Louise O’Neill: ‘The rhetoric around dating was that for women over 35, you may as well be dead’

Over a green tea, Louise O’Neill is describing the thrum of emotions rippling through her body ahead of the publication of her new memoir A Bigger Life. From Clonakilty in west Cork, O’Neill is a powerful, probing writer. She has published seven novels, including this year’s bestselling Whatever Happened to Madeleine Stone, and 2015’s Asking for It, her mesmerising story of a teenager who is sexually assaulted that became one of the most influential novels of her generation, winning Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards that year.

O’Neill is used to doing interviews, and all the public-facing, picture-taking busyness that comes with maintaining a flourishing writing career in the age of TikTok and Instagram. And yet she is visibly nervous as she positions herself at a corner table in the Riverside Café in Skibbereen, her publicist – who has driven the four-and-a-half hours down from Dublin – seated nearby.

She wears jeans that hang loosely, and a black cami top with a vintage Dorette crushed velvet black jacket. Delicate pearl earrings match the pearl detailing on her jacket, which she found on Vinted. A Louis Vuitton bucket bag is tucked by her side. She’s chatty, bubbly and laughs a lot, but has managed to get just five hours’ sleep the night before – “I need more” – and there’s a tension in the air that never really dissipates through our two-hour conversation.

The book cover for A Bigger Life – with its bright balloons clustered against a blue background – has been all over Instagram in recent months, its title a pull from something said to her by her father Michael: “If you want a bigger life, you have to take bigger risks.” O’Neill’s first full-length memoir, A Bigger Life, bought in a six-figure deal after an auction with five publishing houses in contention, is a gritty, plucky, vulnerable, occasionally bleakly funny and viscerally raw confessional of how O’Neill’s world fell apart when her relationship ended in 2023, and she had to begin again.

She and her partner had bought a house together in Wicklow; they had a dog, an expensive sofa, and – she believed – a future. In January 2023, her partner told her their five-year relationship was over; he did not, despite her entreaties, want to try couples counselling. She moved home to Clonakilty, to the little farmhouse she had renovated next door to her parents in 2020. She stopped work, including her newspaper column, because she found she could no longer put words on a page.

She flew to Thailand for a wellness and yoga retreat. (“Why does he get to walk away, unscathed?” she thinks furiously, as she throws herself about in an “ecstatic dance” session at the retreat, slip-sliding on parquet flooring while pretending, per instructions, to be a tiger.) She tried hypnotherapy, a shamanic ritual, art classes, flying lessons and breathwork sessions, and visited an old graveyard with a psychic, seeking to move on, “to make sense of the world”. Eventually, she took the decision to pull herself out of the abyss and start dating on apps such as Hinge and Raya at blistering pace.

Hyped as an “Eat, Pray, Love for the Hinge era”, A Bigger Life recalls Belle Burden’s marriage break-up memoir Strangers and Lily Allen’s break-up album West End Girl in its hurtling rushes of emotion, from shock to anger to insecurity to acceptance.

O’Neill, now 41, says she wants to spark hope as she embarks on this dating journey, but readers first connect to her in her devastation when she finds herself single, 38, gossiped about, selling her furniture, contemplating IVF, and questioning whether she even values herself.

“There’s a line in the book where I say to my dad, ‘Who is going to want me now?’” she says – a stark sentence revealing age-old mores. “So much pain was around my age and time lost. The agony of that. Grieving not just the loss of my best friend, not just the relationship, but the loss of the future I thought I was going to have. So much of the rhetoric around dating was that for women, to be over 35, you may as well be dead. No one is going to be interested in you.”

O’Neill took eight months off work in total, relocating for five weeks to Koh Samui before spending periods in Paris, New York and London. She felt she had no choice but to press pause on her life.

“I know what happens when you don’t properly process grief,” she says. When she was 14, her uncle – who at 30 was like an older brother to her, died in an accident. “It was a traumatic experience. I didn’t have anywhere to put it. Within two months, I had an eating disorder.” O’Neill was hospitalised in 2006 at 21, sent to a 12-week inpatient programme in a facility in Dublin. There was a time when she and her parents never thought she would get over it. But she did, in 2017, with – she writes – “at least two years of effort, consistency, hard work”.

“There was a sense of powerlessness,” she says. “The book was me stepping back into my power. I’m not the victim.”

In 2024, encouraged by her friends, O’Neill signed up for dating apps including Hinge and the celebrity dating app Raya. She began enthusiastically swiping right: she went on 38 dates in 30 days in New York, and more than 100 dates in total between New York, London, Paris, Ireland and Rome. She met men with private jets and gleaming penthouses, men who flew to Cork Airport for her, men who kissed her and who she sometimes kissed back, always sober because she is a non-drinker. “Most of them were on Hinge,” she says, an app that might not have the celebrity cache of Raya, but threw up its own surprises. “I remember saying to someone, ‘I was meeting this guy who has a private jet’, and people would be like, ‘Oh, did you meet him on Raya? ‘ and I was like, ‘No, I met him on Hinge.”

O’Neill is candid about her sexual needs in the book. There are shivers of expectation, thrills of desire, fluttering kisses, and more. “I was brought up in a very sex and body-neutral house,” she says. “There was never any shame around any of that. I feel lucky because I think that was quite rare.” It helps, she thinks, that her parents were young when they had their children, and they have always supported her choices.

Her father is a butcher in Clonakilty, and O’Neill grew up in and out of the family shop. “My parents were 23 having my sister and 25 having me. I have a house sitter who was asking me about the book, and she was asking, ‘How do your parents feel about it?’ and ‘Are you worried about what people in your community will say?’ and I said, ‘No. My parents are fine. They’ve always told me to write what I need to write.’ She looked at me and said, ‘Well, then you’re already free. ’

She has stayed friendly with several of the men she dated, and as the book draws to a close she meets “Leo” in London, with whom she falls in love. She won’t say whether they’re still together – “I will neither confirm nor deny,” she smiles, “to protect him” (in the book she is also vague, saying, “No matter what it is, this thing between us, or what it will be, it is already something.”). But she is clear that dating apps, far from being the exhausting head-wreck they’re often characterised as, did her a lot of good. “For anyone who feels stuck in a relationship, I’d love for them to read this book and have a sense of possibility.”

“I think anybody who has been in a long-term relationship that has soured will empathise with that feeling of coming out and feeling decimated and small, not confident or comfortable in your own skin,” she says. Her self-esteem was shaky for a long time, something her parents sought to help with. “My mother, when I was talking to her about the break-up, I was like, ‘Am I a bad person? Did I ask for too much?’ She was like, ‘You were asking for crumbs’.”

O’Neill writes about how she “felt haggard after the break-up, an ancient thing”. Beauty treatments – Invisalign braces on her teeth, microblading her brows, regular gel nails and facials, Botox injections (she’s had a recurring appointment since her late 30s) and a “lip flip” – were an effort to “reclaim myself, my old self… I wanted to recreate the woman I had been”.

She writes sparely, but powerfully, about her sexual assault at age 19. “It felt relevant,” she says, of her decision to include it in the book. She wanted to highlight experiences in her life that have shaped her, to create a context for her psychology as an adult. “There’s a pattern that whenever anything bad happens, I internalise it as my fault. It was unpicking that,” she says. “I think we’re the sum of all of our experiences.”

Sometimes talking about personal vulnerability – pain, damage – can feel shocking or taboo. “There’s something about it being written on the page and owning it and being like, ‘I’m not ashamed, this is my experience’ that I think can be perceived as radical,” O’Neill says. She understands some readers may view her book as a kind of revenge narrative, but she feels certain she wrote it from a place of acceptance rather than anger. “I would definitely disagree with the idea that it’s a revenge memoir,” she says. “This is the book I needed to read when I was in the depths of despair; therefore I want other people to have access to that story. That becomes more important than any personal feelings of discomfort or fear.” In the book, she puts it simply: “I want my life to be witnessed.”

She doesn’t go easy on herself when she’s writing. Through the Ring doorbell, which sends videos to your phone when people approach your door, O’Neill policed her then partner’s behaviour in Wicklow on New Year’s Eve night in 2022 while she was in West Cork, staying online to check when he returned home. “Two a.m., five a.m., nine a.m., noon, four p.m., six p.m., and still nothing.”

O’Neill’s ex had revealed to her in early 2023 that there was a “rumour about him and another woman,” she writes in the book, but he told her it wasn’t true, that “nothing had happened between them”.

O’Neill says she was tortured by the feeling that gossip mongers might know more than she did. She sought out the forums. “I had to look,” she says. “It was a form of self-harm. It was the absolute torture of not knowing that drove me to them. Every time I looked, it was an adrenaline shock. I was physically shaking.”

One day O’Neill received an anonymous direct message on Instagram, containing screenshots of text message exchanges purportedly between a woman “my ex was rumoured to be involved with” and her friend, containing, she writes, “jokes about my body”. She had no way of verifying anything she was reading, who it was from, whose phone the screenshots existed on, what was real and not real. She sent them to her ex, who said they were faked.

“I was so shocked that I cracked a tooth in half,” she says. “I couldn’t sleep. I was having multiple panic attacks a day. My cortisol was so high. When I went to the doctor, she said these levels we’re seeing are really concerning. My doctor put me on beta blockers because of the heart palpitations. The worst part was this feeling of: what if I’m broken and my body is broken? I took the time off work because I was going to have a nervous breakdown.”

“I remember someone saying to me that two of the states that are most difficult for a human being to tolerate are ambiguity and uncertainty,” she adds. “It is genuinely destabilising to be uncertain of what the facts are.”

These days, she is cautious around all forms of media, social or otherwise. She has a Substack account, but “it’s not political, it’s general chit-chat so it feels safe enough”. Someone else takes care of her Instagram and TikTok accounts, and she has no plans to return to her newspaper column. “I have to keep my nervous system regulated,” she says. “I just didn’t have the temperament.” She laughs as she considers what she has just said. “So I decided to write a memoir instead. I’m just a glutton for punishment.”

The book has been given a clean bill of health from lawyers, she says – O’Neill looks to her publicist, who nods assent – but real people, notably her ex, are documented within its 318 pages. Did she consider whether fiction might be a better outlet? “There was power in owning the experience,” O’Neill says in the careful manner of someone who has anticipated the question. “All names have been changed. I tried to be generous and hold everybody’s humanity in hand. No one’s perfect. There were two people in the relationship, and we each played our part.”

In the book, she writes about what she’s seen Instagram users call the “portal” women go through between the ages of 37 and 43, when they prepare for perimenopause. “You’re at the halfway mark now,” she writes. “You can’t move through life on autopilot any longer; you have to start living on purpose.”

What does that look like in her day-to-day? It’s about making sure she’s taking care of herself. Giving time to her friendships and to her physical health. After we meet, she is going for lunch with her good friend, the writer Maeve Higgins. She’ll have acupuncture later that afternoon in Skibbereen and, she adds, probably only half-joking, she’ll use her next therapy session if necessary to help her break down this interview. Her work on a new novel – she’s 30,000 words in – is going well.

She shows me her phone screensaver, with its romantic image of a woman running in a meadow, the words “Soft and Slow” at the top. It’s a mantra for her, and it seems to be working. She has had better news recently on the health front, too. “I went back to get my AMH tested this year, three years later, and it was higher. Cortisol plays a role. There’s such fear-mongering.” She’s thinking about a permanent move to London, where she spends a lot of time; the only thing really stopping her is her dog, Cooper. And her ambition is back.

She won’t say which territories the book has sold in just yet. “At the moment we’re focused on the UK and Ireland.” But she has high hopes for the future. “I want there to be a payoff for the level of honesty.” A book called A Bigger Life that brings about a bigger life? It would be nice.

A Bigger Life by Louise O’Neill is published by HQ on September 24th