It makes me wonder if it’s not my accent that’s annoying, but my voice

There have been a few charges levied at me recently, writes Louise O’Neill.

That I am the ‘most repulsive’ person in Ireland, for one, which seems grossly unfair to all the rapists and murderers out there, doing their worst to claim that illustrious title. That I used the Ulster Rugby rape trial as a way of publicising my own book, which is also unfair.

It would have been strange not to reference Asking For It given the peculiar similarities between the two, and to be frank, that book feels like a separate entity to me in a way that none of my other novels too. It has been co-opted and appropriated by readers; they have made it their own, and that has little with me at this stage. I also read a comment on an online article that said something along the lines of “we had no rape culture in this country until Louise O’Neill came along and gave people ideas.”