Author Louise O’Neill was 37 years old when her five-year relationship came to an end in January 2023. Suddenly, the future she had imagined for herself – marriage, children and a home by the sea in Wicklow – completely disappeared.
Starting over again, she says, felt overwhelming and almost too much to bear. “Particularly when you’re a woman in your late 30s, it does feel almost catastrophic in a way,” she tells The Irish Times Women’s Podcast.
Following the break-up, the author moved back in with her parents in Clonakilty, Co Cork, convinced that her age and new circumstances would hold her back from ever finding love again. “Who is going to want me now?” she remembers asking her father at the time.
“When your life falls apart like that, it’s so destabilising ... you just start questioning everything and anything,” she tells podcast presenter Róisín Ingle.
READ MORE
Feeling heartbroken and lost, O’Neill went on a mission to heal herself and regain some of her confidence. A bestselling author and newspaper columnist, she took almost a year off work and threw herself into an array of workshops, retreats and unconventional activities, including hypnotherapy, breathwork and even a visit to a graveyard with a psychic.
“I did everything. I did plant medicine. I had a shaman. I did a rebirthing in the forest. There was acupuncture, there was somatic therapy ... there was talk therapy,” she says.
Eventually O’Neill was ready to date again and so began a year-long experiment, which took her on more than 100 dates with men across Dublin, London, Paris and New York. She documents this daunting and at times hilarious experience in her new memoir, A Bigger Life.
“Dating was the thing that I was the most afraid of and, with every date that I went on, I just started to feel so powerful because I was facing the fear and doing the thing that made me scared,” she says.
“I think that anyone who has been through a really bad break-up will know that you feel – particularly if you’re the one being broken up with – utterly powerless. So I think it was really important for me to try and reclaim that,” she adds.
The book details good dates and bad dates. Dates with billionaires and dates that don’t text back. All of the dates, the author says, have taught her a little more about herself along the way and have allowed her to find the joy in life again.
“I just felt like I have been really, really miserable for the last few years. I just want to feel alive. I want to feel pleasure. I want to feel desire. I want to have fun.”
But how does it feel to write so openly about heartbreak and her efforts to overcome it? “It does feel like I’ve photocopied my diary 10,000 times and I’m standing on the street going, ‘Would you like to read it? Would you?’” she laughs.
In this wide-ranging conversation, the Cork woman also discusses the best way to approach dating apps (it’s all about the energy you bring, apparently), why they aren’t exactly the “hellscape” they are made out to be and what it really takes to make a bigger life.
Also in this episode, Irish Times features writer Nadine O’Regan joins Róisín to discuss some of the biggest culture stories of the week, including new music from Bono’s daughter Jordan Joy and the reaction to Sharon Horgan’s new series Youth.
You can listen back to this conversation in the player above or search The Women’s Podcast wherever you get your podcasts.
