People

Caroline O’Donoghue: If we had carried on living together, we would have had no friends left

When you are young and broke, your private jokes have the most life, because they are the only exclusivity available to you. It is a club with only two people

Caroline O'Donoghue: 'Lady Gaga was weird enough and arch enough and arty enough that you could conceivably appreciate her as a straight person who just loved culture, but once you were inside the fandom, you could relax into how gay it all was.' Photograph: Jamie Drew

Caroline O’Donoghue
Sat Jul 1 2023 - 12:16

I have a theory that youngest children are the most susceptible later in life to the concept of serial monogamy. My theory is very flawed, in that there is only one test case – myself. I have been with my partner for almost a decade. Before that, I was with a man for three years. Before that, a succession of boyfriends, in Cork city, where I was born.

When you’re the baby of the family, your social capital is pitifully low. You are clammy and whiny and your legs are too short, and you can’t keep up, and when your parents tell your olders siblings, “Bring Caroline with you, won’t you?” you are treated like an inoperable tumour for the rest of the day. Having a boy agree to be your special friend, to go with you everywhere, and to tell you that you were clever and pretty – what on earth could be better? All you had to do, in return, was mould your entire personality around someone else for a few months, and that was usually quite good fun anyway.

I met Ryan in 2009, when I was in one of these all-consuming relationships. Ryan was a Christmas temp at HMV, where I had already been working a year. By his second week, he had more friends there than I did. I was jealous of him, and desperate to spend every second in his company.

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Ryan was born in Glasgow to young parents who split up when he was a little kid. He had lived all around the UK before settling in rural Ireland in his teens. He had spent a portion of his childhood technically homeless; he had shared single beds with much younger cousins; he had been on the move with his mum and sister. He had worked in his stepfather’s piggery in Mitchelstown, helping the sows give birth. One of the first conversations we had was about the apparently Sisyphean task of trying to move a sow when she was horny. “They freeze up,” he said brightly. “So you have to dump a bucket of cold water on them.”

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He would come out with stuff like this, tales that felt like they were from a different era. But then it would flip, the trauma apparently unimportant, and he would start talking about Sally Field. “Not Without MY Daughter,” he said, holding up the DVD box. He found this incredibly funny, that Sally Field was in a movie called Not Without My Daughter, and so did I. It became a catchphrase for us.

“Not Without MY Daughter,” I shouted at him.

“NO!” He would reply. “NOT without MY Daughter!”

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The joke made no sense, which was why we liked it. It kept everyone else out. When you are young and broke, your private jokes have the most life, because they are the only exclusivity available to you. It is a club with only two people on the list.

You’ve probably guessed, by the Sally Field clues alone, that Ryan is gay. It is obvious now, and it was obvious then, and most people were unbothered by it, with the exception of Ryan himself. “I’m camp as a row of tents,” he often said. “But I’m not gay.”

If we had carried on living together, we would have had no friends left. We would have become too insufferable

I accepted this. It made sense. He seemed very gay and so he had thought about it more, had really interrogated it, and had come to the conclusion that he liked women, and the deep feelings about ageing character actresses was just a separate thing. I held a fuzzy kind of reasoning, which was that Ryan was both gay and not, a Schrodinger’s cat of queerness, and that he would open the box when he was good and ready.

This understanding was clear between us, so the next step was to move in together. I write about this time a lot in my novel, The Rachel Incident. The plot is totally fabricated. There’s intense betrayals, illicit affairs, terrible secrets that my 20-year-old self could have never dreamed of. But the setting, the emotional truth, how we lived, Cork in 2010 – that’s all true. It’s all there.

The other day I caught myself saying to a young person, “You don’t understand what culture was like, before Lady Gaga came along”, and I realised that I had finally become old, and that 2010 was not a year or two ago any more, but an era. The past. The world was a very heterosexual place. Ryan wouldn’t be out for another two years. Lady Gaga was weird enough and arch enough and arty enough that you could conceivably appreciate her as a straight person who just loved culture, but once you were inside the fandom, you could relax into how gay it all was. We tweeted her. We watched interviews in his bed on YouTube. We held parties for the release of her music videos.

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She was incredibly famous, but not so famous that she wouldn’t play the Marquee in Cork, so we went. Poker Face came on and I became so overwhelmed that I had a panic attack. Ryan, who had waited all summer for this, had to drag me out. One arm around my chest, one arm stuck out, parting the crowds of people, yelling at them to get out of the way. We missed the end of the concert, and the encore, and I couldn’t have felt like more of a tit about it all. We lingered by the merch stand, bought our T-shirts, and went home. I had never felt so looked after by a friend, and I remember thinking: missing the last 20 minutes of a Lady Gaga gig is the greatest act of love a person has ever performed for me.

The boyfriends still came and went, but their grasp on me was looser. One young man stormed into our house at 2am, because my phone was off and he was convinced I was cheating. Ryan and I were sitting on the couch eating McDonald’s. The boyfriend screamed at me and stormed out, waiting for me to follow, which I usually did. Ryan and I looked at one another, Eurosaver cheeseburgers still in our hands, and broke into hysterical laughter. It was the exact kind of scene that I was always getting myself into, but now it just felt silly. Ryan and I were the main characters – didn’t he know?

If we had carried on living together, we would have had no friends left. We would have become too insufferable. Ryan moved to Swansea to do a Master’s; I moved to London. We stayed close. He rang me in 2012 from a roundabout at 3am to tell me he was gay. I mumbled “congratulations” and fell back to sleep.

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Now Ryan lives in London too, in his own decade-long relationship. There is less shrieking in our friendship now, and less DVD cases, but it still remains the thing I always wanted: both an epic love story, and someone to talk to about Lady Gaga.

The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donoghue is published by Virago

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