The Deirdre O’Shaughnessy Podcast: Annmarie O’Connor on Twitch: My Life with Parkinson’s

Fashion Editor Annmarie O’Connor shares her story of resilience, family strength, and finding light while living with Parkinson’s

The Deirdre O’Shaughnessy Podcast: Annmarie O’Connor on Twitch: My Life with Parkinson’s

Irish Examiner Fashion Editor Annmarie O’Connor is well known to readers as a stylist, writer, and, more recently, an advocate for people with Parkinson’s disease.

She was the keynote speaker at Thursday’s IEStyleLive 2025 and is the guest editor of this Saturday’s Weekend Magazine. Ann-Marie sat down with Deirdre O’Shaughnessy for an open and honest conversation about her life today and her new book, Twitch: My Life with Parkinson’s.

In this special episode of The Deirdre O’Shaughnessy Podcast, Annmarie speaks candidly about learning to live well with Parkinson’s, her family’s history, and her belief in the spirit world.

“You’ll go on, dear, because you have to, and you’ll do it one day at a time,” is what her mother told her upon learning of her diagnosis. “One foot in front of the other” has since become the family motto — one learned through adversity.

The course of Annmarie’s family life changed when her father died at just four years old. Her mother returned from New York to rural Galway with her daughters to open a B&B. 

She describes her paternal grandmother, who was sent to America by ship at just seven years old to work in the household of a distant cousin, and the resilience of her maternal grandmother, who raised her young family alone after her husband was killed at sea in a freak Galway storm.

In this in-depth interview, Annmarie discusses how a long-buried struggle with disordered eating resurfaced after her Parkinson’s diagnosis — and how she faced it. She also talks about her belief in psychics and the spirit world, the joy she finds in friendship and family, and the challenge of dating while managing the physical effects of Parkinson’s.

Inspiring, heartfelt, and hopeful, Annmarie’s story is one of resilience — surviving the worst that life can bring and learning to thrive despite it.