Child Star

I was living in New York in 2010, the year One Direction were on the X Factor. I remember being confused why people at home – my sister and friends from university, all women in their mid-twenties at the time – kept posting on Facebook about this merry band of teenage boys with bad haircuts and skinny scarves. You don’t get it, my sister would tell me. Everyone is obsessed with them. (Even then, apparently, Harry was considered the breakout star)

She was right, I didn’t get it and I had a healthy sense of superiority about my resistance to this mass hysteria about, once again, a gang of teenage boys. They were bad enough to be dealing with when I was a teenager myself, let alone as an adult. Had everyone collectively lost their minds?

I remained impervious until I moved home. I had told everyone that I was going to write my novel, and had given myself a year’s deadline to finish the first draft. Yet for those first few months living back in my parents’ house in Clonakilty, I found I was regressing to a state of delayed adolescence. It got so bad, I semi-regularly had fights with my mother in which I would scream “I never asked to be born!” and flounce off, slamming any door I could find in my wake. I slept in late, I ate a lot of overly sweet cereals, and, for some reason, I became addicted to watching YouTube videos of One Direction interviews. I have no idea how it started but soon, I fell down a rabbit hole of watching literal hours of Niall, Harry, Liam, Louis, and Zayn being sweet and funny and silly, the very best of friends. This isn’t a new or novel thought but that was what I found so engaging, their chemistry, their camaraderie. It was irresistible.

This brief moment of insanity ended as soon as I started actually writing – once again confirming my belief that creative people who are not creating are some of the most unhinged people on the planet – and I never gave the band much thought after that except for the Harry Styles/Olivia Wilde/Salad Dressing of it all (no one’s fun anymore! Whatever happened to fun?!) and a general fondness for Niall Horan because of the big Irish head on him. We love to see it. But for some reason, over the last two weeks, my TikTok algorithm was serving me a lot of Liam Payne content. There were the