Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Irish writer of a dozen bestselling novels, known for modern, witty fiction with over 35 million copies sold.
On the island
Eight records
about trying to fill that internal hole with all the different things, you know, with alcohol, with relationships, with clothes. It's beautiful and powerful.
When I was about three I used to sing it. Are you a good singer? I am a terrible singer, but my mother was really proud that I knew the words to a song and she thought I was really advanced and she still talks about it. So for that reason alone, because it made my mommy proud.
It's Message in a Bottle from the Police, which when I was about 16 or 17, they were my group. They are my teenage years. And it was a time when, you know, I was very hopeful that adulthood would make me feel okay about everything. So this is a very hopeful song.
He didn't write it, but it was written during the recession of the eighties. And I I just love him because he's such a champion of those who have it hard. I find it very moving, and he really articulates how I feel because I've always been left of centre and he he does it so well.
I grew up with Sister Sledge, but I love my family. Well, I have two sisters, but I have sisters-in-law. I have a niece, I have a mother. I see my family every Friday. We go to my mother's house for a kind of a very chaotic dinner, and there are like often up to 15 of us, and there are babies, and nephews, and teenagers, and old people, and it makes me so happy. I love them.
I've picked Tears Dry on Their Own, but it could have been any song from that album. And I picked it because, even though it's a sad song, I have such a happy memory. 2007, I was in my car driving down to Wicklow on a Saturday evening. It was sunny, the song was on my car radio, and I was singing. And I just remember being in my life and in my body and in that moment and just being so, so happy.
You Have Been LovedFavourite
I used to listen to this song at the worst of my times. The mother in this has been bereaved, her son is dead, and she's still trying to find comfort in her faith. And I had no faith religiously, but I had had faith in my loved ones and stuff. And it was that feeling of when nothing works.
It's September, the song for lots of reasons. I love autumn. The 1st of September is the happiest day of the year for me. And the year 2014, when I started to get well and I was really well really quickly, it was the 31st of August. We were in our sitting room and I realised it was going to be September the next day and I was so happy. So we put on the song and we danced in our living room and I was just so happy. I was back. I was better. Autumn was about to start. It just didn't get any better.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:48I tried to sum up the trajectory of your life. As a writer, and knowing yourself better than I can ever know you, what would you say about yourself?
Chatty Irishwoman writes chatty Irish books and has been very lucky.
Presenter asks
2:19How on earth do you successfully translate that? Which languages are you most surprised that they've been popular in?
Um, Swedish. With any translation it's a complete lottery. Like, you've no idea if the translations are any good or or what they kinda capture from the colloquialisms and my kind of very Irishly constructed sentences. But then language is like Thai, I have no idea. But maybe the stories that I tell are universal, and that's why people in other countries kind of relate to them.
Presenter asks
5:06In terms of the subjects that you write about, caring for elderly parents, dealing with depression, domestic violence, I have this suspicion that how you are categorised, you know, in this phrase popular fiction, well, if ever we could damn somebody with a phrase, that might surely be it. Why do you think you're popular?
The keepsakes
The luxury
Because I'm really quite fond of him, and I'd miss him if I was there on my own.
Because I'm a woman. And because, for good or for ill, lots of women enjoy my books and they relate to them and in my own little way I feel that they are quite empowering and I think that anything that empowers women or makes them feel like hello there could I have some equal pay or how about access to the management jobs anything that makes us uppity has to be slapped down and so if we like something by telling us it's rubbish it makes us feel a bit silly for having liked it in the first place and you know I know so many men will be listening to this and saying but that's not true but like it absolutely is true men have more power and more money and do less work than women and money and power and less work they're nice nobody wants to give them up
Presenter asks
16:04And what was the sign to you yourself, or maybe actually indeed to those around you and who cared about you, that you were drinking too much?
The sign to myself didn't come at all. Because as my addiction got worse, so did my denial. Alcohol was the love of my life. It was my best friend, and in the end, my only friend.
Presenter asks
23:34You posted on your website that you were laid low with crippling depression. What do you remember of that period?
It started quite suddenly. I was at a barbecue one Sunday afternoon, and I started feeling intense anxiety. I couldn't understand it. You know, everything was fine, but everything in me started to speed up, and I started to feel like I was dreaming, like that the people I was talking to weren't real. got worse and worse and I was in the middle of promoting a book and I thought maybe when the promotion ended that the the fear would go away. But it didn't. I had never really experienced anything like it. I stopped being able to sleep. I stopped being able to eat. I couldn't have conversations and it accelerated like the the speediness got worse and worse, and I ended up going into a psychiatric hospital, but I thought I'd feel safe in there and I felt even less safe. So I came out again, went back in again. Then kind of suicidal impulses started and it was very hard to physically stop myself from going through it, like for months and months every day was an enormous effort to not do the acts of wounding myself.
Presenter asks
25:24How on earth did you manage to get out of it? Because you tried it. Goodness knows you tried everything going.
I tried everything. I mean, I did like, you know, every medication. I tried cognitive behavioural therapy, you know, time, couple of spells in a in a hospital, mindfulness, uh, meditation, even went back to mass for a while with my mother. And I would do anything that people suggested, like eating, you know, alkaline food, like blue food, whatever. I did, I did, and nothing worked except the passage of time. And I don't know if that will help people, but it ran its course. It's an illness, and it ran its course.
“I always think I am spent, I am used up. I feel like it's nuclear winter. I have to kind of go off and live my life a bit. And eventually it's like the daffodils in the spring, like pushing through the frozen ground. Like it it eventually comes back, but it takes a while.”
“I was always afraid. Like like fear and shame are my two core emotions.”
“Alcohol was the love of my life. It was my best friend, and in the end, my only friend.”
“I had never really experienced anything like it. I stopped being able to sleep. I stopped being able to eat. I couldn't have conversations and it accelerated like the the speediness got worse and worse, and I ended up going into a psychiatric hospital, but I thought I'd feel safe in there and I felt even less safe. So I came out again, went back in again. Then kind of suicidal impulses started and it was very hard to physically stop myself from going through it, like for months and months every day was an enormous effort to not do the acts of wounding myself.”
“nothing worked except the passage of time. And I don't know if that will help people, but it ran its course. It's an illness, and it ran its course.”