Louise O'Neill: 'At 25, I was more concerned with what I thought looked ‘cool’, than what felt authentic to me'
'What was I going to do in New York?' It's been exactly ten years since Louise O'Neill left for new York (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
I looked at my diary this morning and I realised that it is exactly ten years since I left for New York and it feels both impossible and inevitable that a decade could have passed.
It wasn’t my idea to go. It was another woman at DIT, Vicky, who suggested it.
I’d gone to the Hamptons on a J-1 in 2005, but I hadn’t even heard of this other visa, a yearlong graduate program that allowed participants to intern for a year in the States.
Doesn’t that sound amazing, Vicky said, and I vaguely agreed as I often did in those days, just so people would think I was pleasant.
She collected the relevant forms, and as we filled them out, I remember thinking - wait, do I even want to go to New York? I had a boyfriend and an apartment in Dublin, a life there. What was I going to do in New York?
But then the forms were filled and the deposit was paid, the boyfriend told that a decision had been made, without even talking to him about it. I was crafting letters, sending them to every magazine editor I could think of, hoping my handwriting would lend a certain charm. (I was later told by fellow interns at ELLE about a ‘random’ letter from some ‘weirdo’ in Europe and it was the first time I understood the meaning of the phrase, “and my blood went cold”.)
An assistant at Glamour took pity on me and my pathetic little notes and explained that while she couldn’t get me a job at Condé Nast – they were only allowed take interns who could get college credit – she knew her former boss at ELLE was looking for an extra pair of hands.
And, so it was arranged. I would have my interview the day after I arrived.
On September 1, 2010, I met Vicky at Dublin airport and the enormity of what we were doing hit me then. I looked at her and she looked at me, and I think we both realised that we didn’t know each other that well but were now stuck with one another. (It was a great stroke of luck that she turned out to be a complete joy, becoming like a sister by the end of our year together, our friendship forged in the fire of the most exhausting and exhilarating experience we could have imagined.)
When we landed at JFK, we took a taxi to her friend’s house in Queens. That night as we tumbled into the double bed we would share for the next six weeks, she asked me what I hoped to achieve from the year ahead.
“I want to become a publishing phenomenon,” I said, with the arrogance that only a 25-year-old could muster, and Vicky laughed. “What are you doing here, then?” she replied.
The truth was, I didn’t know.
At 25, I was far more concerned with what I thought looked ‘cool’, what would impress other people, than what felt authentic to me. We arrived to the city in the middle of an intense heatwave and Fashion Week, a combination that even the most hardened of industry veterans might have found difficult to manage.
I pulled a thirteen-hour day my first day at the office – when do we get lunch? I asked another intern who shrugged and said she usually grabbed a sandwich from Starbucks and ate it at her desk – and by the time I got home that night, my throat had completely closed over from the air conditioning.
I don’t know if I can do this, I told Vicky, and she said I could and I would, the first of many pep-talks we would give each other. I needed them.
I often felt uncomfortable, uneasy in my skin, embarrassed of my accent and my soft ts, how when I asked for a bottle of water, I was often met with a confused, “washer?” I felt slow, too slow. Rather than deciding that it was simply a matter of the job being a bad fit for me, I decided I was the problem – I was just not good enough.
As time went on, I learned to shape myself into something more disciplined, more organised; someone with the ‘attention to detail’ that the job required.
I was helped by the incredible friends I made there, especially Angela, a Korean-American intern with a spine of steel, who covered for me whenever I made a stupid mistake and whom I would have gone to war for. But still, underneath it all, there it was.
That burning desire to write, to put words to paper, to see worlds form beneath my pen. As I walked to the subway, the train pushing forward on the Brooklyn Bridge and that oh-so familiar skyline coming into sight and I would gasp at the sight of it; even then, I could hear that desire. Like a heartbeat. Write. Write.
And when the time came to return to Ireland again, at last, there seemed to be a path opening. One in which I could sit down. And I could write.
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