In the world of books, you really know a book has made it when the advance reading copy – the proof sent out to reviewers by publishers – is fancier than most finished books being sold in bookshops. The proof of Aisling Ever After, the fifth and final instalment in the Oh My God What A Complete Aisling series, is a numbered limited edition, pink cloth-covered hardback with shiny silver foil details, signed by the authors, Emer McLysaght and Sarah Breen. It also has pretty endpapers featuring all the different iterations of Aisling over the years. Even Sally Rooney’s proofs aren’t this fancy.
So who is Aisling? In short, she’s the Irish everywoman who over the past six years and five books has become a runaway publishing success story. Co-author Sarah Breen summed her up best for this newspaper in 2017. “Aisling’s the country girl who works up in Dublin but has precisely zero time for your city notions, thank you very much. She loves working in the Big Smoke – very sophisticated altogether – but she loves going Down Home every weekend even more ... Aisling loves a good wake; Aisling has never hidden from the television licence inspector; Aisling knows the Weight Watchers points in everything.”
Breen and McLysaght first developed Aisling as a bit of fun, a way of noticing young women “up from the country”, working and living in Dublin (McLysaght is originally from Kildare and Breen is from Carlow). When their Aisling Facebook group had grown to tens of thousands of members, Irish publishers Gill approached them about writing a book. The series has now sold almost 475,000 copies. Five books later, and Aisling is firmly embedded in Irish popular culture alongside characters such as Paul Howard’s Ross O’Carroll-Kelly and Marian Keyes’s Walsh family.
Some of the scenes are written with great tenderness and depth, while others are played for straight comedy
There have even been spin-off products such as diaries, while Element Pictures, the company behind Normal People, is developing a TV series. While Aisling is a very Irish everywoman, her popularity has translated to other countries. The rural-urban divide easily translates to a class divide in other territories and Aisling’s story is ultimately a universal coming-of-age one about navigating the transformative stepping stones of death, grief, loss, break-ups and disappointments on the road to adulthood. But despite the ongoing success of their character, McLysaght and Breen decided that the fifth novel, Aisling Ever After, would be their final Aisling book.
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The book opens with Aisling living the dream, dating a bona fide New York fireman and working for an events company in Manhattan that organises parties for celebrities. But when Aisling’s ex-boyfriend John shows up in the first chapter with a marriage proposal, she is forced to reassess what she wants. Is her heart in New York or her hometown of Ballygobbard (or Ballygobatshit, as her American boss likes to call it)? The book follows Aisling’s consideration of the question, along with several subplots, including a hen do, a pregnancy and some unexpected announcements. Some of the scenes are written with great tenderness and depth, while others are played for straight comedy.
McLysaght and Breen never coast on their readers’ pre-existing love for Aisling, and this book can be enjoyed as a stand-alone novel. Their real genius lies in their comedy. Every page makes the reader laugh, which could wear thin in the hands of lesser writers but McLysaght and Breen’s one-liners are always imbued with the sharpest of social observations. Take the baby name generator for parents to be. “Kinder, which is like Tinder but for baby names. If we both swipe right on the same name it’s a match,” says one pregnant character. Or this reference to today’s mystifyingly complicated make-up processes: “I’ll straighten my hair when she’s finished with her undercoat and gloss and topcoat and whatever else she’s putting on her face.”
This fifth and final book focuses on what is really important to Aisling: home, family and friends. Is the place we grew up our true home, or is home wherever the person we love is?
Motherhood rears its head, too, as Aisling and her friends each try to figure out how they might engage with the narrow template of job-marriage-children that women in their 30s are often faced with. Mercifully, the Aisling series gives us many nonjudgmental and alternative options. The message remains an empowering one: be yourself, find your joy, and the other stuff will find you.
Without spoiling anything, the last line is so utterly and completely Aisling, it’s the perfect ending to the series and will be very satisfying for readers who have read all five books.
Thankfully Breen and McLysaght have left Aisling’s ending open to the possibility of more books and I’m holding out for a And Just Like That-style reboot in 25 years’ time when Aisling and the girls will walk the Camino.
