The Personals: Short but sweet stories behind the small ads

The Personals: The Human Stories Behind the Small Ads

Author: Brian O’Connell

ISBN-13: 978-0008321345

Publisher: Harper Collins

Guideline Price: £12.99

In keeping with both the intent and format of small ads, Brian O’Connell gets straight to the point in his introduction, quickly debunking the origin story of the most famous classified of them all: Ernest Hemingway’s six-word story, For Sale: Baby Shoes, Never Worn. Generally believed to have been written when Hemingway and his drinking pals were sitting around the Algonquin Hotel in New York tossing bon mots around in the way some of us chuck peanuts at our mouths, apparently at best the line is Hemingway’s adaptation of an earlier “Baby Carriage for Sale: Never Used” ad, and at worst, was attributed to him by a literary agent years after his death.

In The Personals, O’Connell collates a range of small ads over the last number of years, primarily from print media (nice work, Evening Echo) and online (this is a man who spends a lot of time on DoneDeal). Whenever possible he interviewed the advertiser in person, so expect many, many cups of tea, and hours sitting in cars chatting to strangers. Divided into nine sections: Love and Loss; Equipped For Life; Pets’ Corner; Articles of War; Sentimental Value; Collectors; Lost Causes; This Mortal Coil; and Signs of the Times, he encounters, as one would expect, all sorts: famous pigs, medals, lost loves, unwanted graves… even an enterprising UCC pharmacy student who makes up to €800 a year selling her old Leaving Cert study notes for €20 a subject.

Until well into the last century most newspapers ran classified ads rather than news on their front pages. A long-standing fan of the personals myself, no matter how enjoyable those online rabbit holes, nothing beats sitting in a library with a yellowing newspaper selected at random from the archive. Small ads tell us not just what life was like, but what it actually was: what people ate and drank and shopped for. What medicines they took and why. They were the veins through which life flowed. The classifieds are barometers of mood and public opinion, of commerce and class and technological advancement.

Series of snapshots

The Personals not only gives us a series of snapshots of contemporary Ireland, but also lays bare aspects of O’Connell’s own life, including his former addiction. He comments: “Personal ads – and the people and lives and secrets and stories and heartbreak and quirkiness that sometimes lie behind them – are so appealing to this forty-something and somewhat sentimental hack.” And perhaps it was his sentimental side that allowed so many wedding dresses and rings to get through before the real treasure reveals itself. One such gem is a discreet male-to-female cross-dressing service in Louth offered by Tiffany, a former nurse. Her clients, she tells O’Connell, “are so happy when they are with me. It changes them… You can see lines going away on their faces with each touch of the make-up brush against their skin.”

Energetic Joan, who he meets through an ad on DoneDeal offering “cut-price counselling” jumps from topic to topic, “landing on sentences like a cat toying with a mouse”. Brought up in Cork by adoptive parents, her description of her single meeting with her birth mother in Romania fizzes with unresolved trauma and tension. Backstories such as these are fascinating, as is that of Mary, the exhausted student living in a hotel room with her two young children who received no replies to her ad seeking permanent accommodation: “She will leave the ad up for another few weeks, but doesn’t have much faith that anyone will respond positively.”

Jaunty tone

O’Connell’s jaunty tone can be misplaced and sometimes uneven. The Isle of Man for example is, “famous for a road race each year in which at least one participant nearly always dies, and for transforming itself from a holiday destination into a tax haven”. When talking to a man selling a Nazi flag he reasonably asks whether, “allowing a secondary market to exist risks romanticizing one of the most efficient murdering machines in history”; whereas the chap selling the former helmet of a Nazi firefighter he bought on a weekend away merits the comment, “I’m jealous. When my wife and I went to Berlin one November a few years ago all we came back with were head colds.”

The motto of the now ignominiously defunct News of the World was, “all human life is there”. And as with every other newspaper, all human life was: in the personals as much as the front pages. It’s good to know that the classifieds continue to thrive, because, as O’Connell shows, that is where history with a lowercase h will always be found, one small ad at a time.