Louise O'neill - Blog Posts
The Surface Breaks: A reimagining of The Little Mermaid. This moodboard is so soft, but the ending definetly wasn't. Have a good day
"Come on, little lady, give us a smile
No, I ain't got nothin' to smile about"
Almost love by Louise O‘Neill
„I felt dizzy with wanting. Wanting him, wanting money, wanting to feel happy, wanting my life to finally begin. I didn’t know what I wanted. All I knew was that I wanted. I wanted so much.”
Louise O´Neill is one of my favourite writers, her books are must-reads and they introduced me to the concept of the unlikeable protagonist. Or more important: the unlikable female character.
Sarah is one of them. She isn’t a heroine, not a role model, she is difficult, selfish, at times a bad friend. Still, her story is so important.
Almost love is split in two parts, Then and Now, which alternate throughout the story. The then part shows Sarah, freshly out of art college where she realised she wasn’t good enough to make a carrier out of paining. Instead, she works as an art teacher at a private school. There she meets the father of one of her students, Matthew Brennan, with whom she starts having an affair after some back and forth, enjoying the status that comes with this fame and money, hoping their affair will lead to something more. The Now part takes place a few years after things ended with Matthew. Sarah is now in a seemingly perfect relationship with Oisín but the aftermath of her affair with Matthew is still graspable in her life.
To me, the most interesting part wasn’t the affair, it was Sarah herself, her life, how she handled her childhood traumas, her loathing for her small home town in comparison to Dublin, her relationships with her father, her friends, her boyfriends. Like I said, Sarah is a heavily flawed character and it is interesting to see her life falling apart around her without her acknowledging any of her own responsibility. Of course, there are other morally grey characters in books but deep down, most of them are good people. Sarah isn’t, really, and to me, it felt good to see some of my worst traits represented in a novel. I didn’t have to like Sarah to understand some of her behaviours because I recognised them in myself.
Also, a big part of Sarah´s life and personality is being an artist. Everybody around her calls her that even though barely even touches a paintbrush throughout the whole story, as she is more scared to try and fail than to never even try. That was very appealing to me, not as a role model, but because we are always told to never give up, to follow our dreams, and seeing somebody actually giving up and failing was such a relief.
Almost love is definitely not a romance story or your average book, but it is definitely something you have never read before.
