Novelist Caroline O’Donoghue: ‘Irish women didn’t exist on a global scale – now they’re running the show’

The Irish author and ‘Sentimental Garbage’ podcaster talks to Jessie Thompson about the impact of abortion laws, being compared to the ‘Normal People’ writer, and why you don’t need to go to New York or London to ‘have a renaissance of the soul’

Caroline O’Donoghue: ‘Growing up, Irishness globally was like Colin Farrell and [singer-songwriter] Damien Rice, it was all very male’ (Jamie Drew)

A lot of people feel like they know Caroline O’Donoghue. They might slide into her DMs and say, “Caroline, you dumb f***!” Or, they might ask, “So when are we gonna get dinner?” This is because she has a podcast called Sentimental Garbage, on which she garrulously dissects novels, films and other cultural trends that society has tended to sneer at, from Spice World to Eat Pray Love to the word “like”. She’s the smart pal extemporising in her listeners’ ears as they cook or travel to work, and the boundary between audience member and IRL acquaintance melts away. “They already feel like we’ve had these conversations, which I get with podcasters all the time,” she says affectionately of her followers’ quirks. “It’s such a testament to the intimacy of that art [of podcasting]. They’re so convinced that we’re already best friends.”

I totally get it. O’Donoghue, 33, is also a novelist, and her third book, The Rachel Incident, is set in Cork, where she grew up, in the south of Ireland. Within minutes of meeting her at London’s Barbican Centre, where she is wearing a chic multicoloured jacket and we are regularly accosted by pigeons, I find myself telling her a convoluted anecdote about the time that I went to Cork because my gran was from there. Oh no, someone stop me; I have forgotten she is not my mate. The Rachel Incident, about two skint friends working in retail in the shadow of the 2008 recession, might be more relatable still to her milieu of millennial fans. Although it is not the story of O’Donoghue’s own life, its emotional landscape is real. “The drama of it was totally invented, but the feeling of it… that feels autobiographical, you know?”   

The novel was borne out of nostalgia – the kind necessary for creativity as well as comfort. Mid-pandemic, O’Donoghue was overdue on delivering a book to her publishers Virago (she also writes Young Adult novels for Walker Books, and the punishing deadlines were taking up her time and energy). “I had totally fallen out of love with this other book that I had been writing for so long. I was like, I hate it, I hate what it stands for, I hate all of it,” she explains. With 11 weeks to deliver the Virago novel, depressed by the ongoing lockdowns, she realised, “I had to get back to a place in my head where it was joyful. And what I went back to was a time when I was 20, the year before I emigrated, me and my best friend were living in this s***ty little house and we just had the time of our lives,” she says. “It became part of the novel that you can have a renaissance of the soul and really come alive, and be 20 minutes from your childhood home. It doesn’t always have to be going to New York or London, you can wake up anywhere, as long as the right person is with you.” 

When we meet Rachel, she is older and looking back, having recently had a boon time as a freelance writer due to the appetite for articles about Repeal the 8th, the successful 2018 campaign to overturn Ireland’s abortion ban. As the story unfolds, we learn how she and her friend, housemate and bookshop co-worker James, became entangled with Rachel’s college professor Dr Byrne. The young Rachel is studied and eager for approval: she likes reading “dead women talking glibly about society” and “long paragraphs about rationing and sexual awakenings in France”. In Dr Byrne’s office, she wonders “what I always do when I’m in a small room with a man I’m not related to, which is: are we gonna f***?””

Before she moved to London to try to become a writer, O’Donoghue spent three years working in HMV. This was perhaps the beginning of a still ongoing era when instability hung over the retail sector like a cloud. “When I started working there, it was a cool job,” she says in a cool voice. “CDs, DVDs… yeah!” But things changed, the uniforms became scratchier, and the focus moved onto selling “big ticket items” like speakers. “We were like, this is it! This is the fall from grace! We used to be a cultural institution!” she jokes. Once she had moved to London, O’Donoghue found herself staying on a friend’s floor for six months, progressively downgrading her expectations as she failed to get a job in journalism, or copywriting, ending up in recruitment while running a blog, which eventually helped her get a gig at the now defunct women’s site The Pool. Her first novel, Promising Young Women, about an office relationship involving an abuse of power, was published in 2018, one of the first “post-MeToo” novels out of the blocks. 

Although The Rachel Incident’s setting feels specific to anyone who was trying to enter the job market post-2008, some American reviewers have mistakenly assumed it is set in the 1980s. This is perhaps because, until recently, a woman’s lack of access to abortion – something the novel addresses – felt like it belonged in the past. In a depressing coincidence, the book was bought by Knopf editor Jenny Jackson (who recently published her own novel, Pineapple Street) on the same week that Roe v Wade was overturned. “It’s such a huge part of the Irish female landscape. I’ve never had an abortion but my lack of access to them has defined me psychologically in a huge way,” she says. “You come of age sexually in a place like that, that has access to all the culture of Paris Hilton, Sex and the City – but it’s always shaded with this thing of: if you were to get pregnant, you have to go on a terrifying journey, probably alone, or you’d have to tell your parents, and it would cost lots of money.”   

When [a writer has] filtered through to men knowing who a woman is, I think that’s when true mainstream-ness has happened

Caroline O’Donoghue

The idea of the “Irish writer” is changing, O’Donoghue thinks – and that’s partly because of this issue. “Now we think of Sally Rooney, or all the other amazing people coming up, and everybody is dealing with abortion in some way or another,” she says.  Siobhan McSweeney and Sharon Horgan’s recent awards success (for Derry Girls and Bad Sisters respectively) are just a few examples of how Irish women are finally having their moment. “Growing up, Irishness globally was like Colin Farrell and [singer-songwriter] Damien Rice, it was all very male. Irish women just didn’t exist on a global scale at all. And now they’re f***ing running the show. And it’s so cool and a brilliant thing to be a part of. It makes you wonder if some kind of breakthrough moment happened around Repeal the 8th – I don’t know if we were ready for the world, or the world was ready for us. But it’s all just broken through, you know?” 

Having started her podcast to redress the balance by encouraging critical respect for work made for and by women, O’Donoghue does think things are finally changing. “Women were always reading the bulk of novels in the world, and writing them – I think the industry is really catching up with that,” she suggests. Although she believes something called “special girl syndrome” still exists, whereby only a select few female writers – Rooney, Zadie Smith, for example – fulfil the added metric of “but do men know who she is, though?” O’Donoghue explains: “When [a writer has] filtered through to men knowing who a woman is, I think that’s when true mainstream-ness has happened.” Like all young female authors – particularly Irish ones – O’Donoghue has, of course, been compared to Rooney. “On my gravestone, it will read: for fans of Sally Rooney,” she says with a raucous laugh.  

Sentimental Garbage began in 2018 and has since had over five million downloads. O’Donoghue had the idea for the podcast after rereading a Marian Keyes novel. “I realised that I had a real hunger for reading an essay about it,” she explains. But no such writing existed, so she decided to create it herself. The meaty, freewheeling discussions have played their part in edging things like Bridget Jones’s Diary and Coyote Ugly out of the margins of “chick lit” and “chick flicks”, empowering women not to feel ashamed of the stories that bring them pleasure. “I realised that I actually cared about not just women’s literature, but women’s interests in a very big way,” O’Donoghue tells me. “And I realised, if I could treat everything as if it were a great American novel, what would my world look like?” She adds with glee: “It looks great.” 

‘The Rachel Incident’ is out now, published by Virago