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I am:

My name is Louise O’Neill. I grew up in a small town in West Cork, Ireland called Clonakilty. After studying English Literature at Trinity College Dublin and then doing a post-graduate degree in Fashion Buying at DIT, I moved to New York when I was 25 to work for the senior style director of ELLE magazine. Within six weeks of starting work there, I had relapsed with anorexia, but within four months, I’d come up with the idea for my first novel, Only Ever Yours. You win some, you lose some, I guess. I returned to Ireland at the end of 2011 to start writing and OEY was published in 2014. Now, nearly ten years later, I’ve written six novels including Asking For It, and Idol, and I’ve won a few awards that I won’t bore you about here. I had a column with the Irish Examiner for six years and the Irish Sunday Times for a year after that, yet I would never describe myself as a natural columnist. To quote Taylor Swift, “to you, I can admit that I’m just too soft for all of it”. Every weekend, just before my column went live, I would often feel nauseated with fear. Fear that I had said the wrong thing, fear I was going to get sued, fear I would unwittingly hurt someone’s feelings, fear I would get yelled at on social media, fear that I had made a mistake. (As a recovering perfectionist, making a mistake, big or small, seemed genuinely catastrophic.) In May of this year, dealing with severe burnout, I decided to take a sabbatical. Quitting my column was the first part of that and while there was initial relief – I am far too afraid of confrontation to be a political commentator, you guys!! – it wasn’t long before I… well, I missed it. I know, I am very contrary. The truth is, writing is how I make sense of the world, how I even begin to understand my own beliefs and opinions. Without that space and time to work through my feelings on the page, I began to feel unmoored. “What about Substack?” a friend suggested, and it appealed instantly. A smaller, safer space to share my work, and to engage in meaningful dialogue with people who wanted to have real conversations. That’s what I hope I’ll be able to create here with Savage Hunger and I hope, too, that you will join me.

What is Savage Hunger:

Years ago, I was driving through my hometown when I noticed an ad at the bus stop. It was for the Irish Examiner, and it was the cartoon of a man in a blue jersey and a green helmet, holding a busted hurl in his hands. (For those who are not Irish, a hurl or a hurley is a wooden stick used to play hurling, one of the fastest field sports in the world.) The tagline read – Savage Hunger. Underneath that, the words - A highly motivated, and often primal state.

I remember thinking to myself that if I ever wrote a memoir, that would be the perfect title. Savage Hunger. Anyone who has ever struggled with addiction understands what I’m talking about – that voracious, devouring hunger for your substance of choice, desperate for anything to stop the pain, to fill the cavernous black hole of need widening inside you. But putting my eating disorder aside, I have been hungry in other ways, too. I think a part of me was born that way,; I was born wanting. There’s a line in my last book where the main character says to her best friend, “You’ve never been like me. You don’t know what it’s like to be this fucking hungry. I’m hungry for everything. For love, for money, for acceptance. To be valued. To be special,”. And while I’m not a narcissistic wellness influencer, (!) like that character, I still felt that line in my bones. That hunger has driven me to the point of exhaustion, hustling non-stop, working, working, working. And for what? What was I trying to prove, and to whom? So much of 2023 has been about learning to let some of that go. To be gentler with myself, to slow down. I’ve spent this year trying to figure out what it is that I need rather than what I want. I said above that with my Substack, I was looking for a smaller, safer space to share my work but maybe I’ve been looking for something softer too. Maybe that’s what I’ve always needed, in the end.

What you’ll get:

I write about topics such as recovery ane addiction, pop culture, relationships, body image and food, therapy, healing, feminism, ambition, creativity, writing, and art. And whatever else pops into my head on a weekly basis, it’s potluck around here baby!

Free Subscribers:

- One essay a month

- What I read: books round up every month

For the paid subscription of €5 a month, you’ll get:

- One essay every week

- Regular chat threads just for subscribers

- What I read: Books round up every month.