Had my love for Disney and Barbies and ‘Sweet Valley High’ contributed to my desperate desire to be thin and beautiful?

It was the summer of 2016 when Lauren Fortune, the fiction editorial director at Scholastic publishing, contacted me, asking if I would be interested in writing a feminist re-imagining of The Little Mermaid, writes Louise O’Neill.

Given that I was, at that point, knee deep in writing my third novel, the logical answer should have been an empathetic no. And yet, I hesitated. Discussing it with my parents, I listed out the numerous reasons why I should turn down the offer, and they nodded, but then they hesitated too. “What are you thinking?” I asked them and they replied in unison. “It’s The Little Mermaid,” they said. “This is your story.”

I had been a dreamy child, intense; wild with imagination and fits of fancy. For the first four years of my life, we lived right on Inchydoney Beach and I was half human child, half sea creature. With my hair tangled with salt and sand crusted under my finger nails, my sister and I roamed the dunes and searched the caves for pirate treasure. And then there was the sea. I would swim for hours until my mother forced me back into the house, blue-tinged and teeth chattering, clutching pieces of seaweed and broken shells like a talisman. I would spend the rest of the evening staring out the window, wondering at its unfathomable depths. I wanted to return to the waves, where I belonged.