Farewell Aisling: Immense highs, excruciating lows and even heckling poor Graham Norton

I shared a flight with Leo Varadkar recently. It was somewhat jarring to see him – an international head of Government – standing on his own in a Ryanair queue waiting for the delayed plane to land, and a fresh batch of ham and cheese paninis to be loaded. We locked eyes momentarily and I wondered if he had any idea who I was.

In 2018 he wrote a letter to Sarah Breen – my Aisling co-author – and I, thanking us for sending him an advance copy of The Importance of Being Aisling, our second book. We had an eyewitness account of him spotted reading Oh My God, What a Complete Aisling by a pool in Vegas (!), and like the lickarses we are, we’d included him to receive an advance copy of book two. Who’s a better influencer than the leader of the country? In his letter he detailed his favourite parts – he’s a Piotr truther, if anyone’s wondering. Now, whether he wrote the letter himself is a state secret, but we interpreted it as an acknowledgment of sorts.

Sarah and I never expected our first book to sell even a thousand copies when it was released in 2017. We thought we might manage a few hundred between friends, family and the members of a Facebook group we’d created to share the Aisling character we’d created 10 years earlier.

We’ve had knock-backs and disappointments, but nothing has ever come close to precipitating the rows that interviewers and journalists insist [myself and Sarah Breen] must have

When Oh My God What a Complete Aisling was a surprise success, the abortion storyline we’d included was one of the main issues affecting young women in a pre-Repeal Ireland. It reached more people than we ever hoped. We got messages from people who’d had conversations with family members because of the storyline, which centred around a character with a crisis pregnancy and Aisling’s own mother’s experience. We commissioned an “Aislings for Choice” banner and invited people to walk with us for Repeal the 8th marches. We wrote in favour of Repeal in Aisling’s voice in the national press. When the government hopped on for a piggyback on some of our campaigning, we knew that people were listening. We recognised the significance of the Taoiseach becoming aware of Aisling in the months before the vote, and the book being on his Easter holiday reading list.

I’d never wear my big straw hat on the streets of Dublin. Someone would call me JR Ewing

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I’m all for AI as long as I can have a robot to do all the housework

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Emer McLysaght: The ‘cry laughing’ emoji has been my nemesis for as long as I can remember

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Being a small part of that movement towards Repeal is one of the absolute highs of the past six years of the OMGWACA whirlwind. In that time we were also invited to Marian Keyes’ house, twice! We went on The Late Late Show, we travelled to the UK, Germany and the US on the back of the success of the books. We (well, Sarah and her husband) welcomed two babies, quit two full-time jobs and swizzed people into taking meetings in The Westbury more times than we can count. The highs have been immeasurable. I managed to turn messing with my best friend into a job and eke a living out of a profession in which it is notoriously difficult to make ends meet.

We turned OMGWACA into a screenplay and then a TV pilot with Element Pictures, who we continue to work with in bringing our girl to the small screen. Writing for television is a long process, evidenced by the fact that some of the actors we had earmarked as “up and comers” for the cast are now Oscar nominees and international celebrities.

[ Emer McLysaght: Real life has tipped into dark satire when TDs need Garda footwear advice ]

The lows are few, but they are significant. Twice Sarah emailed our agent and publishers on our behalf because my mental health meant that we weren’t going to be able to deliver a book that year. When I spent two months in an eating disorder unit in a psychiatric hospital in 2020 it was excruciating to see fellow patients take out my books to read and wonder if I should admit I was sitting right there. I couldn’t see myself as a successful author, just as a person on the precipice watching the whole experience from behind a veil. Without Sarah’s support and our self-employed status, I wouldn’t have had the time and resources to start to get back on my feet.

I’m no Fine Gaeler but when you get a personal missive from the office of the taoiseach, you text your mother and then put it away for safe keeping

For Sarah, it was not easy staying up evening after evening writing book chapters just weeks into her “maternity leave”, or until a publishing deal from the UK gave the freedom to quit the day job. We’ve had knock-backs and disappointments, but nothing has ever come close to precipitating the rows that interviewers and journalists insist we must have. Remaining best friends – so much so that she was with me, returning from a two-week holiday with our “Getaway Gang”, when we saw Leo in the Ryanair queue – has been a priority throughout.

The final Aisling book, Aisling Ever After, is an homage to all she’s been through. It details not only how far Aisling has come but, in a way, how far we’ve all come. We revisit themes from that first book with new and imperfect laws in place. We draw together all our favourite characters: Majella, Sadhbh, Mad Tom, Niamh from Across the Road and even Daddy, who we wouldn’t have killed off in the first book if we had known there were going to be four more.

[ Emer McLysaght: I am never more of a Complete Aisling than when I’m on holidays ]

I have a shelf in my home with a copy of every single version of Aisling books that’s been produced along with two of our three Irish book awards, the second of which we were so sure we weren’t winning that we generously overserved ourselves from the complimentary table wine. The resulting acceptance speech, filmed by RTÉ cameras, was probably only half as shambolic as my shame-spiral mind will let me remember. I believe there was some gentle heckling of gracious loser Graham Norton at one point. Shudder.

As for the letter from Leo, I’m no Fine Gaeler but when you get a personal missive from the office of the Taoiseach, you text your mother and then put it away for safe keeping. It’s a wild reminder of seven years of writing, five books, 20-plus years of friendship, and the impact of an everyday Irish girl called Aisling.

Aisling Ever After is published by Gill Books on August 31st