I spent a long time feeling as if I didn’t fit in in Cork, that I was always on the outside looking in

I am writing this from the Metropole Hotel in Cork, where I was invited to be their writer-in-residence for January, writes Louise O'Neill.

Not that I actually stayed here for the month. I’m saving such eccentricities for when I’m rich and old and can act out my Eloise of New York fantasies, living in the “room on the tippy-top floor” of the Plaza Hotel with her nanny and two pets.