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.”