O\u2019Neill is used to doing interviews, and all the public-facing, picture-taking busyness that comes with maintaining a flourishing writing career in the age of TikTok and Instagram. And yet she is visibly nervous as she positions herself at a corner table in the Riverside Caf\u00e9 in Skibbereen, her publicist \u2013 who has driven the four-and-half-hours down from Dublin \u2013 seated nearby. <\/p>\n
She wears jeans that hang loosely, and a black cami top with a vintage Dorette crushed velvet black jacket. Delicate pearl earrings match the pearl detailing on her jacket, which she found on Vinted. A Louis Vuitton bucket bag is tucked by her side. She\u2019s chatty, bubbly and laughs a lot, but has managed to get just five hours\u2019 sleep the night before \u2013 \u201cI need more\u201d \u2013 and there\u2019s a tension in the air that never really dissipates through our two-hour conversation. <\/p>\n
The book cover for A Bigger Life \u2013 with its bright balloons clustered against a blue background \u2013 has been all over Instagram in recent months, its title a pull from something said to her by her father Michael: \u201cIf you want a bigger life, you have to take bigger risks.\u201d O\u2019Neill\u2019s first full-length memoir, A Bigger Life, bought in a six-figure deal after an auction with five publishing houses in contention, is a gritty, plucky, vulnerable, occasionally bleakly funny and viscerally raw confessional of how O\u2019Neill\u2019s world fell apart when her relationship ended in 2023, and she had to begin again. <\/p>\n
She and her partner had bought a house together in Wicklow, they had a dog, an expensive sofa, and \u2013 she believed \u2013 a future. In January 2023, her partner told her their five-year relationship was over; he did not, despite her entreaties, want to try couples counselling. She moved home to Clonakilty, to the little farmhouse she had renovated next door to her parents in 2020. She stopped work, including her newspaper column, because she found she could no longer put words on a page. <\/p>\n
She flew to Thailand to a wellness and yoga retreat. (\u201cWhy does he get to walk away, unscathed?\u201d she thinks furiously, as she throws herself about in an \u201cecstatic dance\u201d session at the retreat, slip-sliding on parquet flooring while pretending, per instructions, to be a tiger.) She tried hypnotherapy, a shamanic ritual, art classes, flying lessons and breathwork sessions, and visited an old graveyard with a psychic, seeking to move on, \u201cto make sense of the world\u201d. Eventually, she took the decision to pull herself out of the abyss and start dating on apps such as Hinge and Raya at blistering pace. <\/p>\n
Hyped as an \u201cEat, Pray, Love for the Hinge era\u201d, A Bigger Life recalls Belle Burden\u2019s marriage break-up memoir Strangers and Lily Allen\u2019s break-up album West End Girl in its hurtling rushes of emotion, from shock to anger to insecurity to acceptance. <\/p>\n
O\u2019Neill, now 41, says she wants to spark hope as she embarks on this dating journey, but readers first connect to her in her devastation when she finds herself single, 38, gossiped about, selling her furniture, contemplating IVF, and questioning whether she even values herself. <\/p>\n
![\"Louise](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/3CAYW7FDDVGQXDLRVUF2S2QZ6E.jpg\")
Louise O’Neill: ‘For anyone who feels stuck in a relationship, I\u2019d love for them to read this book and have a sense of possibility.’ Photograph: Egle Laukyte\/Artisan Chronicles <\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a line in the book where I say to my dad, \u2018Who is going to want me now?\u2019\u201d she says \u2013 a stark sentence revealing age-old mores. \u201cSo much pain was around my age and time lost. The agony of that. Grieving not just the loss of my best friend, not just the relationship, but the loss of the future I thought I was going to have. So much of the rhetoric around dating was that for women, to be over 35, you may as well be dead. No one is going to be interested in you.\u201d<\/p>\n
O\u2019Neill took eight months off work in total, relocating for five weeks to Koh Samui before spending periods in Paris, New York and London. She felt she had no choice but to press pause on her life. <\/p>\n
\u201cI know what happens when you don\u2019t properly process grief,\u201d she says. When she was 14, her uncle \u2013 who at 30 was like an older brother to her, died in an accident. \u201cIt was a traumatic experience. I didn\u2019t have anywhere to put it. Within two months, I had an eating disorder.\u201d O\u2019Neill was hospitalised in 2006 at 21, sent to a 12-week inpatient programme in a facility in Dublin. There was a time when she and her parents never thought she would get over it. But she did, in 2017, with \u2013 she writes \u2013 \u201cat least two years of effort, consistency, hard work\u201d. <\/p>\n
She did not think she would write a book about her break-up \u2013 although she has kept a diary since the age of eight \u2013 but soon realised she couldn\u2019t not write about it. \u201cIt\u2019s like, if you have to write something, you\u2019re going to write it, you have to get it down,\u201d she says. Writing was a way of forging her identity again. <\/p>\n
\u201cThere was a sense of powerlessness,\u201d she says. \u201cThe book was me stepping back into my power. I\u2019m not the victim.\u201d <\/p>\n
In 2024, encouraged by her friends, O\u2019Neill signed up to dating apps including Hinge and the celebrity dating app Raya. She began enthusiastically swiping right: she went on 38 dates in 30 days in New York, and more than 100 dates in total between New York, London, Paris, Ireland and Rome. She met men with private jets and gleaming penthouses, men who flew to Cork airport for her, men who kissed her and who she sometimes kissed back, always sober because she is a non-drinker. \u201cMost of them were on Hinge,\u201d she says, an app that might not have the celebrity cache of Raya, but threw up its own surprises. \u201cI remember saying to someone, \u2018I was meeting this guy who has a private jet\u2019, and people would be like, \u2018Oh did you meet him on Raya, and I was like, \u2018No, I met him on Hinge.\u201d <\/p>\n
\u2018I tried to be generous and hold everybody\u2019s humanity in hand. No one\u2019s perfect\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2014 \u00a0Louise O’Neill<\/p>\n
O\u2019Neill is candid about her sexual needs in the book. There are shivers of expectation, thrills of desire, fluttering kisses, and more. \u201cI was brought up in a very sex and body-neutral house,\u201d she says. \u201cThere was never any shame around any of that. I feel lucky because I think that was quite rare.\u201d It helps, she thinks, that her parents were young when they had their children, and they have always supported her choices. <\/p>\n
Her father is a butcher in Clonakilty and O\u2019Neill grew up in and out of the family shop. \u201cMy parents were 23 having my sister and 25 having me. I have a house sitter who was asking me about the book, and she was asking, \u2018How do your parents feel about it?\u2019 and \u2018Are you worried about what people in your community will say?\u2019 and I said, \u2018No. My parents are fine. They\u2019ve always told me to write what I need to write.\u2019 She looked at me and said, \u2018Well, then you\u2019re already free\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n
She has stayed friendly with several of the men she dated, and as the book draws to a close she meets \u201cLeo\u201d in London, with whom she falls in love. She won\u2019t say whether they\u2019re still together \u2013 \u201cI will neither confirm nor deny,\u201d she smiles, \u201cto protect him\u201d (in the book she is also vague, saying, \u201cNo matter what it is, this thing between us, or what it will be, it is already something.\u201d). But she is clear that dating apps, far from being the exhausting head-wreck they\u2019re often characterised as, did her a lot of good. \u201cFor anyone who feels stuck in a relationship, I\u2019d love for them to read this book and have a sense of possibility.\u201d<\/p>\n
Between the dating accounts, O\u2019Neill peppers the book with blisteringly honest mini-essays. There are anecdotes that hit hard, whether it\u2019s her terrible encounter with an IVF doctor in February 2023 \u2013 he advises her that given her lower-than-expected anti-m\u00fcllerian hormone (AMH) levels, which measure ovarian reserves as an indicator of fertility, \u201curgency is key\u201d \u2013 or her raw admission that after the break-up she found it hard to see herself as beautiful or interesting because her partner had left her. <\/p>\n
\u201cI think anybody who has been in a long-term relationship that has soured will empathise with that feeling of coming out and feeling decimated and small, not confident or comfortable in your own skin,\u201d she says. Her self-esteem was shaky for a long time, something her parents sought to help with. \u201cMy mother, when I was talking to her about the break-up, I was like, \u2018Am I a bad person? Did I ask for too much?\u2019 She was like, \u2018You were asking for crumbs\u2019.\u201d <\/p>\n
O\u2019Neill writes about how she \u201cfelt haggard after the break-up, an ancient thing\u201d. Beauty treatments \u2013 Invisalign braces on her teeth, microblading her brows, regular gel nails and facials, Botox injections (she\u2019s had a recurring appointment since her late 30s) and a \u201clip flip\u201d \u2013 were an effort to \u201creclaim myself, my old self… I wanted to recreate the woman I had been\u201d. <\/p>\n
![\"Louise](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/MBQFVT7IJNDCJEJTW7YPG7XEPY.jpg\")
Louise O’Neill: ‘I want my life to be witnessed.’ Photograph: Egle Laukyte\/Artisan Chronicles <\/p>\n
She writes sparely, but powerfully, about her sexual assault aged 19. \u201cIt felt relevant,\u201d she says, of her decision to include it in the book. She wanted to highlight experiences in her life that have shaped her, to create a context for her psychology as an adult. \u201cThere\u2019s a pattern that whenever anything bad happens, I internalise it as my fault. It was unpicking that,\u201d she says. \u201cI think we\u2019re the sum of all of our experiences.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sometimes talking about personal vulnerability \u2013 pain, damage \u2013 can feel shocking or taboo. \u201cThere\u2019s something about it being written on the page and owning it and being like, \u2018I\u2019m not ashamed, this is my experience\u2019 that I think can be perceived as radical,\u201d O\u2019Neill says. She understands some readers may view her book as a kind of revenge narrative, but she feels certain she wrote it from a place of acceptance rather than anger. \u201cI would definitely disagree with the idea that it\u2019s a revenge memoir,\u201d she says. \u201cThis is the book I needed to read when I was in the depths of despair, therefore I want other people to have access to that story. That becomes more important than any personal feelings of discomfort or fear.\u201d In the book she puts it simply: \u201cI want my life to be witnessed.\u201d<\/p>\n
She doesn\u2019t go easy on herself when she\u2019s writing. Through the Ring doorbell, which sends videos to your phone when people approach your door, O\u2019Neill policed her then partner\u2019s behaviour in Wicklow on New Year\u2019s Eve night in 2022 while she was in west Cork, staying online to check when he returned home. \u201cTwo a.m., five a.m., nine a.m., noon, four p.m., six p.m., and still nothing.\u201d <\/p>\n
Technology \u2013 and the havoc it can wreak in people\u2019s lives \u2013 is a shadow actor in this story. Entering 2023, O\u2019Neill wasn\u2019t simply a bestselling novelist. She was also a well-known newspaper columnist with the Sunday Times (formerly with The Irish Examiner) and an active user of Instagram. People often wrote about her in loosely flippant, casually cruel ways on message-board forums. When the break-up happened, anonymous commentators took digs online, speculating about the relationship.<\/p>\n
O\u2019Neill\u2019s ex had revealed to her in early 2023 that there was a \u201crumour about him and another woman,\u201d she writes in the book, but he told her it wasn\u2019t true, that \u201cnothing had happened between them\u201d. <\/p>\n
O\u2019Neill says she was tortured by the feeling that gossip mongers might know more than she did. She sought out the forums. \u201cI had to look,\u201d she says. \u201cIt was a form of self-harm. It was the absolute torture of not knowing that drove me to them. Every time I looked, it was an adrenalin shock. I was physically shaking.\u201d <\/p>\n