Katriona O’Sullivan: “I felt like a fat bride, and I still hate the wedding photos”
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Professor Catriona O'Sullivan, good morning.
Hello, thanks for having me.
So, Catriona, three years ago, you first sat there telling me about this little book you'd written called Poor.
Yeah.
So Poor has stayed on the bestseller list for the last three years now.
Yeah.
It sold a quarter of a million copies. It spawned a terrific sellout play. It was a memoir people will know about growing up with poverty and chaos and working through all that to become the minute university professor that you are today. So your new book is called Hungry. a biography of my body. And it's about your relationship with your body, a body that you say in the book feels alien to you sometimes. And it's about your hunger for love, food, safety, even achievement. And then that hunger as well to be thinner, to shrink yourself, as you say. And it's so much story of what you put yourself through to kind of to feel, I suppose, enough down to getting a gastric band. Can I say, I think you've done it again.
This book is so good and so pertinent. It is very honest and it is very raw. And I'm also conscious that for you, talking about it like this is probably going to feel different to writing it. So I'll be guided by you here. If you're not comfortable with anything in the moment, OK, that's fine. We'll move on.
Yeah, of course.
We know each other well enough. So would you tell me first about Little Katrina up to the age of... Six or seven. Your relationship with your body then. I remember from the first book, the little girl doing cartwheels.
What inspired Katriona O'Sullivan to write her new book 'Hungry'?
One thing, literally hungry a lot of the time.
Yeah, so I grew up in a home. If you don't know my story, I grew up in a home that was marred by my parents' heroin addiction. And what that meant was I was hungry for most of my childhood. And I don't just mean for food. I was hungry for a hug, for someone to teach me I was valuable, to make me feel safe. But food hunger was a big issue in my home. And so I start the book talking about, I suppose, how it felt to have a body that was hungry as a child and how that feeling interfered with everything.
Tell me about rich, poor and poor, poor people.
Yeah. So I it's this is not an academic term. Hopefully one day it will be. But sometimes people refer to someone who some people are working class and some people are underclass. That's the sociological term for it. But I grew up in a community that was all poor. All of us were in a council estate and everyone was struggling for money. But some of us had different values. We had more trauma and we had less food supply. And for me, we were poor, poor. And then there was the other families that were just struggling for money, but they had love in their home. And I talk about my next door neighbours, who are these lovely little family, an Irish family, three little girls. And they had no money. Their dad drove a white van.
He was a builder of some sort. But the mam loved them and she sent them to school and she hugged them every day and she fed them. They were rich, poor. I was poor, poor. My mam didn't care if I went to school. I didn't have a dinner. in the mornings. My mum was prostituting herself and putting needles in her arms. But also, there was a lot of trauma in our house. And I think we need to understand when we judge people and we talk about who escapes and who doesn't, I think we need to understand that some people are really on the margins. And as a little girl, I was not only... We not only had no money, but I had no food. Like, I'd go to school with an empty belly and be expected to learn like everybody else, Brendan.
And the loudest noise I heard in my head was actually the empty belly that I had. It wasn't... The quadratic equations that Mr. Singh was trying to teach us. It was my stomach telling me, please feed me.
You couldn't get past that to do anything else. Now, the thing is, though, you remember with great joy that your body, you were sporty and strong and everything. And I think that is, they're the only happy memories of your body that I can see for a long time.
Yeah, so I don't remember even being a girl.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–1:34
2
What inspired Katriona O'Sullivan to write her new book 'Hungry'?
1:34–4:58
3
How did Katriona's childhood experiences shape her view of her body?
4:58–6:51
4
What does Katriona mean by 'the fat-girl algorithm'?
6:51–17:46
5
How did societal expectations influence Katriona's body image?
17:46–24:59
6
What role did family dynamics play in Katriona's relationship with her body?
24:59–37:16
7
What were the consequences of Katriona's decisions regarding weight loss surgeries?
37:16–45:43