mean girls sort of thing of like mean girl having mean thoughts and uh fuck society and like that kind of thing that I love it when like an Atessa Marshfeg does it but it's just not my destiny I don't think um and like I'm quite like a buoyant person and um writing that sort of prose was really depressing me like was really like on top of it being a depressing landscape anyway like this was February 21 so it was like that second year of the pandemic where Christmas had just been cancelled and like the weather was awful and it was just so cold and everyone was so just depressed and you're writing this quite depressing book not like not depressing in itself but like depressing characters I guess

um was just bombing me out and then the third thing on top of that was I realized that like a novel what that central message was essentially oh no the phones was so like not the vibe yeah it was like like literally technology was the only thing holding our entire society together for that two-year space like we just had this like global mass vaccination that was largely organized by like you know alerts on your phone and like that kind of and like that was kind of amazing and like you people were staying in contact with their families through zoom and doing the zoom quizzes and it was the sort of society was being held together technology and it just felt really inelegant and the wrong time to write a novel that's like oh no the phones oh no the

technology i love that cell oh no the phone but it does really capture i know what you mean yeah yeah and so i sort of like it was like okay my publisher was it was was February. And Pablo was like, we really do need this by May. You know, so I was like, fuck. So I sort of set myself the task. I was like, I have to write a novel that A, of all makes me really happy. And B, of all, I have literally no excuse to open a single Google Chrome tab to sort of research. Because that was another thing that went wrong with Oh No The phones yeah was I was constantly going on these research rabbit holes

because with stuff like tech there's always more to research and you can get lost if you want to um and so so I was like okay I'm gonna set it during a time and a place that I know inside and out and that for me was 2010 in Cork which was the year before I emigrated and I wanted to get back to a really happy hopeful time which was when I was living with my best mate Ryan in a crappy little house and we were working in retail you know and that became the basis of what was a real saviour for me like it was such it was so much fun to write there's a lot of dramatic upsetting things that happen in the book but ultimately it's I hope it's joyful read yeah it is I think

reading it you can really tell that this is something you had a lot of fun writing yeah and you can imagine that it came quite easily to you because it does all just it's very very snappy and sharp and very like a lot of social commentary but it does feel very natural and it feels very much like having listened to your podcast and you know read your work before it feels very much like it it's it is your natural kind of voice and you're kind of like quippy tones and stuff it's great and I think everyone who's a fan of your work will love it um I want to ask you about one of the themes in the book without giving too much away but because for anyone who's read Promising Young Women and you know this book as well there is a kind of a

parallel in terms of like age gap relationships that you write about and power dynamics and not necessarily even between men and women but just that whole difference of you know when you are someone younger who is going out with someone much older than you or even if you just have a crush on someone much older than you like um Rachel does on her professor and I think that's such an interesting area to explore so I was I was intrigued to see you returning to it in this kind of different way in this book what is it about that that you find fascinating and ripe for fictionalizing do you think it's so interesting because uh when i wrote promising young women i was 26 and um i was full of like rage like and and also I wanted you know

many feelings but rage was a huge part of it and it was like everything that I had sort of seen in sort of corporate creative London sort of things and like the kind of um sexual dynamics I saw at play in all these offices I had worked in and I was quite rageful about that and the sort of romantic interest slash antagonist of Promising Young Women is like he's quite literally monstrous do you know what I mean like it's borrowing from like horror literature in a very like deliberate way and um i really had fun with that and like it was a great thing of kind of picking apart those sort of gothic vampire type tropes and uh working with that but then by the time i got to rachel um i'd

lived a lot more life um a lot more like six years more life but in in in that in this time going like 26 and 33 felt like very different ages you know you'd grow a lot more like six years more life but in in in that in this time going like 26 and 33 felt like very different ages you know you'd grow a lot during that time um and i was i kind of realized that like even though fred burn from the rachel incident and um clem from promising young women they're both men in positions of power who are kind of abusing their positions of power in order to get sort of drink from the fountain of youth but fred i feel like my attitude toward the character had changed like i've caught he's not the same as clem but it's like he he's just a guy you know i mean he's just like it's just like what it is a human man who like is sort of He's a human man who like is sort of crumbled under the weight of just A of all being closeted and, you know, being a man of a certain generation who's closeted, who feels like he's missed the boat people I knew of who were out and maybe you were the same were people who didn't have any choice but to be out because

they're they couldn't pass yeah yeah and Fred is somebody who can pass so therefore has never been forced to come out and so has in a sense been living a lie for a long time and the delicacy of that and the sadness of that and the sort of you know that that's um I felt a lot of empathy for him even though he does horrible things um and so I think the main differences between those two relationships is my sort of maturity I think you can really tell though from reading it and it's interesting what you said about writing the first book from a place of rage because I'm also now wondering if my because I'm writing my first novel now yeah like there's a lot of rage motivating this story I'm wondering if like as a female novelist your first piece of work maybe rage because I mean you know we as

women have so much rage in us anyway that we're never allowed to express and constantly told to kind of yeah kind of keep keep quiet and keep to ourselves i wonder if when you are writing a novel as a woman that's like your first outlet to be like this is all my hunger and this is what i have to say that i feel like i can't express in my real life because no one will let me and i can't express in non-fiction because you know i'll get criticized for it it's so interesting i think there's a lot because like um uh it's like we've all everyone in the world has had an idea for a novel or a movie right like everyone everyone's capable of coming up with like a pretty good plot kind of thing but it's like what are the things in your subconscious or in your emotional life that nudges

you toward needing to write this story and like i think the propeller has to be a very strong emotion and i think if you've never written a novel before maybe rage is the one that will do it you know and as you get further along in your career it can simply be like extreme curiosity or affection or whatever but like maybe to get that first one over the line because it's such a weird thing to do to write a novel like to like just come out with like i think i'm capable of inventing a whole landscape and many people in it and it will be important and people will care and pay 69.9 on the hardback for it it's a nuts thing to think about yourself so grandiose and self-important

so maybe rage has to be the propelling emotion yeah it's so interesting um and the central relationship in the rachel instance as you kind of mentioned, is this platonic friendship between a straight woman and a gay man. And I know you kind of drew on some of your own experiences. You mentioned that you lived in a kind of flat in Cork with your friend Ryan, who you think in the back of the book in the acknowledgements, I always read the acknowledgements. I read them. I read them too. I have a very strongly back acknowledgements that they're a short story at the back of the book. They are. They often are. And when they're not treated like that, I get very annoyed. It's like a list of names. I'm just like, that's not a story.

No, there's always so much going on there. So I wanted to ask you about how you go about drawing from real life stories in your fiction, because, you know, it is something that is constantly weaponized against female writers and constantly told, you know, oh, so this is basically a biography or this is basically about you so how do you go about navigating that while also still pulling from real things that have happened? Yeah I think about this a lot because I don't think the Rachel incident is any more or less autobiographical than any of the five novels I wrote previously

and three of those novels were supernatural fantasy for teenagers but I was I've drawn so much from my own teenage life in those books that they they function as memoir just as much as the Rachel instant does just as much as prominent you know I mean like you've never you're always drawing from somewhere kind of thing um and I thought i think that like truth in novels is a bit like alcohol and wine where it's like 13 is probably too little yeah 15 is about right 16 and people go nuts where it's like 16 and people are like what's true what's real we're drunk on this amount of like funny of like truth you've given us and you're like it's really not that much more than normal yeah you know i because i think about

this a lot as well and i think the thing that is true mainly would be the emotional truths because exactly and that's not necessarily saying this you know this factually happened but of course if you're writing a story and you're coming at it from a place of drawing from things that have happened to you it doesn't necessarily mean you're writing exactly what happened to you but yeah it's about the feeling that you had and the and the the reaction that you had and the kind of sensory experience and you know obviously that's a really really good place to draw from for a story yeah yeah totally and like the so the the plot of the rich lindsay is totally invented and i think i think that the character of rachel she's

a lot of like biographical things in common with me in terms of like when and where we were born and when we moved to london but i i think of us as being very different people but the emotional stuff of like that's how we lived like we we went out that much we went to those bars we did this kind of thing this is sort of how I acted with men at that time kind of thing that sort of like soupy of like experience and ambience I think is probably yeah quite true to life um before we move on to talking about the loves of your life which I'm really excited to ask you about um Before we move on to talking about the loves of your life, which I'm really excited to ask you about, I have to talk to you about Sentimental Garbage.

Okay. I mentioned at the top, I just love it so much. I do too. It's so great. And I know that obviously during the pandemic, you did these episodes with Dolly Alderton about Sex and the City. And they all sat there and they were like, can you remember how we resolved yeah the Miranda thing oh I think that they she went out to Charlotte and said oh I'm moving to LA I'm in love and they all just

went yeah I think that probably not just that but I think we can just do that yeah but it needs to be done by Thursday so let's just get over the wire the podcast was already pretty popular but when you did those sex and city episodes it kind of took it to another level i think because it was a something that people so desperately wanted to kind of absolve themselves into at that time like that really fun criticism of like this cult show that no one's ever really done before i don't think there'd ever been anything like i mean i mean i know people have done podcasts about sex and the City before but I think the way that you guys did it was quite unique and it came and it came at a really really good time when people like I said really wanted

that but I wanted to ask you about how it felt to have that level of attention and that level of listenership and engagement and then you know make like the demands that they were then making of you afterwards to be like can you please do it for this show and do it for this show and kind of how that how that kind of felt and how you navigated that it's so fascinating because I think I mean I'm not I'm not a dummy in that like I knew that you know when me and Dolly had this plan to do kind of a mini series and we had it in the we've been talking about for such a long time like we came we were on holidays at some point and we came up with a

phrase like talking about Sex and City for the great American novel literally and that just made us laugh as a sentence so much um but but like it then it obviously was the pandemic that took it you know we literally had the time to spend like three or four hours a week on the headphones um but i knew that obviously you know that when your friend dolly all of a sudden is going to sign on do a little mini series with you that way more people are going to listen to it because she's like a phenomenon you know and also the um the high low had just finished and so people were like desperate they were like they had this sort of like weekly fix of Dolly for years and then it was gone.

And then suddenly she was back talking so much. So that really played into it as well. And so even though I was like, I don't really care about that stuff because, you know, she's one of my best mates and she's like one of the most fun people to talk to in the world. And there was still always a part of me that was like uh a little bit a little bit nervous because I'd never gotten that much attention before there was a kind of a slight nerviness that like she would be Barbie and I would be Skipper kind of thing which is kind of true but also it's fine and then um and so there was a lot of like it was like a lot of tension

but it was like really nice because like I feel like I have something I think like it's so nice because there was all this um all this content that got absorbed and during the pandemic uh that changed a lot of artists lives like i remember this is like a horrible comparison to make and i'm not saying i'm this person but i remember seeing an interview with anya taylor joy and she was like yeah no one knew who i was and then the queen gambit came out during the pandemic and then suddenly like a year later i'm out and like people are people are out again and then people are running up to me in the street and she was like so this fame the fame happened in like a capsule where it didn't bump off of me and now suddenly it is bumping off of her and it's such there was no trickle down of like a slow flat

so going into love island and coming out and having yeah yeah it's like that it's just like that it's just like that and it is a bit like that in that um yeah that like i went into the pandemic as like somebody who was like you know pretty like well reviewed um it has somewhat of a following but like not you know not a character in people's lives to then coming out of the pandemic being a character in people's lives and having people coming up to you when you to you on a night out and do people come up to you yeah and they want to talk about sex and dishes yes that's quite sweet it's really sweet yeah and then I remember when it was over when when we finished the mini-series I remember thinking like oh now I'm gonna get I'm gonna carry on and do other things and um talk to other people but I'm just gonna get all these one-star reviews saying bring Mac Dolly

you know but that never actually happened. You know, they stuck around for Skipper. I mean, it's great. I love every episode and I love the breadth of subjects that you talk about. There was one just on the word like. Yeah. And then, you know, you've done all sorts of, it's so interesting, the kind of, because the premise is like talking about, I'm now very conscious of using the word like,

the kind of because the premise is like talking about I'm now very conscious of using the word like yeah it's always talking about things that we're normally made to feel sort of ashamed of for liking and enjoying the kind yeah and so but it's interesting how far you can take that subject matter and there's so much that totally like after we did Texas City I was like what if everything could be a great American novel? Yeah, it is. And like the way that you talk about every subject, it's really fun to apply all of that kind of critical analysis. The one you did recently on Midnight is the Taylor Swift album. That one, I'm a big Taylor Swift fan. That was great. If anyone watching this does not listen to that, you definitely should. I was afraid that one was like a bit unhinged i was like maybe that's why i love to yeah people really responded really well because i think people do have their unhinged feelings about terry swift yeah

and me included but like um the yeah i remember thinking that like because it was a level of like when we talked about second city we did a lot of like fantasy role play of like here's the kind of like podcast jack burger might have but then i was really conscious when we in general talking about taylor swift that we were talking about real people and like that feels like that hits a bit different and i don't know and so i was a bit nervous that we came across like deranged but actually it was great i think it's great episode no it was great and also like yes she is a real person but what you're you're talking about like taylor swift the phenomenon yeah cult figure you know you're not talking about taylor swift the girl i went and had a cocktail with exactly like it's kind of the the culture around her which there is a huge

and i and i think also with taylor there's this thing as well of like um because she's our age and she's growing up alongside us and we've seen her have these relationships. But we've also had relationships like that alongside her. So we can we sort of we get it. We can project our own experiences of love and romance and disappointment onto her. And she provides a really great canvas for that, which is why I think people get more obsessive of her than anybody else yeah definitely I think I mean I could just I'm gonna stop because I will talk to you about Taylor Swift yeah I could do it yeah it's a bit at the end of Mastermind but she says you know nobody wanted to play with me as a little kid yeah so I've been scheming with a

criminal ever since I just think everybody on earth can relate to that feeling do you know me it's so the way that she can do extreme specificity while also being so enormously relatable is um yeah real skill it's crazy this taylor swift keep an eye on her breaking news happens anywhere, anytime. Police have warned the protesters repeatedly, get back. CBC News brings the story to you as it happens. Hundreds of wildfires are burning. Be the first to know what's going on and what that means for you and for Canadians.

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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 jesse crookshank is not available on facebook it's out now wherever you get your podcasts a cast helps creators launch grow and monetize their podcasts everywhere a cast.com acast.com right I'm going to move on to talk about the loves of your life so I'm obsessed with your first one I don't think we have had anything quite like this before so tell us why you have chosen pickles pickles pickles things that are pickled vinegars vinegary things just like anything that sort of hurts your mouth remember being actually one of the first things i bonded with dolly about what pickles pickles yeah yeah totally and yeah i remember for the first like some birthday she just got me

a big jar of them and um uh yeah i just find that um uh you, I've been a writer, a full-time novelist for a while now. And you really need a few, as anyone will tell you, you do, like, I think writers love to hide behind this veneer of like, oh, I'm just a mess and somehow things get done. They're either one or the other. They either hide behind the veneer of like, here's my bullet journaling, here's my post-it wall, here's my use of a clean office, how I get things done. Or they're like, I'm a mess.

I don't even know how. But we really know that the truth is somewhere in the middle. Yeah. Like most people have a kind of a pretty structured day and a good internal sense of like what can pick them up

or lift them out of a slump. And for me, the thing that always lifts me out of a slump is just nailing an entire jar of cornichons. I'm going to have to quote what you wrote in the email when we asked about your loves. You said that pickles really help your writing process and that they are for you what cocaine was for Brett Easton Ellis.

So tell me in your writing process, in in your typical writing day how does that look and where where exactly do the pickles fit in where do you find yourself reaching for them question um so yeah yeah when i'm actively writing a novel or a script um the the days are quite structured so um i try and get up i try to like hit my desk at around the same time where my partner is hitting his so we're not like crazy out of sync you know you want to live you want to run a house you know um and so tends to be coffee from around the corner in the morning we go together you know it is nice it's nice me and him in the dog go for a coffee in the morning um take a walk around the block and then we're both at our desks by just after nine um and then you know work till sort of one ish go for a

proper walk with the dog come back um and maybe get an hour of work done and then that kind of thing like okay now i just have nothing to live for nothing to think about and my brain doesn't work and so I think I might be like allergic to the pickles is what's happening is that so the left one they can't it's either a jar of cornichons or a family bag of space raiders um whichever is more to hand um and I just like just really like standing up in the kitchen just really trying to feel something but it's like my brain gets hot my face gets warm i can like feel things like really picking up and like i've never been a cocaine person but like it's the same vibe yeah it all gets jittery and then i can i i can get about 90 minutes of like creative work done

off a bag of space. Maybe you are a bit allergic. Maybe. But when it comes to like a deadline time where like I really just have to get something over the line and particularly those three years when I was writing, four years when I was writing the YA stuff, which is so deadline heavy.

Yeah, pickles were just, they really became a coping like this I'm joking that time so your second love is a type of relationship so I'm really pleased you've chosen this because we haven't had anyone choose anything like this before so tell us why you've chosen monogamy and what you meant when you described yourself as a boyfriend girl so this is something that I've had to genuinely come to terms with about my personality because i don't like it about myself um but so i'm getting i'm getting married in the summer it's great you know me and me and gab we've been together almost 10 years and like that's that's

great i'm delighted with that but if i'm i'm delighted with him and so and like temptation was obviously to talk about him here, but I knew that if I did, he'd be very embarrassed by that, you know? And I'd get it wrong as well. And, but the, when I kind of zoomed out, I realized that I do have a bit of sort of shame because I started dating when I was 13

and I didn't stop. Like I, I, like I went out with somebody for six months and then I went out with somebody else for six months and then I just kept leapfrogging and leapfrogging maybe it's probably why I love Swift so much because she's the same way and like I'd say if I were to like it's if I were to really go into the forensics of it like since I was 13 I would say I've probably spent about like less than a year of that time single and I find that very unhealthy and weird and I think when I was younger a lot of it was to do with that I've thought about I've really tried to get to the end of this a lot like because I don't think of myself as being this like terribly codependent person like in in my relationship i'm we're very independent

from each other you know it's not like that but i think part of it is coming from a big family and feeling like you always want to have somebody who's has to be on your side um because my my next brother up he um is it so goes my sister who's 10 years older than me my next brother down is eight years older than me and then next brother down is eight years older than me. And then next brother down is two and a half years older than me. So I always wanted to hang out with him, my next brother up, but he always wanted to hang out with the older brother. And so it was always felt like I never had like my special friend kind of thing.

Maybe that's how everyone feels that way in the family. I don't know. And so I think I always wanted to have my special friends. Like, cause even when I was six, I made my best friend really quickly kind of thing and I was obsessed with her kind of thing and and then when I met Ryan um who inspired the Rachel incident I was obsessed with him and like I just get really obsessed with me and um uh but and then I but I also think that there was something happening and I think I mentioned this in the Rachel incident as well of like one of the reasons it's so attractive to her

to have an affair with her English professor is that she's incredibly sexually curious and she has a huge sexual appetite, but she still is living in the sort of, you know, the leftovers of a very conservative society that is slowly changing into a liberal society. And like, that's a really confusing thing. And as an And like, that's a really confusing thing. And as an Irish woman, it's a really confusing thing

because like, you know, a figure that, you know, is often quoted is that the last Magdalene Laundry closed in Ireland in 1926. And the Magdalene Laundry was a place where women who were either single mothers or just, you know, deemed promiscuous by their own family or their own community were incarcerated for the rest of their lives, essentially, and made to sort of work for the state.

And it was literally the church and the state conspiring to, you know, I think even Louise O'Neill spoke about this on the podcast. So it's a huge piece of furniture that lives in Irish women's heads. 1996. 1996, yeah. So those women are still alive. They're you know it is crazy and um and you know the morning after pill was incredibly expensive growing up I had to use it when I was about 17 and I remember like borrowing a tenner off loads of friends to buy it and you know obviously the abortion thing is a big thing

always knowing when you're getting ready to have sex in your life obviously the abortion thing is a big thing always knowing when you're getting ready to have sex in your life that like that could be a possibility and but that's like all of that stuff that's quite specific to Ireland is also playing against a global cultural context that at that period when we were teenagers was all about you know your Paris Hiltons and raunch culture and celebrity sex tapes so like I was we were it was like such a crossroads of female messaging to be an irish woman during that time growing up during that time and i think how it manifested in me on top of feeling like i was quite lonely in my family was that i was incredibly sexually curious but also really frightened of like what would happen if i was promiscuous

promiscuous in any way and how that manifested was just like i couldn't i would have been so much happier i think if i just had casual sex um but instead i had to be under the sort of guise of being in a relationship all the time so and it would always be like really like i mean sometimes some some lads were nice. Some lads are always nice. And some, some of them really weren't. And, and some of them were just like basically no chemistry unsuitable kind of thing. Um, and, but to constantly have to be living under the guise of like, but it's okay. Cause she's in a relationship, but like then almost becoming like famous among your group

of friends being like, yeah, but you're going out with someone for eight months, really intensely telling everyone you're the, they're the love of your life and then just moving on immediately like it's just it's a bit laughable like it's mad to go back to our friend taylor let's just keep referencing yeah yeah every few minutes because i'm so down with that and what's interesting is that she's like she's moved straight on like she's moved straight on to um and i think that i mean for her it's probably a lot to do with feeling protected i think yeah i think yeah i don't know why um but uh you know a lot of the feedback she's getting from her fans is that like not necessarily even she's moved on too quickly i think people

got over that pretty quickly but it's like the kind of man that he is yeah i don't really know much about that guy maddie maddie yeah no neither do i but i know that people don't like that he's going out with taylor and he's said he's like said a bunch of offensive things yeah um but it's like she's responsible for the things that he said more than he's responsible for the things that he which is always the way is that it somehow becomes her responsibility just because she's dating him, that suddenly she's going to come under fire because of what he's done.

And I think you see that happening a lot. But it's like women being like the guardians of like some kind of moral state. And I just think that hasn't changed. And that's weird to me, you know? I know you've never been on online dating or dating apps or anything like that. So I want to ask how, because I've written a book about, you know yeah I know you've never been on online dating or dating apps or anything like that so I want to ask how because I've written a book about you know the perils of online dating yeah

uh I want to ask how you met your fiance so I was I moved here in 2011 yes 2011 I spent and I remember the feeling I think I mentioned this on the podcast but I was and I remember the feeling, I think I mentioned this on the podcast, but I was like, I remember the feeling of like, because Cork is such a small city and I'd lived there my whole life and gone to university there. But like all these people who I had dated or whatever for a long time were all converging on each other. Like I would see several of them on the night out and finding out that some of them were friends now. And I remember feeling like the claustrophobia. Yeah, that's terrifying. And there's like in the Rachel incident that she does like a terrible thing well depending on your point of view a terrible thing. Yeah. And then she feels like the shame of that follows

her around the place and I never did something like that but I definitely mind a sense of like I feel like I've conducted myself poorly with men and like maybe there's a kind of a narrative out there about me. And so leaving Ireland, I remember being like, oh, they're all dead. Like, they're all dead. Sounds like a line from a Taylor Swift song. My exes are dead. Yeah, totally. Being like, oh, I can just start again in a new country.

And then I, yeah, I actually did date around a little bit um here but it was again pre-internet dating i mean there was okay cupid or whatever but that was it was still very much the preserve of like people in their 30s at first yeah yeah yeah when you were in your early 20s and 11 12 here you still met people at bars and at work which i think is cute um i i then got a serious boyfriend for about three years he was a lovely man um and then I started working in advertising and on the first day of the job Gav um took my photograph for the my staff ID and that's so sweet I know and um I remember I was in this like studio or whatever and

just thinking like oh my god like this is it was just a really I just I don't I I shouldn't believe in love at first sight but I think I do because that's what it felt like and I've never felt it before and what's sort of depressing is that I think it's quite one-sided um and why do you think you shouldn't believe in love at first sight because it doesn't feel like a smart thing to believe in and I'm like and it feels like the kind of thing that legitimizes a lot of poor choices yeah and uh not a great degree of self-knowledge or knowledge about the world fairy tale narratives and yet um yeah and so then um i and well then um i went back to my desk feeling quite sort of shaken up or whatever and then i got a a phone call at my um my desk

and he was like hey sorry um to bother you but i i wiped the memory card by mistake could you come back up and then we went back up and we had a chat for another hour or so and then he sends it to me he was like oh it was bollocks i just wanted to have a chat this is why i always like hearing how people meet because it's never like even though like yes it's lovely you're getting married and you know it's obviously worked out for the best like it's never a straightforward path to that it's always like a wiggly road and and you know I'm single and I you know I'm always complaining about how hard it is to date right now so I'm always interested to hear other people's stories because it gives me gives me faith gives me optimism and it's just like it's it's I guess similar in career journeys in a way like you see someone at the top of their career and you're like

okay but how did you get to that and it's always a wiggly route and I think with relationships it's you know it's not so much wiggly as it's more like yeah it's right over the place and it's it's it's even whatever about suitability it's also about getting like timelines to match up exactly it's timings and actually when you think about the chances of, A, falling in love with someone who loves you back, but falling in love with someone at a time that you're single and when they are single and you're both in the headspace where you want to date. Like there are so many things that need to...

And not just date, but really meet someone that you can really do something. Yeah, and do you live in the same place? Is it going to be easy? There are so many things that need to match up and actually the chances when you whiskle, like, really, really small. Yeah, they're so small. It's a wonder anyone gets born.

You know, like, it's insane. Okay, finally, we have to talk about your third love, who is a musician who you admit to not really knowing that much about. I suspect that's not true. But tell us why you've chosen Paul Simon. Yeah, no, I actually, I really don't know very very much about him I know he's got a couple of wives and he would carry Fisher for a bit um which is cool but um I just find that like do you ever have this where with musicians where they just keep coming to you and finding you at

the right time in your life um and first of all i think the way he writes is how i would love to be able to write like i because i think you can tell from his lyrics that he's like writing to amuse himself almost like you can call me out as such a bonkers song but it's always this thing where he is writing in this way that's kind of a bit mad. But when you drill down into it, it actually makes total sense. You know that thing where he looks around and around and he sees angels and the architecture and spinning in infinity. And that's the thing of being in a new place and looking up and that's how it feels. And I remember years ago I went to Graceland, Elvis' house. Years ago, I went to Graceland, Elvis's house,

and that song, Graceland, meant an enormous amount to me because it was the favourite song of my friend who at the time was dying and is now dead. And it was a song that we always sang together and it was really meaningful. But I was in Graceland and I was thinking about that song and there's a line in that song that says um uh i'm looking at ghosts and empty sockets i'm talking about ghosts and empties and i thought it was so weird because like you're walking through graceland and it's like a historical site but it's also from the 1970s do you mean it's like a historical site. But it's also from the 1970s.

Do you know what I mean? It's so weird because in this continent, we're so used to old things and like walking through palaces and castles and old structures. But America is so new and so young. And also it doesn't have like, it doesn't have an Arthur's Seat or a Stonehenge, really, because it destroyed all of that. Like with its genocide against the native americans they don't know anything about it they're just like here's the stuff we've made and so it's like it's so weird to walk through a house that's like a spiritual place where people come together and like cry and like feel things but also you're looking at electrical plugs in the wall it's so weird and like like and and it was weird to be like oh Paul Simon thought it was weird too you know and and I just think that's so incredible and then when I was writing

the Rachel incident um it was such a hard time to just get out of bed you know because it was you could you could have not put on clothes you got a whole period of time and no one would have known and that lack of accountability was was really eating away at the souls of people like it was just a slobby sad time and um I remember finding the song Cecilia which is to see yeah you're breaking my heart I love it so much and it just like I used to play it every single morning when I sat down to my desk to write Rachel and to get me in the mood and just sort of like a bit like the pickles just like get my sort of blood flowing and my heart pumping and like able to feel joyful about the world and I feel like I wouldn't be able to he's like my greatest writing inspiration even though I don't know anything about him and he also he's just like

gotten me through a lot of difficult points in my life yeah I mean I loved what you said about him when we asked you who your loves are you said how he's an artist that can both rise to meet me in my sadness but also cheer me up and force me outside outside of the house and outside of myself and I really love what you wrote because I think it really captures a what is so brilliant about your brain and the way that you write but I also really related to it because, you know, like I said, as someone who writes and spends a lot of time in their own house, talking to their cat and in their own head, writing is quite a maddening thing.

It's a very isolating thing. You spend a lot of time alone in your own thoughts, in your own head, ruminating on things, inventing things, drawing from, you know, emotional truths and things that have happened to you. How do you go about doing that and maintaining a modicum of A, sanity and B, just like reality and like a sense of what's going on outside of the house and outside of your head? How else do you kind of navigate that? It's tough, isn't it? Because I find that like, yeah, when i'm when i'm sitting down with the work like i really i really enjoy our job you know i'm you know it's

amazing yeah it's amazing and and and i but dragging yourself away can be hard but what is worse when the job is not does not feel like it's good for you, is when you're out and you're in nature and, like, you talk to your cat, I want my dog, you know, that's how I decompress or whatever, and I can't think of anything but myself, you know? It's not even that I'm thinking intensely about the characters or, like, what's going to happen next or setting. I'm just, like, like you know answering fake interview questions in my head i'm like imagining like controversies that may arise after my dealing with an issue

in a book i'm like i'm it's just this fucking endless self-involved boring self-chatter that is like the it's like hannah horvath to the power of like your worst self that's when i don't like it when you can feel yourself stepping outside the imaginative creative process and instead you're in this weird ego spiral of like well i see so and so on instagram has gotten some kind of list that i haven't got like that is gross and not good yeah it's awful I think it's so but it's so easy to get seduced into that kind of world and then it becomes like a downward spiral and it's not just being stuck in your head it's also like you said being on Instagram and looking at what other writers are doing and comparing it to yourself and it's like I think

you really need very kind of sturdy tools to get you out of your own head totally and like for me the only thing that really does that is exercise I think exercise is a really good yeah it's great it just forces you to think of something else and you're thinking about your body I try to meditate I've never really been able to no I wish I was like oh I just meditate I just can't do that but even like it's really hard when you're exercising to not go back to that space in your head like it's i find that um i've sort of gone on kind of a intermittent fasting with social media where i am allowed to have instagram on thursdays and part of sunday oh that's a good idea you know sometimes i break it but i try and like limit it basically and i just delete instagram for the rest of the week and re-download it when i need to post

about the podcast for example um i get there's times when i'm good at it in terms of i'm bad at it and um also it's like i need to i need to be dieted with podcasts as well because there is definitely i am really waiting for the study to come out that really says that like podcasts are making people depressed interesting why do you think it's because we're constantly listening to something and not yeah i think i think music is better for you than podcasts yeah like if we're going to rank distraction techniques or whatever i think list bouncing around listening to paul simon or whatever and like thinking about angels and the architecture is probably a more mentally healthy process then like i'm gonna listen to two women in america review romey and michelle's high

school reunion like and just like why because and i realize that i'm craving this content as well but i also think that i get into when i'm not in great mental spaces I just chain these things and I'm not really yeah listening to it I'm just I just like the chatter in my ear yeah I'm not I'm not really committing to listening to it I'm not really thinking my own thoughts either I'm just in this nether space of floating around my neighborhood not feeling great about my life or the world yeah well that's what I think the problem is is if you're constantly outsourcing things and you're constantly looking for distractions, you're not sitting with, you know, just...

You're not really achieving deep thought on anything. No, and you're not really present in any moment. You're constantly elsewhere, whether it's like in another person's conversation or, you know, whatever. And I don't think that is good for your brain. No, no. I'm trying to more and more now um when i go on like walk the dog like ringing someone yeah yeah yeah yeah i think that is probably a big help even though it feels like we're getting further and further away from yeah chatting on the phone it's weird it shouldn't like i know

whenever i go for a walk if i don't listen to music and i don't listen to a podcast and i don't call my mom i'm like oh I'm quite proud of myself. I just did. I know. Total silence. It's pathetic. I know. It's so pathetic.

It's one of those strange world we live in. Yeah. Anyway, that is all we've got time for. Thank you so much, Caroline. Oh, this has been so good. I've loved it. It's been so nice to talk to you. That's it for today.

Thank you so much for joining us. You can listen to Love Lives on all major podcast platforms you can also watch us on independent tv and all social media platforms and on all major connected devices i will see you soon bye 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 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 Jesse crookshank is not available on facebook it's out now wherever you get your podcasts