Louise McSharry: 'My baby moved, and within hours the woman who gave birth to me died'

Last March, on the night of the Choice Music Prize, I bumped into the 2fm presenter Louise McSharry at a book launch, and convinced her to get a cab with me to the gig in Vicar Street. In the taxi, I spoke about how I hadn’t been feeling well and was going into hospital for tests. If you ever need to talk to someone about health stuff, she said, give me a shout. I laughed, “It’s nothing like what you’re going through!” At the gig, between bands, she talked about how appreciative she was of her body, that it was getting her through something incredibly difficult, that she had a newfound respect for it. McSharry was about to come out the other side of Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, a cancer that was diagnosed after endless tests, illness and weight-loss.

When I was diagnosed with cancer 10 days later, she was one of the first people I called, even though we weren't particularly close. I was crying and asking for help and I knew I could trust her. She was in London, and gave me some key advice to get me through the weekend. How she handled her own struggle with the disease provided inspiration for many cancer sufferers, myself included. She was open and honest on social media and in radio and television interviews. She took selfies of her chemo-induced shaved head, and made a brilliant documentary, F*** Cancer, for RTÉ.

McSharry is the kind of person you come across at festivals, drink in hand, Tropical Popical nails and general LOLs. Her makeup is always impeccable, her style equally so. She's a laugh, self-deprecating and self-aware, smart and open. She's in that weird media-celebrity zone that Irish broadcasting encompasses, a fame that was increased by the searingly honest interviews on Ryan Tubridy's radio programme and The Late Late Show.

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Louise McSharry with her dad Ruaidhirí following cancer treatment, "the most we have ever looked like each other".

Strangers come up to her and online media outlets steal her tweets for stories. She puts a lot out there too, but has learned to pull back. Her new book, Fat Chance, is part memoir, part thoughts and personal experiences on everything from unemployment to body image, fashion to the boredom of wedding planning, fertility to sexism.

Sitting in the Cake Cafe on Camden Street in Dublin, McSharry seems to have pretty much closed the chapter on The Cancer Years, "I don't think about it. From when I was diagnosed, I kind of felt like 'okay, I'm just going to do this, do what they tell me, then I'll be fine, and then I'll move on with my life'." There was no big epiphany, "people who know me knew that was never going to happen. I'm not a negative person, but I can certainly get bogged down in my own s*** if I want to. I have been known to be moody, and it was unlikely that was going to end. It would take more than cancer to beat my moods, I think."

A line in the preface of the book reads, “Things got off to a rough start for me.” McSharry’s father died from cancer aged 28 when she was just three years old. Her mother was an alcoholic, prompting McSharry to assume a parental role to both her younger brother, Andrew, as well as her mother, Dee.

There’s a section in the book ‘What it’s like to have a alcoholic parent’ in the form of a list, “Cowering in corners. Screaming matches. Police cars in the driveway. Christmases destroyed. Fear every time you put your key in the front door . . .”

In 1989, her mother moved McSharry and her brother to Chicago. Her mother's new boyfriend robbed a gun shop at gunpoint while they waited in a car outside. When he got out of prison, McSharry's mother moved the family into his caravan. Eventually, McSharry's aunt and uncle, Ger and Ruaidhrí, who also lived in Chicago and had been searching for the children, spotted them. Her mother surrendered custody, to the aunt and uncle, who grew to become her new mum and dad.

Contact with her mother was sporadic and “the periods of absence were excruciating”, McSharry writes, “For six years after we left her I spent every evening gazing out my bedroom window, whispering ‘Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight, I wish I may, I wish I might, go back to living with my mom.’”

The often harrowing, sad, and shocking details of her childhood feel a little at odds with this sharp, confident, witty person. But she also repeatedly underplays herself, saying her experience with cancer was a lucky one ("It almost doesn't feel like I had the same thing that other people had. I almost feel like I shouldn't be categorised in that same category, because I had such an easy time of it compared to other people, so it feels unfair to them to pretend it's the same."), or beats herself up for not doing more during the daytime ("It's extra hard when you have cats! They really like snuggling you, and then you have a cat on you! And it's like, 'I could get up, or I could watch another episode of Absolutely Fabulous.'")

Her husband, Gordon Spierin, who works in RTÉ, says she minimises everything. "I'm the queen of compartmentalisation," she admits. "I'm very good at 'I just won't think about that'. Which is good in some ways and bad in other ways. I think it's gotten me here, but I think if I'm real with myself, there's a lot of stuff that has been compartmentalised that is dying to get out and eventually I'm going to have to deal with it."

She has been to “a good few first sessions” of therapy, but with a diploma in counselling and psychotherapy, she feels like she knows what the therapist is up to, and admits to a capacity for being “really manipulative with my deep-down s***, and I need someone to call me on it”.

If cancer did one positive thing, it was to change how she viewed her body.

“I have been giving out about it, giving out to it, blaming it for everything that ever went wrong in my life,” she says. Then, come the hour, her body was “just being f***ing amazing in that whole time . . . the truth is, my body is fit and healthy. It’s a big body, but it is fit and healthy. I had never acknowledged that or appreciated that, or even thought about the fact that my body had a purpose beyond wearing clothes. Which is crazy. I know now that’s mental. But it was the space I lived in for a really long time.”

Learning to sit with herself, and accept her body, is something she’s come around to over the last couple of years, and it’s an acceptance rooted in “not apologising for being a fat person, not accepting the way that a large portion of the world wants to treat fat people, and choosing to try and use my voice for [those] who aren’t there yet or can’t necessarily own that yet.

“For years there was no way I would have even been able to have this conversation . . . So to be out the other side of it, and to feel, no, f*** that, I am a fat person and that’s actually okay, and it’s ridiculous that I would have spent 90 per cent of my life feeling guilty and ashamed of that. I really want to make sure that other people who are like I was, say, 10 years ago, can maybe see what I’m saying and say, ‘oh, maybe I’m not so bad’, because that’s exactly what happened for me.

“It was really social media, seeing other people own it, and refuse to apologise, and point out just how ludicrous it is that so much emphasis is placed on weight and size when there are so many more things that are more important.”

On a week night in 2fm, McSharry’s show is on air. The show is based around new music. There’s no producer behind the desk, and at this time of night, the RTÉ campus is quiet. It seems like a lonely kind of job for such a sociable person. Sometimes she thinks to herself, “I’m just sitting in a room playing songs for myself.”

She says her dad – the uncle who took her in in Chicago – said that initially he didn't really get her show, and then something clicked, "He said: 'I get it now. You're like John Creedon, but younger'."

At that moment, a listener confuses the phone numbers for 2fm and RTÉ Radio One and a text comes through on the screen for ... John Creedon. That Friday night, she attends the VIP Style Awards. “It’s mad, the red carpet was terrifying,” she texts from the ceremony, “Most #GLAM event I’ve ever attended.”

Back in the Cake Cafe, McSharry says she “really enjoys” her show and is “incredibly well supported in RTÉ” – especially now, following fertility issues caused by cancer treatment, that she’s pregnant – but hopes when she returns to work after maternity leave she could start making inroads towards “more talk” in radio. “Long-term? Say in 15 years? I would really hope I could be on Radio One talking to people. That’s my hope.”

If the “overall gist” of the book, according to McSharry, is “s*** happens and it’s s***, and it’s okay to feel s*** about it, but you can get through it, you really can,” then the bad news about her fertility was almost a last straw.

She thought, "When is my break? Everything up until that point, I was like 'fine, fine, fine', and then that happened and come on."

She doesn’t want to talk about it too much, conscious that other people are going through their own issues with fertility and trying to have babies. But actually having a baby is preoccupying her. She’s scared it will change her. “I would often be like ‘I won’t be able to go out the way that I am now’, and people will say ‘oh! But you won’t want to’. And I’m like ‘I don’t want to not want to’.

“I don’t want to have a personality transplant and change into a completely different person . . . I want to be myself, except with a baby.”

She's off to Glastonbury in June. What about bringing babies to festivals in the future? "I'm not at a festival to carry a baby around. If I go to a festival, I want to be me at a festival – which is not baby-appropriate ... I want to be irresponsible."

Something dawns on her, “That’s actually the crux of the whole issue. I want to have a baby, but I want to be irresponsible. Hopefully we’ll find a way to balance those two factors.”

A week-and-a-half later, on a Monday morning in May, at the Great South Wall pier bookended by the chimneys of the Poolbeg Power Station and the Poolbeg Lighthouse, McSharry and I go for a swim. Initially I wanted to skinny dip – a sort of dare related to McSharry's writing about body image in her book. It seemed like a good idea at the time, okay? But as the reality of passers-by took hold, we kept our gear on. McSharry was chatty and upbeat, commenting on how she'd never been out here before, and later, on Instagram, that the red and white stacks look a little more poetic from a distance.

Her biological mother died the previous week. In the aftermath of her death, McSharry tweeted, “This week I felt my baby move for the first time and then, within a matter of hours, the woman who gave birth to me died.”

An older gentleman in his togs and goggles talks about the temperature of the water warming up recently and wonders what the photographer is all about. “I’ve a book.” Oh, what’s it about? McSharry struggles with a description. “It’s a memoir,” I say. “I need to get better at explaining that,” McSharry says.

Lowering ourselves down the ladder, the cold water shock response takes hold, a gasp reflex nearly veering towards hyperventilation.

And then with our breath back, everything is calm. Tough going, but calm. Fat Chance: My life in ups, downs and crisp sandwiches, by Louise McSharry (€17) is published by Penguin on June 2nd