Release Date: 05/12/15
Quercus/Hachette
398 pages
Summary from Goodreads:
Where
women are created for the pleasure of men, beauty is the first duty of every
girl. In Louise O'Neill's world of Only
Every Yours women are no longer born naturally, girls (called
"eves") are raised in Schools and trained in the arts of pleasing men
until they come of age. Freida and Isabel are best friends.
Now,
aged sixteen and in their final year, they expect to be selected as companions--wives
to powerful men. All they have to do is ensure they stay in the top ten
beautiful girls in their year. The alternatives--life as a concubine, or a
chastity (teaching endless generations of girls)--are too horrible to
contemplate.
But
as the intensity of final year takes hold, the pressure to be perfect mounts.
Isabel starts to self-destruct, putting her beauty--her only asset--in peril.
And then into this sealed female environment, the boys arrive, eager to choose
a bride. Freida must fight for her future--even if it means betraying the only
friend, the only love, she has ever known.
Hello,
There are two questions that everyone asks, when they
hear
that I’m an author.
1.“Where
do your ideas come from?
This
seems to imply that I’m either stealing my ideas fr
om
other people (I’m not. I promise) or
that
I’m likely to run out of ideas in the near future.
Both
options are terrifying and haunt my
dreams
now.
2.Did
you always dream of being a writer? The second question is easier to
answer without breaking out in a cold sweat. No, I didn’t always
want to be a writer. I wanted to be an actress although there was a
brief period where I thought I might become a nun much to the delight
of my grandparents. The joys of a Catholic childhood. While I didn’t
harbour any ambitions to become an author, I always wrote. I kept
journals from the age of eight, I wrote short stories and incredibly
bad poetry as a teenager. Writing was my way of making sense of the
world. Sometimes, I have to
sit
and start to write before I can begin to understand how I feel about
something in my life. My opinion is formed through my pen. I studied
English Literature at Trinity College, Dublin and it was here,
walking on the same cobblestones as Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, and
Samuel Beckett did before me, that I decided I
would
try to make words, beautiful words, my career.
Life
is not always so simple. At 25, I started working as a fashion intern
for the Senior Style Director at ELLE magazine in New York. There are
no The Devil Wears Prada type stories – she was lovely and kind and
supportive.
Yet I wasn’t happy. Faced constantly with fashion’s obsession
with extreme thinness,
the
anorexia that I had battled as a teenager re-surfaced and I relapsed.
It
was January 2011. I was sitting in a Starbucks in Brooklyn, waiting
for the Q Train to start running again. I was reading a trashy gossip
magazine, poring over photos of celebrities with ‘circles of shame’
drawn around their cellulite, stomach rolls, sweat patches. There is
a woman sitting near me who is eating a muffin and I am fascinated by
her. How can she eat that muffin
and
seem so carefree? Why is she not having an existentialcrisis over the
calories that are in that muffin?
I
was hungry. I wanted a muffin. But I thought if I ate a
muffin,
I would get fat. If I ate a muffin,
I
would have failed.
Suddenly,
a vision flared in my mind. It was bold, bright, beautiful. It was a
young girl, standing
in
her bikini in front of a classroom while an older woman with a bald
head was standing in front
of
her. The older woman had a red marker in her hand and she was drawing
circles around the
young
girl’s ‘fat areas’ while the rest of the classroom chanted FAT.
FAT. FAT. I grabbed my notebook and I started writing.
A
world in which girls are bred for their beauty.
Why?
Because women are no longer able to bear daughters.
Their
wombs will only accept a male fetus.
I
sat in that coffee shop for two hours, scribbling pages
and
pages of notes but it wasn’t until
March
2012, when I had returned home to Ireland, that I started to write
what would eventually
become
Only Ever Yours.
Within
a week, agents wanted to see the full manuscript.
I
had offers from five agents, some of
whom
were amongst the most well respected in the world.
I
had offers from a number of
different
publishers, finally signing with Quercus in May 2013.
Only
Ever Yours
was
published in Ireland and the UK in July 2014 and my world has been
irrevocably altered. While the awards and the rave reviews are
gratifying, it is the reaction from readers that has been incredibly
humbling. I receive letters and emails almost daily from women who
want to share their stories with me and who wantto tell me how my
book has changed their outlook on life. That people have connected on
such a deep emotional level with my work is
something
that I dreamed of but could barely hope for.
I
truly hope that you enjoy
Only
Ever Yours. You can find me on Twitter @oneilllo to either message me
or to read my increasingly inappropriate ramblings!
-Louise
Advanced
Praise for Only Ever Yours
"Terrifying and heartbreaking,
O'Neill's story reads like an heir to Margaret Atwood's The
Handmaid's Tale and M.T. Anderson's Feed, and, like those
books, it's sure to be discussed for years to come."
—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
"A dark dream. A vivid nightmare. The world
O'Neill imagines is frightening because it could come true. She writes with a
scalpel."
—Jeanette Winterson
"An ingenious exploration of gender roles,
female identity, and female competition."
—Buzzfeed
“Unbelievably believable, compelling, utterly
riveting... Whilst it is dark, uncompromising and utterly daunting to read
as a woman, it is and should be a classic in the making."
—Liz Loves Books
Louise O' Neill is from Clonakilty, in west Cork. After
graduating with a BA in English Studies at Trinity College Dublin, she went on
to complete a post-grad in Fashion Buying at DIT. Having spent a year in New
York working for Kate Lanphear, the senior Style Director of ELLE magazine, she
returned home to Ireland to write her first novel.
She went from hanging out on set with A-list celebrities to spending most of
her days in pyjamas while she writes, and has never been happier.
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Yes I agree beauty is what is focused on when women are just lowly objects. It is sad but a mere fact of real life!
ReplyDeleteI like the cover and the summary! I hope this is a big success!
ReplyDelete