Caroline O'Donoghue: The euphoric high of awkward situations

Caroline O'Donoghue.

I write this on a long train from Gloucester to London, having just spent the weekend at Cheltenham Literary Festival. Literary events, of all shapes and sizes, have been a big part of my career even before I had books out. As a journalist, I was often the person interviewing an author on stage, or perhaps being plugged into a random panel event about being a woman in the media, being a young person in the media, being an Irish person in the media.

There’s always been a strong element of embarrassment to these kinds of events. In the past six years, I have been subject to the kind of mortifications that many people tell me is their worst nightmare. Having no one turn up; having an extremely dodgy ex-boyfriend show up; having lots of people show up but not for you, so that afterwards, there is a long queue to speak to the other panellist and no one to speak to you.

One time I was actually mistaken for the personal assistant of the author standing next to me, and I got so bored of explaining that I was an author too that I just started saying “yes — he’s very busy, we’re off to Edinburgh next.”

I have had a random man show up at a book shop event and seem to think it was some kind of singles mixer, and used the entire Q&A session to ask me about my romantic status. He then waited outside for me to leave the bookshop, and I had to leave via the fire exit. I’ve had a person I was interviewing tell me, moments before the event began, that he had complete contempt for what we were doing, that the subject of the discussion was nonsense, and that he would rather be at home.

When things are really bad, I repeat a mantra that a bookshop owner once told me: that she once had to cancel an 'In Conversation With' between Colm Tóibín and Seamus Heaney, due to lack of tickets sales. (Colm, if this is untrue, please do not reach out and correct me. I need the myth very badly)

Why, my friends often asked, why do you keep doing them? It was hard to say. Certainly not for the money. The speaking fee is generally minuscule, although once I was gifted a cashmere jumper in lieu of payment, and I still wear it every single day of winter. The event is often in some random location like Leeds. You lose a day in travelling to it; you stay in a crap hotel; you don’t have any mysterious adventures or many fascinating encounters.

Part of it is the knowledge that, as a novelist, you are keenly aware of just how many novels there are in the world, and therefore selling copies is a little like running for mayor in a small town: you must cut every ribbon, you must kiss every baby. But I’m also starting to wonder if I get a kind of adrenaline high off incredibly uncomfortable but very contained awkward situations.

I felt this way when I got both of my tattoos. To be in the middle of a situation that you have spent a significant amount of time dreading is a strangely euphoric experience. A wave of calm comes over me, followed by a kind of puckish air that I can do anything, say anything, because the worst has already happened. The microphones are broken, there’s three people here, and one of them won’t stop screaming obscenities! There is literally nothing that can go wrong now! You’re in the eye of the storm, the belly of the beast, the armpit of embarrassment.

Crucially, these events are highly contained. They don’t touch the rest of my life. I don’t tend to know anybody at these events, and they don’t know me. In my real life, I will agonise for weeks about a party where I know that I have a Complex History with one of the guests. In my real life, I would sooner chew my fingers off than tell a loved one that they have upset me. I would rather leave a Whatsapp group than gently correct a person’s messages within it. 

Doing terrible, awkward events has been a kind of exposure therapy for me: the realisation that you can go through toe-curling experiences that, while uncomfortable, cannot kill you. We use the phrase 'it won’t kill you' a lot in our culture, but it’s quite different to really feel the enormity of that statement after you’ve spoken in a theatre with 300 seats and only 12 of them are filled.

This weekend at Cheltenham, however, ushered in a change. There were people at the events. There were people who wanted to speak to me, to get me to sign their book, to get a photograph. It was a genuine shock. I had failed to realise that my own profile had changed during lockdown: a combination of having two books come out in that time, and my podcast Sentimental Garbage having finally found its audience. 

Now instead of experiencing the awkward asteroid smash of a failed event, I was the subject of it: people were awkward with me. People giggled nervously as they spoke, and covered their mouths, and told me extremely personal things, and then got in touch over Instagram DM later to apologise for saying the extremely personal things. But importantly, everyone had a good time in the end.

So this, you could say, is my case in favour of awkward situations. If there’s something you’re not doing or not attending because you feel like it might be uncomfortable, I’m here to tell you that it absolutely will be. It will be excruciating. But it won’t kill you.