'If things hadn’t been so desperate, I wouldn’t have been forced to leave Cork and make the life I have now'

A “GRATIFYING and accomplished novel” is how Caroline O’Donoghue’s latest book, The Rachel Incident, is described in The New York Times.

It’s her first adult novel to be published in the US (she also writes young adult fiction). The review also says the novel “recalls the fiction of both Sally Rooney and Anne Tyler as the author interrogates the dynamics of power, from academia to publishing houses to bedrooms.”

That’s high praise indeed for this satirical highly amusing novel, most of which takes place in 2010 as the Irish economy implodes amid a global recession.

Originally from Rochestown, a past pupil of Scoil Mhuire and a graduate of UCC, Caroline, aged 33, has been living in London for 12 years. While she found it a hard city to crack, Caroline is now a real success story with six books under her belt as well as an award-winning podcast and a BBC project that she’s working on.

The Rachel Incident has been optioned by Universal Studios with the first episode for television written.

“It hasn’t been green lit by a platform yet and because of the writers’ strike in America, it’s currently on pause,” says Caroline.

You can never promise that it’s going to be made but it’s looking fairly warm.

The novel is “a little bit autobiographical in that it’s based in Cork in 2010 when I was there. Like the novel, I also moved in with my friend in Shandon. That bit is very much drawn from my life. In terms of the actual plot and all the drama that unfolds and the various characters, that’s totally fictional.”

In the novel, the friend is James, a gay young man who isn’t yet out at the start of the tale. He is based on Caroline’s friend, Ryan Farrell. The pair fell in love platonically, having met as temps in a bookshop, and wanted to write about themselves for television.

“We were romantically obsessed with our own kind of story. We’d go up to people we worked with saying they were going to be in our TV show. 

It was absolutely nauseating, annoying stuff. What’s funny now is that while we were sort of nauseating twenty-year olds, we were proved right. I’ve taken all these memories and put them into my novel.

The Rachel character has a crush on a former college lecturer, Dr Byrne, and somehow finds herself organising a book launch in the book shop she and James work in. It’s an academic book that happens to have the word ‘diet’ in the title. Dr Byrne is surprised that his book is garnering the kind of attention that Rachel is giving it. But it’s her ploy to try and seduce this married man. What unfolds is unexpected and very funny.

Caroline was twenty-one when she emigrated to London, with a plan to be a writer. She had no choice but to get out of Cork which was “totally decimated” by the recession.

“It felt like such a desperate time. All my friends were emigrating. It really felt like we were all being pushed out. It was either that or work in a call centre. 

It seemed like a really hopeless time to be beginning your career. But I’m almost grateful now. 

"If things hadn’t been so desperate, I wouldn’t have been forced to leave Cork and make the life I have now.”

While Caroline used to review gigs for a local Cork free sheet, it cut no ice in London “where everyone finds what you’ve done as super parochial, almost a joke.”

Trying to break into the media was difficult.

“London’s media circles are fed by the Oxford and Cambridge system and there’s a great deal of nepotism going on. I don’t really feel very resentful about it anymore because all kinds of societies are cliquey. But I just loved writing. It’s the only thing I’ve ever felt good at or confident about. So I stuck at it and eventually got journalism jobs that turned into novel writing.” (That was after years working in bars, on film sets, in advertising and recruitment). Throughout this time, Caroline continued her blog. She got work writing for a women’s lifestyle website as well as writing for Irish newspapers including a column for the Irish Examiner. With her podcast, ‘Sentimental Garbage’ getting a lot of traction, Caroline said something had to go. She quit writing the column saying that while it was a great platform, it had a flat rate in terms of payment whereas her podcast continued to attract more listeners – and money. With advertising attached to it, it now forms a significant part of her income.

Caroline says she enjoyed journalism, only because she likes writing. “I didn’t have a real hunger for the news or for crafting a story or even for interviewing people. 

I was meant to be a novelist rather than a journalist.

It was through posting some of her unpublished short stories on her blog that Caroline attracted a literary agent. The agent said she had a great talent for fiction and asked her if she’d consider writing a novel.

“That was all the encouragement I needed, that somebody within the industry thought I was talented. So I started my debut novel, ‘ Promising Young Women’. I was twenty-six when I sold that book, twenty-eight when it came out. Since then, it has been a very busy few years.”

Caroline, who will marry her Essex-born boyfriend in Kerry in September, says her friends in London are mostly English and are success stories themselves. For Caroline, it was all down to the economic crash, with its rare silver cloud...

The Rachel Incident is published by Virago. €14.99.