Katriona O'Sullivan

A hundred percent.

But imagine my scars are like healed scabs, you know, that are kind of healing over.

And when you go back to any emotional situation that you've been in, if you sit with it for long enough, you feel the feeling again.

And so it's not that I'm not okay with it because there's nothing I've written that I'm not okay with sharing.

And there's lots of things, Claire, that I've never shared because I'm not okay with them yet.

Everything that's in my book, I'm okay with.

However, you can never go back to painful situations and not revisit the pain.

Like it's not possible, I don't think.

So it's like kind of picking out a scab a little bit and going, oh, that's still sore a little bit.

But it's never like deeply sore.

And I would always say to people,

Do not think that you can go through the vulnerability of telling your story without actually having told yourself your story because that is really irresponsible.

And I've actually seen bad practicing in publishing where someone is in the media because of some mad event that happened to them.

They might have had a sexual assault or they may have been an addict and a publisher will dive in and say, come tell your story.

And that person is not ready because they haven't actually dealt with it.

But because we're in a situation where we want to sell books, it's not very responsible for publishers to publish books where a person is not OK with their story.

you were always bookish weren't you despite everything that was going on the books were always a thing for you yeah always and I was always writing actually so today I went back through I have an old folder and I'd started like stories years ago and I was like oh my god that's actually pretty good I was quite proud of myself always bookish always interested in how to tell a story

Not necessarily just in the written form, but also verbally.

So, yeah, I've always been really bookish.

Yeah.