Katriona O'Sullivan: 'Even in the darkest moments, there was so much brightness, too'
Katriona O'Sullivan. Picture: Bríd O'Donovan
One word. One syllable. No messing.
The title of this book says it all. On the front cover, a young girl climbs a brick wall.
Not tall enough yet to reach the top; you can’t see her face, but you can feel her curiosity. She’s bright, like her yellow dress.
I want to know more about this child, so I buy a copy of the book and start reading it later that morning. I reach the last page by early evening. It’s all I can think about.
Author Katriona O’Sullivan, academic, educator and activist, pins you by the collar with her truth.
Her early exposure to abuse, addiction, and neglect; being pregnant and homeless at 15 — these hit hard.
Still, what shines through are seemingly small but significant moments.
Acts of kindness and empathy that stop a young girl from slipping, that help her see over the wall and stand 10 toes down as an agent of change.
Numbers don’t lie.
The impact has had on our cultural narrative speaks volumes, sitting at number one for 72 weeks on the Irish paperback charts, according to retailer Easons.
In 2025 alone, the award-winning book has been translated into five languages and made its world premiere at The Gate for the Dublin Theatre Festival, adapted by Sonya Kelly.
For O’Sullivan, is not just a memoir, but “a social document”, she tells me as we chat on Zoom.
Raised in Hillfields — a deprived inner-city area of Coventry — O’Sullivan has first-hand experience of poverty.
Born to Irish parents who struggled with heroin addiction; from a young age, she witnessed her father’s overdose, experienced sexual violence, and often went hungry or smelled of urine, with school being one of the few places she could find food and care.
She could have fallen through the cracks of a broken system had it not been for a handful of people whose belief pulled her “out of the trenches”.
“There are a few moments in my life,” she writes, “when I could have been lost for good, pivotal moments that could have gone either way.”
A former school leaver and now lecturer of digital skills in the Department of Psychology at Maynooth University, O’Sullivan’s ability to capture the destabilising effects of deprivation from different vantage points in her life is what makes this narrative so compelling.
“I want people to really question inequality when they read ” she asserts, “…to think about the kids and what we turn into, and how we’re let down.”
This ‘social document,’ although in service of something larger, requires immense vulnerability. As a writer, I’m keen to understand how she protects her peace.
“If you know me, you would know that I’ve been through stuff, so I’ve always felt that it wasn’t something that I was hiding,” she explains, “this just gave me the ability to contextualise myself.”
Passionate and to-the-point, what you see is what you get with O’Sullivan. She doesn’t wear a mask.
“I think we are showing ourselves, even when we’re trying to hide ourselves — especially when we’re trying to hide ourselves.” So true.
Transparency aside, she points out that as someone who pushes past her emotional limits, she knew that “as soon as I said yes [to writing the book], I needed to be in therapy”, giving herself the “caveat that I could stop [writing] at any time and I didn’t have to release it, all the way up to the last day.”
In the same way self-awareness allows her narrative to unfold, it also keeps the reader engaged with its core message in an expert balance of realism and hope, allowing light to suffuse the cracks — a harbinger for better things to come.
“I think I knew somewhere, if it was all dark… it might make you turn away. [...],” she remarks. “But the truth of my life is that even in the darkest moments, there was so much brightness, too.”
One of those places was school. O’Sullivan self-describes as not being well-behaved, but hunger and trauma will do that.
She was smart. She wanted to play. But to classmates she was “the nitty kid”.
One morning, her primary school teacher, Mrs Arkinson, gave her clean underwear and taught her how to brush her hair and teeth, restoring autonomy and dignity.
“That moment in the book, particularly, is really sad,” she admits, “but also, there was such empowerment for me.”
Likewise, O’Sullivan’s secondary school English teacher, Mr Pickering, encouraged her, a then pregnant teen, to sit her GCSE exam.
He believed in her academic potential. Most of all, he reduced the distance between educator and student by sharing his story (left school early, worked in a mine, attended Open University) and his humanity.
O’Sullivan’s teachers remind us that what we say and do matters.
“All the adults who actually saw past how I presented to the world and invested in me despite what I was like at times,” she says, “they provided a different soundtrack to the one that was being played to me over and over again, which was, ‘I’m no good. Nobody’s ever going to love you. You’re failing. You’re not very clever’.”
We could be, and should be, that adult for someone. In fact, sometimes we are and don’t even know it.
The community worker in Dublin who guided O’Sullivan toward therapy and training schemes.
The friend who encouraged her to apply to the Trinity access programme while she was working as a cleaner.
More than unassuming exchanges, these are powerful flashpoints where clarity meets intuition and life changes in unexpected ways.
Some things, though, haven’t changed.
Thirteen years after graduating with a doctorate in psychology, issues of access and opportunity in the education system persist.
Societal tropes like the ‘success story’ and buzzwords like ‘resilience’ individualise excellence, maintains O’Sullivan, promoting the idea that hard work is enough, with little consideration for cultural capital or external factors at play.
While acknowledging her own strength derived from hardship, she emphasises that similar experiences have broken many others.
Then there’s the not-so-easy task of staying grounded in her advocacy work.
“This stuff hurts me at times,” she reveals. “Me, I’m lucky that I’m really loved. I have a beautiful marriage and a wonderful husband, and we work really hard to stay connected with each other, and so I have a great support in him, and he has in me.
With O’Sullivan’s book, , due out next year, I think of the phrase ‘on the beam’ coined by her friend Audrey in .
A metaphor that represents flow state, intuition, or being in one’s power, I ask what meaning it holds for her today.
“I always imagine that there’s a light that shines from my feet all the way up out of my head, you know?” She smiles.
“There’s this brightness that comes with all of us, and sometimes there can just be things that block the light and make it difficult for us to shine.”
And her greatest source of light? O’Sullivan gets emotional, naming her eldest son, John, born when she was homeless and living in a hostel.
“Despite the fact that I found it really hard to be a parent. I think he gave me a drive that I didn’t have — to always try and be better, irrespective of how many times I failed.”
She shares that with John, now a father himself, and her having a grandson, Axel, the “cycle is completely broken”.
“All the work, all the struggle to get better, to drag myself forward has actually changed the future of my family, which is, I think, all I ever really wanted — to be able to love and be loved, and love him particularly.”
Love.
One word. One syllable. No messing.
Three years ago, I came out of the medical closet and shared my diagnosis of early-onset Parkinson’s disease with the .
I didn’t know just how big this moment was or how it would alter my life, but I knew it was bigger than me.
It was more than an article on how I navigate life with Parkinson’s. It was a way of changing something that happened to me to being the change I wanted to see.
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Life brings us moments that shake us to rubble and moments that invite us to rebuild.
The choice is ours: to conceal the cracks or let them become a source of inspiration.
As Leonard Cohen reminds us, “There is a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in.”
I hope you find something in these pages that lights a spark for you.
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