An Irish author’s take on academia in the aughties

The moment I discovered the podcast Sentimental Garbage was the moment I knew I’d like the host. I had just finished Curtis Sittenfeld’s American Wife, and was in search of podcast deep dives. I stumbled upon the show, which billed itself as a podcast that celebrates “the culture we love that society tries to make us feel ashamed of.” American Wife was perhaps not the most illustrative example of the podcast’s concept: host Caroline O’Donoghue has done episodes on everything from Legally Blonde to “Weddings” (in general) to “The GirlBoss” (as a monolith) to, most notably, Sex & the City with special guest Dolly Alderton (I wrote about the “Sentimental in the City” miniseries in one of my first newsletter’s back in 2021). Caroline had written a number of books by that point, but none of them had been published (or, at least, publicized) in the U.S., so her body of written work was not in my purview - until! - I was listening to an episode of one of my favorite podcasts, Straight Up (one of the only ones I didn’t cull in my recent content consumption cutdown, in fact - if you read my last newsletter, you’ll know what I’m talking about) where the hosts interviewed Caroline. I was sold from the moment she not only shared the book’s plot, but also alluded to the fact that it was loosely based on real-life events.

The story follows a girl called Rachel and her co-worker turned best friend & not-out-but-quite-clearly-gay roommate, James, through a tumultuous few years in which James embarks on an affair with Rachel’s ostensibly straight and very much married professor, whom she herself is in love with. Rachel narrates the tale from a bird’s eye view; she’s married and heavily pregnant when she runs into an old classmate in a bar in London, who asks her if she knows that their former professor is in a coma. From there, she takes us back on a nostalgic trip through her college years; the scrounging for money; feeling alienated from family; twisting through Ireland’s club scene; and coming face-to-face with the country’s draconian political policies. Obviously, I was not present in Ireland, or even in college in 2010, but O’Donoghue’s writing is so evocative that anyone’s who has ever felt their life get a little bit messy will undoubtedly see themselves reflected in Rachel or James.

While it’s absolutely a page-turner (I bought it in the airport and finished it over the course of two short plane rides), it’s not exactly the frothy women’s fiction you might be expecting. O’Donoghue is Irish, after all; seemingly genetically primed to produce thoughtful and very funny work that still feels melancholy at its core. Crack it open, cast your mind back to your own college days, and you may find yourself feeling both glad to be done with them and sad they’re behind you.