Author interview: Dizzyingly inventive narrative exploring the nature of time
Caroline O'Donoghue is talking to me on Zoom from a friend's house where she, her husband, and dog are staying while their London home is being renovated.
The last time I spoke to her was ahead of her appearance at the Cork Podcast Festival in September, 2019 — when neither of us had even heard of the video-calling platform, never mind envisaged the central role it would begin to play in our lives just a few short months later.
'Oh God, I know, it was a whole other world ago,' says O'Donoghue as we muse on the disorientation of the pandemic and lockdown.
The concept of time, and the privilege of having it, is explored by the Cork writer in her latest book, Skipshock.
The dizzyingly inventive narrative follows Margo, who is on a train from Cork to Dublin when she slips into another dimension where time is a precious resource and her youth is quickly slipping away. Helping her navigate the brutal new world is the enigmatic travelling salesman Moon.
'On the surface, it's a YA, fantasy sci-fi romance, but it's been about a year since I actually wrote it, and now is that moment where the work meets the world where you actually start to understand why you wrote it.
'Part of it is trying to metabolise my relationship with time and also how traumatised we all feel about that since covid, how we all went through this thing together, and nobody wants to talk about it.'
We all feel like we were robbed of time, and that is a very existentially sickening thing for us. Time is the one resource you can never really get back.
'There are so many moments in this book where Margo, having come from this 24-hour world, she realises that she just sat down to dinner and now, it's the morning, it's nausea-inducing.
'I'm only just now realising what that was all about. I lost the end of my 20s — I went into covid at 29 and I came out 33. It is an interesting phase of life to miss out on,' she says.
Life may have slowed down somewhat during the pandemic, but her career has gone into overdrive in the last few years.
Skipshock is her seventh novel, her pop culture podcast Sentimental Garbage has a huge and committed fanbase, and she is working on the adaptation of her Cork-set novel The Rachel Incident for Channel 4.
O'Donoghue left her home in Rochestown for London in 2011 after graduating from UCC, with the intention of becoming a screenwriter but found it hard to break into the industry.
Years of grafting are now coming to fruition for her but she is still coming to terms with what it means to actually realise your dreams.
'So much of this career has been a struggle. There were years I was working in recruitment, advertising, copywriting, and social media management.
'I was looking at the social media profiles of women who are in the position I'm in now, and trying to find the advice I could use that would make my life more like their life — then to have it is so strange.'
Success in a world where appearance trumps reality
She is also acutely aware of how that success, in a world where appearance trumps reality, might appear to others.
'People like success, but only a certain amount of it, you have to temper it.
'Even now, when I'm posting about something, an event that I need to sell tickets for, or whatever, on social media, I'll have this instinct that's like, well, you better post something silly about the dog, or how you screwed up the other day, just to remind everyone that you're still a person.
'Getting this TV show for Channel 4 has been my biggest dream for years, and now I have it, it's wonderful, but it is still just a job where I log on to Zoom calls every day and talk to some people about what's working or what isn't working or what we need to change.
'It is like the most regular job I've had in years,' she laughs.
While The Rachel Incident, and her other novels for adults, Promising Young Women and Scenes of a Graphic Nature, had elements inspired by her own life, Skipshock inhabits a brilliantly realised fantastical universe.
'Write what you know' is common advice to authors but does it take more effort to write about something beyond your own reality?
'Yes,' says O'Donoghue emphatically. 'I teach a seminar to teenagers about world building, and I say to them that when the hero in a story has to save the world, whether it's Frodo, Katniss, Harry Potter, or whoever, we want to know the world they're saving.'
Making a reader believe the stakes are real is some of the hardest work you can do as a writer, and it's the stuff that you end up revising and torturing yourself over the most.
O'Donoghue's previous YA fantasy series, which began with the tarot-inspired All Our Hidden Gifts, was hugely successful but having such work dismissed is something that O'Donoghue has become used to.
'It's interesting because I sometimes have these conversations and the assumption seems to be that the genre books I write — the mysteries, the fantasies, the sci-fi — that is like the 'Happy Meal' work that I'm doing for money or so my brain can take a holiday, and then the contemporary stuff is the 'real' work.
'Actually, more often, the reverse is true, it's quite fun writing adults having conversations in rooms and watching the potboil of human relationships — there's a natural, logical flow to how things should go.
'But when you're inventing a world from scratch, you have to think about things like religion, currency, transport, burial practices, and all that stuff.
'Some of it will never even make it to the page, but you need to know it's there in order for the world to make sense at all.'
Right now, O'Donoghue is immersed in bringing the Corkonian universe of The Rachel Incident to life for the screen.
She has been collaborating with a team of US writers and producers including Jen Statsky, co-creator of the hit show Hacks, who has also worked on shows including The Good Place, Parks and Recreation, and Broad City.
'It's unbelievable,' says O'Donoghue.
She's wonderful, and has been an incredible mentor in this whole thing for me, she has this amazing comedy brain.
The Rachel Incident follows the adventures of the eponymous protagonist who works in a bookshop in Cork, developing an intense relationship with a colleague, James.
O'Donoghue brought two of the producers over on a flying visit to Cork a few months ago.
'I took them into [legendary bar] The Hi-B. If you are in the city for one day, then that's where Cork is distilled down to its essence,' she says.
Filming will take place early next year, with interiors shot in Dublin and exteriors in Cork. O'Donoghue has been hard at work trying to visualise locations.
'I've been writing scenes set in Cork, thinking where could this be, how could we really use the city to its most dramatic potential?'
She will be heading home for the shoot — the first time she has lived in Ireland for 15 years, something that already has her reflecting on what she left behind and what lies ahead, both personally and professionally.
'Now that I have seven novels under my belt, I've realised all the young people in them are in Cork and anyone over the age of 25 lives in England.
'My portal to youth is Cork. I can't write about being young without writing about Cork and I can't write about Cork without being young.'
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Normal People producers to adapt Cork author Caroline O'Donoghue's novel for Channel 4
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