Culture That Made Me: Rachael English on Springsteen, Maeve Binchy, and Spotlight
Rachael English has a new novel.
Born in 1968, Rachael English moved from the UK to Ireland aged four, growing up in Shannon, Co Clare. In 1991, she joined RTÉ as a news reader, going on to present several radio shows, including Five Seven Live. In 2010, she joined the Morning Ireland team before moving this summer to present RTÉ Radio 1’s flagship lunchtime programme, News at One. Her seventh novel Whatever Happened to Birdy Troy? is published by Hachette.
The first proper book I read by myself was Johanna Spyri’s Heidi. I just wanted to live in Heidi’s world in the Swiss Alps, to be with her grandfather and all the people who were up in the mountains with her. She was sent away to live in the city, but she didn't like it as much. She thought everybody was a bit sad even though they had more food than she was used to. Eventually, she made her way back to the mountains where she belonged. It's a bit battered now but I still have the copy of it.
My memories of the local library as a teenager are of discovering Edna O'Brien and Maeve Binchy. Growing up, I was reading stories about men. In the case of both of those authors, it was the first time I read stories of Irish women.
Especially in the case of Edna O'Brien’s books there was the desire to live a bigger, more colourful life, to escape the constraints of home. There was a sense that nobody had really done that before in an Irish context. We were more accustomed to reading international books or any Irish books around tended to be about men.
I remember very clearly reading George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and being just blown away by it. It was so different from anything I had read before. There was a sense of absolutely feeling like you were part of the book.
The author I discovered when I was 17 was Anne Tyler. I was working in a hotel in Limerick and a guest left behind a paperback of The Accidental Tourist. She writes in such a wonderful way. It epitomises writing that seems effortless. Her books have a certain rhythm that you just fall into. Her dialogue is brilliant. I have such fondness for her.
Bruce Springsteen was very much the sound of my teenage years. The first big gig I was at was Bruce Springsteen at Slane Castle when I was 16.
It was the Saturday of the June bank holiday weekend 1985. I look back and think how were we allowed to go? Off we went on the bus – myself and my two friends, and came back about 24 hours later, having spent most of that time on a bus. The sun was shining that day. As somebody else said, “It was the best day in Ireland for the entire of the 1980s.” It was brilliant.
JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye is probably the first book I read that made me realise you can write the way you speak. It doesn't have to be formal or clipped. Good writing comes in all shapes and forms. It appealed to me because it was about a young person. I wasn’t accustomed to there being that many books about young people. This was before the YA fiction genre became a phenomenon.
A book I always recommend to people is Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond. It’s a book about poverty in America. He's an academic. He spent months living among people who have nowhere to live, which is divided into two worlds, basically depending on the colour of people’s skin. He spends time with white people in a trailer park and with black people living in slums and shelters. It makes you realise the possibilities of a book – to bring you into somebody's world and to make you think about poverty and homelessness, because a lot of what's in it is relevant here. It's a superb book.
Common Ground, a book from 1986, by J. Anthony Lukas is based around the busing crisis in Boston, which was about educational integration, in the 1970s. It’s a book based around three families whose stories are interlinked: an African American family; an Irish American family who are poor; and a wealthier family – a guy who's an academic, himself and his wife decide to move into an area that is becoming more gentrified but which had had a crime problem in the past. It goes down all sorts of tangents. Even though it's about a specific time and place, so much of it is universal – about people's experience of poverty and racism, and the limits put on people’s lives. It's an astonishing piece of work.
A film I love – and this very much ties in to the journalism thing – is Spotlight. It’s the best portrayal of a newsroom there has ever been, even better than All the President's Men. It’s so accurate in its portrayal of journalism, not just the things they got right, but the things they got wrong.
Like a lot of journalists, I was fascinated by the guy who keeps turning up with the box of clippings and letters and they ignore him for years. Then they realise belatedly this guy all along had a huge story, only nobody wanted to listen to him. That rang so true. I've watched it two or three times, and I’d watch it again.
Growing up, I loved radio, all types of radio, all genres – music radio, news radio, documentaries, dramas, pirate stations. It was such an integral part of my childhood. I was about 10 or 11 when I went to an auction in the old ballroom in Sixmilebridge, Co Clare. The auction had cheap electrical goods. My parents bought me my first radio there. I was always a radio obsessive.
The TV show that stands out for me – and in a way has influenced what I write, as I like telling stories of people over a period of time from when they're young to when they're much older – is Our Friends in the North. It's wonderful. It's about a group of friends growing up in the northeast of England. It follows their lives over 30-40 years from teenage years until middle age. It came out in the mid 90s. Every episode moves the story forward several years. I love dramas set in the north of England. I was born in Lincolnshire and my mother is English. It’s maybe the English part of me coming out.
