Chapter 1: What inspired Dr. Katriona O'Sullivan to write 'Hungry'?
The Clare Byrne Show on Newstalk with Aviva Insurance.
Well, I'm delighted to be joined by academic, psychologist and author Dr. Catriona O'Sullivan. Catriona, you're so welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. And we're here to talk about your brand new book, which is called Hungry. Yes. People, I think, are aware of poor at this stage because it was such a massive success. And then, of course, the stage play. What is Hungry?
Is that a good place to start?
Yeah. So Hungry is a biography of my body. When I wrote Poor, I thought, I'm done now. I've said a lot, and a lot of people have read Poor. A lot of people haven't read Poor, actually, just to say that, even though a lot of people know it. I said I'd never, I wouldn't do it again. But sometimes stories and books are just in people, and in my case...
I reflect a lot on my social media about how I feel about my body, particularly as a woman in the world and how I love and hate it at the same time. And I began to explore the idea of like telling the story of my body and all of the things that influenced how I feel about my body. And that's, I suppose, the hungry element of it.
We talk about hunger, we talk about food hunger, but the desire to be smaller. But then I kind of used a play on words and I started to look at hunger for... connection and love and the things that are done to try to achieve them and then hunger for achievement. A lot of people ask me, how are you a professor? How have you been so successful?
And I suppose I've talked about my pathological drives for things and how they sometimes were neurotic and then how I've learned, I suppose, to take a moment and try to be more at ease with myself.
And did you feel at the end of Poor that there's so much left unsaid here, that that's why you needed to go back? Because I'd say it's not easy to go back into yourself again for these stories of your life, which are so personal. But you clearly felt, I need to, I've got more to say.
Yeah, I think so. I think...
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Chapter 2: How does 'Hungry' differ from Dr. O'Sullivan's previous book 'Poor'?
I am an academic and I am an intellect. So poor was me using my... I look at poor and I think it's more of a social document than a memoir. It's me using my story in order to highlight some of the challenges that exist in society around poverty, access to education, trauma. And similarly with Hungary, it's not...
There are new things about my life that people won't know, but it's a reframing of my story to look at how my experiences with my dad, with my mom, with men, with social media, with work, influenced how I felt about myself as a woman in my own body.
Mm-hmm.
And so it's not a follow-up. It's not a next step to pour at all. It's actually a reframing of some things you might already know. Like people who've read it say it feels familiar. It feels familiar because it's my voice and my story, but there's definitely new things in there. But it's all about how the world impacted how I felt about myself in my own body.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's familiar as well, because when you read it, I think you see yourself in it a lot, or I certainly did. You know, you describe doing cartwheels as a child and this is what your body is for. It's for movement. It's for joy. Yes. And there comes a moment, I think, in everybody's life as you grow up where you think, oh, has that changed? That's changed.
It's different now, particularly for women, right? And it's trying to recapture some of that. Exactly.
Yeah, so I start the book off where I'm talking about just me. So it's themed. The book is themed. It's not necessarily chronological, but the first influence on my own body was how I saw my body. And as a little girl, before I had any idea about...
you know abuse or sex or you know I loved my body I didn't even actually realize I had a body or that I was a girl I just loved my body I was brilliant at sport I used to love running free on my brother's bike playing sports and I cartwheeled with no shame showed my knickers and I suppose this that particular part of my story is trying to exemplify how oftentimes we commodify educate um
exercise and we commodify food and we make exercise and food about losing weight or shrinking our body or we don't realize that our body is a source of freedom and like i remember my body just being something that i felt really safe in i'm really happy about and i used to feel the breath and the the world and really enjoy it and i lost that through the experiences that i had but i think we all lose that
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Chapter 3: What personal experiences influenced Dr. O'Sullivan's views on body image?
I'm a very beautiful child and I'm a beautiful woman. But I suppose I felt my value was tied to how I looked. And a lot of women's values are taught to them about the way they look, whether it's we see that in social media, we see it in the pressure to stay small. to stay smooth, to keep our bodies looking young.
But in my case, I had a mother, particularly my mum and other people, friends and family, who had just really rewarded me for the way I looked. So I kind of built these connections that looking a certain way was tied to my value. And then I had really traumatic experiences in my body that... I kind of thought these must be because of the way I looked, because these bad things happened.
I kind of connected these things with my body. These bad things that happened were maybe to do with the way my body looked. Maybe if I wasn't a pretty little girl, maybe if I didn't have lovely hair, maybe if I didn't move like these, these men wouldn't have done the things that they did to me. So that kind of like, I kind of got these connections that were extraneous.
They weren't meant to be together. But because I lived in a world where nobody communicated about them things and I had no space to talk, I really kind of got this sense that my body was a bad thing and that I was attracting bad things to my body because of the way I looked.
And then there's that time, I mean, I'm remembering from the book, particularly after your first child was born, where you felt, if I was smaller, everything would be better.
Yeah, but like I've lived through five trends now of women. So I'm 49. So I've lived through Kate Moss, Kim Wilde, actually. I was going to say Kim Wilde. She was before Kate. You know, Linda Lassardi, Samantha Fox.
Ashley Graham you know she was like a few years ago Kim Kardashian so like there's trends like we're sold a physical size that is is beautiful and we should all aim for and the media does that to us but as a as a poor woman who actually had a lot of trauma like when I was introduced to Weight Watchers and the Slimming Worlds and the Slimming Clubs and the idea like of success and
of gaining something successful in my body, reaching a standard, a size, that became like an elixir to me, like losing weight. I used to go to the slimming club and I would walk in and I'd have starved myself all day, not eating, gone to the toilet so I weighed the least. We all did it. We all did it. Tuesday night. Took my bra strap off.
Like I went in the room and there was this big picture of the woman who'd weigh us from when she was fat. So the fat picture, and look at me, you could be as skinny as me if you just count the points. And I used to stand on the scales and then I'd get clapped. I'd get clapped. But your whole week was good if you did well. I know. You know, that affected your week, didn't it?
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Chapter 4: How does societal pressure affect women's perceptions of their bodies?
And it's that for lots of women. But in my case, it was pathological. And because I was uneducated and I didn't have criticality, the things that I was willing to do to shrink my body became really toxic to the point where I had a gastric band.
I was getting sick every day and I was hiding this from the world, pretending that I was just succeeding because I was smaller, when realistically I was mentally unwell and I felt dreadful every single day. Where are you with that now? You know where I am now. So the book talks about it. It talks about how to get out of that. Now, I still live in this world.
I still turn on my social media and see a before and after picture. I see smooth faces of 50 year old women and I'm not smooth face. So I've not escaped the fat algorithm or the beauty standard. So I open and I still have questions about my body size, my face, everything else.
But what I have now that I didn't have before is I have another, I have a moment of reflection that comes in after I think maybe I'll get that Botox or maybe I'll get that lip filler. Maybe I'll go on another drastic diet or join that gym. I have another voice that comes in and go... Would this be helpful to little Katrina?
Is this going to get you back to a place where you want to cartwheel freely? Is this where you're going to feel safe and supported in your own body? And that moment of reflection has come through therapy. And sometimes I still decide to buy the product, Claire. I bought one of the red masks recently.
I was influenced by both. I've caught myself seeing them in the shot. I completely ignored them for ages but now I'm slowing up as I walk past them.
I'm not, I'm not, like this, there's no perfect arc in this story and in some ways that's why it seemed the way it is because I still live as a woman in this world and I still have the challenges of being a bigger woman, I'm not small, of wanting, of thinking there might be a destination but now I have a moment and I have more choice now than I ever had before. I didn't have choice before.
I was just driven by the hurt, by the insecurity and by the world that I lived in. Now I have autonomy and the capacity to say, maybe I don't need to go on that extra diet today. Maybe I just need to take a rest and like myself a bit.
You make this brilliant observation about perceptions of beauty and worth. that are different amongst working class women and middle class women. And you have great experience of both, so you can see it really clearly. Yes. But when I read it in the book, I went, yes, that's exactly it. We all think that we're ticking the right boxes. Yes. We're just doing the same thing in a different way.
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Chapter 5: What role does mental health play in body image and self-acceptance?
Yeah, so the way you go about it is different, but is your goal the same? That's the question that we all need to be asking ourselves, isn't it?
I think it's the same for all of us. I think what you're willing to do is different. So most women I know, it's very rare that you'll meet a woman who does not want to be... that she wants to get back into, or an old outfit, the way she wants to get back into, or that she's trying to control her body. Maybe she's smaller and she's trying to control it.
Occasionally you meet women who are smaller who want to get bigger, but they're still aspiring to be different in their own bodies. So I don't think any of us escape it. And just to say, this is not a women-only issue. Like men are as much influenced now as they ever were by the like, we've got protein, they're in the gyms, they're trying to build themselves up.
So there is an influence on young men. But yeah, so I think we're all aspiring to be to meet the standards. And the problem is, is the standard changes. So we're moving more and more into plastic surgery.
surgeries botoxes whatever so what's going to come next if we don't stop and say is there ever going to be a point where it's okay to just get old or it's okay to be a bit chubby if you're healthy yeah like when are we going to actually stop and all of us take responsibility and go okay i'm not going to feed that machine i'm actually going to try and be a voice to say maybe we don't need to do that and that's what i'm trying to do is trying to be a bit more reflective about it and encourage other people to be reflective too i want to ask you about the theme of sex yeah i love the sex bit
I loved writing about sex as well. Did you? I found a skill. Yeah. I think if I don't sell this memoir, I'm going to go in and start selling sex books because a lot of people who read it was like, oh, this is good. So if you don't like anything else, buy it for the sex.
Yeah. But it took you a long time to reach an accommodation with, you know, who you were sexually.
Yeah.
But that's all part of self-acceptance and self-worth.
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Chapter 6: How does Dr. O'Sullivan address the theme of beauty standards in her book?
Yeah. And also, so I talk about like witnessing my dad's relationship with women and the way my dad sexualized women. And he actually sexualized women in front of me, which is abusive. And, you know, that was really hard for me to write about because I feel... defensive of him, but it's the truth. Like, I learned that women were a vessel for men's sexual pleasure.
And I think we all learn that in some ways. Like, this idea that a man will explode if he doesn't finish. Whereas, you know, we're fine. We can push our needs aside. Like, I think there's that implicit... a message to women as well about how we should be sexually with men. And as a girl who had low self-esteem, I got into an abusive relationship and the sex was really bad.
But I didn't even know that it was... Well, that's what you thought. I just thought... What more was it supposed to be? Yeah. But I know a load of women who actually, you know, accept going to bed without having an orgasm, like lots and lots of women. And so I was really lucky that... Not necessarily, but I actually had my first orgasm. I'm afraid to say that on the radio.
I had my first orgasm actually on my own by mistake when I was 19 in a shower. And I was like, oh my God, is this what my body is made for? I actually did not know that there's this amount of pleasure available to me. And anyway, look, when I turned 22, I was really living a desperate life in Dublin One. And I asked for help and I went to therapy. And this therapy was so good for me.
And I made a decision in that therapy. I was like, I'm never going to be with a man again without... And enjoying it. I'm never going to do that to myself and my body again. And I'm also going to take a break from men so I can actually build up my confidence and self-esteem to be able to make them decisions for myself. And then I met Dave, my amazing husband.
And the first time we're together, I talk about it in the book, like, it's really passionate, really great, but he finishes and I don't. And there's a moment where I'm like... Am I going to tell him? Am I going to hurt him? Because the idea that the man's... And you remember thinking that. I actually remember. Am I going to say it? I'm going to say it because... And it's hard to say that.
Yeah, absolutely. I think it's really hard for women to ask for what they want in the bedroom. Sometimes we don't know or sometimes we can't say it. And we prefer to push ourselves aside. And I just remember looking over at Dave, his big blue eyes. He's so happy, smoking a John Player blue. And I just said, that was great. The connection was there, but I'm not done yet.
And he literally crumbled in front of me. Like his face crumbled. And then he just awakened. And he was like, a woman's never spoke to me before about her body. And I just thought, wow, what a great man to actually admit that. And I'm not going to chronicle our sex life here and say how great Dave is because people are trying to steal him. But the truth is,
But the truth is, you know, that set a path for our relationship, not just in terms of how we were intimately, but how we were in terms of our communication with each other, like the honesty. Like he loves me for the honesty that I have and my unwillingness to accept less than what I deserve.
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