Book Review: A Bigger Life by Louise O’Neill

By Katy Thornton

From Fiction to Memoir

Louise O’Neill has never shied away from dealing with complex feminist issues, particularly in her fiction. Asking For It deals with sexual violence amongst teenagers, Idol explores the dark-side of influencers and the complexities of cancel culture, and most recently Whatever Happened to Madeline Stone focuses on the experience of female child actors – a timely and harrowing subject that has received warranted attention in contemporary memoirs and documentaries. This is only to name a few of her novels. In fact, all seven of them engage the reader and challenge perspectives on modern issues facing women today.

In A Bigger Life, Louise turns that attention on her own story. Following the break-up of her relationship, Louise is left to reckon with her life as it now stands, and confront what she really wants. A bigger life. This sharp redirection of the path she was on compels her to reconsider her past relationships, not just with men, but with herself, her body, her aspirations and desires, and the difference between what women are told they should want for their future, and what they actually want. There’s no topic too delicate or too off-limits for Louise to unravel, and as such, through the memoir she provides a raw look at how she became undone and put herself back together, living a bigger and bolder life after a painful turning point.

A Bigger Life

At the beginning of A Bigger Life, Louise’s O’Neill’s relationship is on the brink of collapse. Faced with her sister’s engagement, she realises she has no desire to be in that position, but she also cannot fathom the loss of a five-year relationship so late in her thirties. When the relationship inevitably ends, she mourns it and is filled with grief as she watches all her ticked off milestones be metaphorically crossed out in thick red biro. The beautiful orange couch she bought for their shared home, now meaningless in her new reality, is a recurring theme and the author is unsure what she is left with. At 38 years old, she’s suddenly without all the things she is told she must want as a woman, and she faces a choice – does she let this destroy her, or does she build something new from the wreckage?

Louise expresses the emotions that come with this diversion in life with candour and courage, in a way that becomes palpable to the reader. You feel the hurt come through the page as Jonathon leaves the relationship and the depth of her despair as she considers what this might mean for having children. But there is also confusion beneath that grief, particularly when she acknowledges, mere pages into the book:

“This isn’t right.“

“You haven’t been happy for years, Louise.“

“Why are you fighting so hard for something you’re not sure you want?“

It’s the kind of truth that delivers like a gut-punch to the reader, a familiar mantra, exposing the pressure to settle down and have children before the biological clock stops ticking, even if it means staying with someone who Louise admits later in the book, she never truly loved.

What arrives as a bleak outlook on women who become single before achieving said milestones actually becomes a manifesto on alternative and oftentimes beautiful ways to live your life instead.. Louise is unflinching and unguarded as she comes to rediscover herself.

100 pages in, the reader thinks the break-up and its ramifications is all this book is, when in fact, it is so much more. As the memoir continues, it instead becomes the catalyst for change, for finding a new path for your life, and how wonderful the journey to this new destination can be. One of the ways Louise expands her life beyond expectations is through travel – getting physically out of her comfort zone.

A Change in Scenery

While not the same as emigrating – Louise doesn’t settle down in any of these cities – she allows the likes of Thailand, Paris, London, and New York teach her about life, and in particular, the people she meets there. She dispels the myth that age narrows her romantic opportunities, and the men available to her, with a refreshing level of perspicuity. Across the book, with the 100 men she dates in a year, only a handful disappoint her, with most delighting her or teaching her something about herself or life. You cannot but come away from this memoir with a renewed sense of hope that there are still truly good people in the world.

In the chapter Men Are Trash, which purposefully subverts the expectations of the reader, she writes, “the more I made it my mission to look for good men, the more I found them“. There are no wishy-washy affirmations or proclamations about love and marriage and dating, no sweeping promises about soulmates. Through this bigger life experiment, something even more valuable is offered to the reader: the possibility for so much more still exists, even when you think it can’t. Louise expanding her dating pool into different countries is what ultimately allows for that realisation, and also some potent comic relief when it comes to the topic of the Irish and stereotypes…

The This Is Not Us of it all….

At EPIC, we are naturally tuned into conversations about stereotypes and how people see the Irish, and when Louise’s dating takes her to other parts of the globe, she has some funny encounters. She matches with an English man on a dating app, and she is impressed that he knows that he needs to send international dialling codes when transferring their conversation over to WhatsApp. As she says in the book, “That an English man knew Ireland was a different country was not always a given, but I took it as a good sign.”

The moment is played for laughs, but it introduces a thread that continues throughout the book. When dating in Paris, Louise is faced with the common misconception that all Irish people drink, despite being sober for many years.

“I know that we ate olives and pizza and salad, and he drank red wine while I ordered a non-alcoholic cocktail which prompted what would be the first of many similar conversations while I was in the city. ‘You don’t drink?! But you’re Irish!’ he said, and I had to resist the urge to slip into a country accent worthy of The Quiet Man and say, ‘Begorrah, I don’t.’

This isn’t the only time she faces it either.

Many of our campaigns at EPIC focus on the symbol of the potato, or rather, challenge the persistent use of the potato as shorthand for Irish history and identity. One encounter in London takes the stereotype further when one of Louise’s dates makes a ‘Paddies’ joke after she orders potatoes with her dinner, which leads to the very funny passage:

“I looked at him coolly and asked if he was referencing the Famine because I didn’t find the starvation of an indigenous people amusing. ‘Build a bridge and get over it,’ he chortled as I fantasised about plunging my fork into his hand.”

Clearly, every man that Louise meets is not an intellectual prince. The memoir might be uplifting but it is not naive.

The humour weaved into every chapter of this book is essential. It allows Louise to draw attention to wider assumptions and prejudices without making it heavy and despairing. The moments where Louise is confronted with misconceptions about the Irish are amongst the funniest, made all the better for how she responds to them. Louise spends a lot of A Bigger Life undoing the expectations put on women, but once she leaves Ireland, she has to do the same for those put on Irish people.

There Are Other Ways To Live

That’s the main takeaway from A Bigger Life. It’s a simple but effective. It isn’t a blueprint on how you should live your life, it’s not a self help book, but it challenges expectations and presents alternatives in refreshing and more importantly, desirable ways. It invites the reader to reconsider the “rulebook”, the boxes we think we must tick to have completed our particular game of life “successfully” and portrays how much living there is to do, if you just open yourself up to the possibility of it.

A Bigger Life by Louise O’Neill hits bookshops on the 24th September. The Cork author will join us at EPIC on the 30th November to discuss her memoir. You can purchase tickets below.