Louise O'Neill: 'What if we decided that 2021 was the year we would tell our people we loved them?'
Picture: Miki Barlok
During the promo for After the Silence, my publicist mentioned a possible feature in RSVP magazine. It wouldn’t necessarily push the book – although there would be a tagline at the bottom – but instead, focus on me and my mother.
I agreed to take part, primarily because I thought the photos would be nice to have if either of us were to die in the immediate future. (2020 made me incredibly morbid, I’m sorry.) The journalist sat in our back garden and she interviewed us separately, asking questions about my childhood and how our relationship had evolved over the years. She always asked to interview the subjects separately; people were more honest that way, she said, more likely to open up.
The piece was published in early October and in it, my mother said that “(Louise) would never have been a girl to go with the flow. Even as a child, she always had her own ideas, opinions, questions on everything.” The piece ended with this quote, “I have learned from Louise that determination, hard work, and belief in your pays off. Never giving up or giving in. Sometimes I wish I could have met her when I was younger and learned that from her back then.”
Now, I’m very aware of my own flaws and faults; I have plenty of them. But there was something so moving about receiving this kind of affirmation from my mother, I couldn’t stop thinking about it for days afterwards. It’s not that I grew up in a home where praise was rationed, my parents were always generous in their encouragement and affection. It was very different to how they must have been raised – as much as I adored my grandmother, she was a typical Irish woman of her generation and thus incredibly modest; she would have hated to be seen as boastful or proud.
(This was quickly beaten out of me when I was working in New York because Americans tend to be more literal than we are and they assume self-deprecation means you are actually shit at your job.)
My family wouldn’t have approved of any delusions of grandeur – I remember a weekend in 2016 when I looked at the Sunday Times book charts and exclaimed, “Oh, I’m at #3 this week!” My sister and mother paused, glanced at me with weary resignation, and then continued their conversation about stickers my sister was planning on buying as a treat for her Junior Infants’ class – but there would always be an effusive acknowledgment of our successes, affirmation of how proud they were of us.
But what made that RSVP feature feel unusual was the scope of it, but also, how much more forthcoming we might be when the person we’re talking about isn’t there. In a way, it felt like hearing what my mother would have said in a eulogy at my funeral. (2020. V Morbid.)
And it made me think – why do we wait until after someone has died to outline how we feel about them? Why don’t we tell them about how much they mean to us, how much we enjoy their sense of humour, the way they check the weather app when they know we have a long journey to make the next morning, the silly song they sing in the shower, the way they sneak out of bed for work quietly so they don’t wake us, the thought they put into making sure our birthday was special. It’s all those little things that allow us to tell that person – I see you. I see the whole of you. And I love you for it.
Maybe I’m just feeling sentimental because last year was such a difficult one and for many of us, it helped us identify who and what is most important in our lives. Today, we might be thinking of our New Year’s Resolutions and what we can do to make sure 2021 is a more positive experience than the year we’ve just left behind. But why do resolutions always have to be ‘worthy’, and often times, punitive? Why do we have to make promises to be ‘better’, to create a new version of ourselves that will somehow be more palatable?
What if this year we decided to write letters to the people closest to us, outlining all the ways our lives are the better for having them in it? What if we decided that 2021 was the year we would tell our people we loved them? Tell them why. Tell them often. Be specific. What would this year look like then?
Crashing Landing on You. The premise of this is wild – a South Korean influencer is paragliding when a storm knocks her out and she awakens in the forests of North Korea – but it’s an enormous amount of fun.
The Black Kids by Christina Hammonds Reed. Set in 1990s LA during the Rodney King Riots, a young, wealthy teenager suddenly finds she’s not just one of the girls, she’s one of the ‘Black kids’. Nuanced and powerful, I loved this.
