Irish author Caroline O'Donoghue is no stranger to success. Her first YA novel, All Our Hidden Gifts, was a bestseller. The Rachel Incident, her first novel for adults to be published in the U.S., is in development for a Netflix series. And she's the host of pop culture podcast Sentimental Garbage, which has more than 11.5 million downloads. But O'Donoghue's latest YA novel, Skipshock, may well be her most ambitious project to date. First in a duology, Skipshock opens on a strictly regulated train connecting a series of worlds, each of which experiences time differently. As one ventures further north, days -- and residents' lifespans -- grow shorter. On the train are Moon, a young traveling salesman desperate to retire before he succumbs to "skipshock" caused by frequent time-speed shifts, and bewildered Irish teen Margo, who was en route to a Dublin boarding school when she landed in another dimension. PW spoke with O'Donoghue from her home in London about her magpie approach to plotting Skipshock, the complexity of the book's construction, and her "great theory" about YA fantasy's true target audience.
What idea or experience inspired Skipshock?
Some things materialize instantly and some things are like a ball of chewing gum under a movie seat, just rolling around and collecting gunk for years. Skipshock is definitely on the-rolling-around-collecting-gunk-for-years side of things. The initial seed was probably Brexit, which is so strange because Brexit now feels extraordinarily quaint. Post [the election of] Obama, it was a relatively simple time; we thought that we could fix the world by, like, writing articles about manspreading, you know? And then Brexit happened. So many bad things have happened since, but that really felt like the first bad thing, politically, that was going to affect me, my friends, everyone.
I'm Irish and I live in London, and overnight the meaning of my passport changed. When the U.K. was in the European Union, you had the right to live and work anywhere within the E.U. without having to apply for any kind of visa or special permission. And then overnight, that just stopped being a thing. All these new rules came up about traveling, and suddenly my passport, which was unaffected because I'm an Irish person, became the lucky passport to have. I got really interested in the idea of movement and travel, in general. I didn't start traveling until I was in my late 20s to early 30s -- I was just too broke, trying to make it as a writer. Then I started getting travel journalism bits and going abroad to promote my work -- seeing the world but as a working person, like a traveling salesman, and experiencing jet lag and feeling very much like Moon feels in the book. Then, for a long time, I was really excited by this sort of Spirited Away, Diana Wynne Jones-like magical world that was connected by a train line. I kept coming back to that.
The notion of playing with time came when I was sent on assignment to Tahiti. It was just before Covid. I'd never been so far away from home before, and in Tahiti, the sun is at its height in the sky at a different time of the day. Like, I think of the highest point of the day as being 3 p.m., but there it's 9 a.m. And then, on the way back, I bit into my airplane sandwich and my front tooth came out. We had a layover in San Francisco and I tried to glue it on with nail glue and stuff from the pharmacy in the airport. It was awful. And then what proceeded was all these really horrible surgeries, because I had to rebuild the entire tooth, and I had to get pig stem cells in my mouth to grow back the bones because they had deteriorated for some reason. I remember thinking, okay, this chewing-gum-under-the-cinema-seat idea I've had for years, I'm going to plot it out while I'm in the dentist chair because it's so horrible being there. And I remember thinking about how my relationship to time kept changing, because 40 minutes in a dentist's chair feels like four hours. It all sort of came together like that, really. That's why it feels like such a crazy idea, because it's somebody who was on drugs when they came up with it.
In addition to being a traveling salesman, Moon, the book's male lead, is part of a persecuted religious group, the Lunati. Is there a real-life community that informed that aspect of this story?
There's a few. My earlier trilogy in the YA space, All Our Hidden Gifts, was tarot-based. I did a lot of research into tarot during that time and lots of research into the Romani people. There was a thriving tarot culture in Italy in the fifth century, because, for a time, Italy had greater freedoms around the travel of Romani people. They were allowed to stay there for longer, and therefore, the culture was allowed to thrive. Then I started looking more generally into nomadic cultures, because Ireland has its own nomadic culture, Irish Travellers. Ireland is now an extremely left-leaning country, by and large, but there's still a real gulf of sensitivity around Travellers. When a subgroup is not allowed to settle down, or it's in their culture not to settle down, they become a scapegoat because people don't trust people who aren't laying down roots in the community. That is the cause of so much xenophobia and racism, but it's a fascinating human insight, as well. I found the idea of a culture being expelled and having to move around a lot so interesting.
You drew on your childhood and teen years in Cork when you were writing the Gifts trilogy and that's where Margo is from, too. Do any of the worlds in Skipshock have real-life inspirations?
Whenever I'm writing for teenagers, they always start off in Cork. That's just how I access the feeling of being young, because I moved to London when I was 21 and I haven't gone back. All my youth exists in a vacuum there. In terms of the worlds themselves, that was actually a challenge that I set for myself: to create worlds that are not so informed by our culture. It's something that's a real pet peeve of mine in fantasy -- when people are creating different worlds and it's like, well, this is just China. Or like, this is just Arthurian England. You're calling it this thing, but it's knights and tabards and people are eating cheese and drinking mead.
Your characters move between worlds that have days of varying lengths. How did you keep track of the book's timeline?
With great difficulty. I have to count on my fingers, you know? I'm not mathematical and I'm not systematic in any way. I have no grasp of these things. For that side of it, this book more than any other book I've written was really the product of a brain trust. I would go away and write my draft and then my agent, my two editors, and I would get into a room for half a day and just whiteboard it out. My agent, Bryony Woods, was the real timekeeper of the whole piece. I am not the kind of person who's capable of writing this sort of thing alone.
Your YA fiction is fantasy, and your books for adults are all contemporary fiction. Is that bifurcation intentional?
My first two novels came out in the U.K. and parts of Europe, but not in the U.S. They did well, relative to how any debut novel does well. But a critique that was often quite fairly levied was, it's kind of everything-and-the-kitchen-sink in here. The brief from the publisher for the first one was like, we really want something kind of Bridget Jones-y but with a dark Millennial edge, and I ended up writing vampires into it. And then the second one, Scenes of a Graphic Nature, I wanted that to be a road-trip story about somebody discovering their identity, and it became kind of a crime thriller. There are readers who adore that kind of genre blending, but there are few publishers who do, because they want to be able to market something in one way or another. Things being different is generally not that great a compliment until after it's done well. Before it's done well, it's actually kind of a problem because people don't know how to sell it.
I had always wanted to write YA, but when I first met my agent, she was like, well, the YA market, particularly in the U.K., has really collapsed. There was very little being bought for anywhere near a livable price over here. And so, she said, I think you should just do contemporary. And then, when I came up with All Our Hidden Gifts, she said, now's the time. The market has picked up again. There's been this huge boom in middle grade, those middle grade kids are aging, they'll want something. I started writing All Our Hidden Gifts, and it was just straight urban fantasy, and it was like, "Oh, this is so freeing, because I don't feel like I have to apologize for it." It's firmly within a genre that's easy to sell. Like, these are tarot mysteries about teenagers, you know? It sells itself. And it became a bestseller and was an instant hit.
Right after that, I started writing The Rachel Incident and because I'd spent all this time with these tarot mysteries, I had no desire to write anything except a straight contemporary drama about adults having conversations. I had had this sort of murky stream of thoughts and ideas, and I had managed to channel them into separate streams and I realized that's when my writing is at its best -- not when I'm trying to muddle things together or satisfy two parts of my brain, but when I divide them. Maybe there will be a time when I write something contemporary that has magic in it or write something for teenagers that has no magic in it. But at the moment, that seems to be how my brain works best.
People who don't know me very well and know I write YA and contemporary, they have this idea that the YA is the money work; they're kind of like, "Oh, that's just your commercial, McDonald's Happy Meal stuff." And then stuff like The Rachel Incident, that's the grownup work. When actually, I love both projects, but it's the reverse. The Rachel Incident was so easy to write. It was, like, 12 weeks, and it was really fun, and it came naturally. I was in a good place in my life to write it, and it sold really well. And because it's in that sort of contemporary literary box, people just assume that it must have been harder. But Skipshock was the hardest thing I've ever written. Like, all the times, all the worlds, all the characters -- are you kidding? Even naming the characters -- finding a naming convention for the characters that's not insane.
Did you grow up reading YA fantasy?
No. This is my great theory about YA fantasy, by the way -- I don't think it's for young people. I think if you're a big reader at 15, you want to read women's commercial fiction, generally. I read, like, Marion Keyes and Philippa Gregory. Then, when I was a bit older, I wanted to read clever men, like Haruki Murakami and F. Scott Fitzgerald, because I wanted to drink black coffee and smoke rolled cigarettes and hang out with boys. And then, when I was about 22, I started living in a city for the first time and going to a job every day. Those are some of the worst years of your life, between 22 and 26 -- when you've got no money and no skills and no friends and everything is so grim. That's when you want to read YA fantasy. When you see those girls on the train reading Fourth Wing or Sarah J. Maas, they need the escapism so much more than a 15-year-old does.
Can you give any hints about the second book in the duology?
While the first one was set in the northern worlds, the second one is set in the south, so time is slowing down a lot. We've been used to the worldview of the first book, that everyone wants to live in the south so they can live this longer life of greater luxury, but Margo and Moon are separated and they have all these hundreds of hours in the day. It's like that thing of being separated from the person you love and time is just going on forever; it's its own kind of torture.