Caroline O'Donoghue
speaker
100 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Caroline O'Donoghue’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Wow. Many and varied. In case it's not clear to your listeners, I am an Irish person. And there's this whole thing of like, I get to sit on all these amazing literature panels and have people ask me really thoughtful questions about like, what is it with the Irish and storytelling? And to that, and the whole like strong oral tradition thing.
And like, it really hits me that the phrase strong oral tradition is just a sort of a euphemism
Talking shit all day, every day.
I think about this an awful lot. Ireland never really had an industrial revolution.
So going back to the turn of the 19th century. Yeah.
Let me bring you back to the spinning, Jenny. Oh my God. You know, in England and America and Germany, all these different countries, there was like this moment where industrial action happened and where like all kind of populations just became into cities and all that kind of stuff. That never really happened in Ireland. Ireland was always just like, your workplace is your back garden. Yeah.
And there's no entertainment of any kind except for you can walk six miles in the dark to your friend's house to talk shit. And I think that's where all the music stuff comes from. And that's where all this storytelling thing comes from. It really comes from a lack of anything else to do. Like the... The two penny strip show is not coming to Ireland. The Nickelodeon is not coming to Ireland.
What comes to Ireland is like going to your friend's house and telling them a story you heard off somebody else who heard it off a cow, you know? You kind of see that as well with Irish people where it's like they never let the truth get in the way of a good story either. So tales be getting told.
Oh, that's such a good question. So The Rachel Incident is a book about gossip in many ways. So in the opening chapter, this character runs into somebody from her hometown years and years after she's left and is kind of reminded of this piece of gossip that existed about her in her hometown that wasn't true, but she had to live her life as though it were. But I definitely think that...
That is a frequent thing of like when someone tells you a piece of gossip and then the first thing that you think about is like, how much of this can I change and then put into a novel? And I always do feel as well that like you're far more likely to put to...
adopt a situation or a character that you know very little about kind of thing so you can sort of fill in the gaps in your head there has to be like a gap where intrigue can develop naturally where you're just like you know because if I if I know my friend and all of her problems and everything about her then then my brain isn't doing that natural thing where it fills in the gap with sort of interesting lies um and so it's never gonna happen yeah um did you bring a gossip for me
I did bring a bit of gossip for you. So, you know, I live in London, which is a place where people are so gossipy and every single person in London has a story about either the royal family or Mattie Healy.
What side of the class divide are they on in the kind of London social person? And so obviously I can't repeat any of that gossip here because I'll be hung. But so this is a story that I heard at a wedding and I loved it so much. So let me see if I can relay it to you here. Please.
Okay, so I meet this girl at a wedding and even as I met her, she seemed like a kind of a recently recovered shy person, you know? I know exactly what you're talking about. You know what I mean? She's, like, learned the tricks and things and, like, and she's learned how to do it. But you can tell that, like, it's not something that comes, like, super easy to her.
And, like, you could tell with this woman that, like, she was like, oh, she was like, so when I was a teenager, I was super shy. And I was like, yeah, I can guess. And, like, I met her and I was like, immediately I can see that she was, this is, again, filling in the gaps with interesting lies. I can...
I could totally see that she was the kind of girl who probably had like two best friends in school, who she's told everything to, but nobody else in her year group knew she existed, you know, kind of thing. Yes. And she's like super studious and just keeps herself to herself and whatever. And in her, I guess what you'd call your senior year in her last year of school, her family moves.
Well, precisely, Kelsey. They're not going to make her make new friends. What they're going to make her do instead is commute. Oh, no. Yeah, I know. Sad. Very sad for our shy girl. Let's just call her Andy. Poor Andy. Poor Andy. She used to live right in the middle of the city with all of her friends somewhere in the north of England. And now she lives in like the fucking countryside. Right.
And like she has to get like a 45 minute long bus every day to go to school. Yeah. So, you know, she's getting up at six. She's getting up in the dark to go to school. She's coming home in the dark. Her senior year, like, sucks. And then one day she is at the bus stop and a car drives up and it is...
a boy from her year huh and you know how like every every single year group um has like you know you're you're you're sort of russian nesting doll of popular kids and some of them are popular because they're attractive and some of them are popular because they're attractive and rich and some some of them are popular and this is the the smallest nesting doll in the in the very middle they're rich they're attractive and they're really fucking nice
You know those people? Aha, yes. Let's call him, what's your favorite English name? Paul?
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