I was restless, frustrated, wanting something I couldn’t name. I had the sense that I wanted to set fire to something, metaphorically speaking that is. I knew strange things could begin to happen to women in their mid-40s; a confluence of simmering hormones and young kids and ageing parents and stressful jobs and the weight of pressure that it takes to run a household. To-do-lists tethering us to the ground like ropes. She depicts this beautifully in the novel, with Irish barfly characters contributing some of the book’s most affecting moments. “We don’t all get the luxury of belonging where we’re born,” one of them says. As she spoke to regulars in these north London Irish bars, such as The Coopers Arms in Kilburn, the pub scenes in the book “grew and grew. And I realised that this book is really about being Irish in England. And exploring who the f**k am I? How Irish am I? What does it mean to me to be Irish? Where do I belong? All of that stuff which is so prevalent for anyone who doesn’t live in Ireland any more. The kind of neither-here-nor-thereness of it all.”

I had fallen in love with writing and knew this was a golden opportunity. I left my evening radio show and moved my working day to within school hours. In conversation with 1883 Magazine’s Cameron Poole, Macmanus discusses her second novel The Mess We’re In, the art of Interviewing, Changes, and what success looks like to her now. The pub was her idea. She’s a proper local here now, having made a decision to integrate herself more in her local community while writing her new book. The podcaster and author lives a few minutes down the road. She brings her children here sometimes to watch football or play darts. Her husband, the DJ and music producer Thomas Bell, known professionally as Toddla T, is sober and not keen on pubs generally but “this place has got more of a community centre feel”. She is friends with a few local mothers from the school gates – some local trivia is that the first series of Sharon Horgan’s Motherland was filmed in this area. Macmanus and her school mum friends meet in Maggie’s Bar now for pints and bacon fries, preferring this refreshingly no-frills environment to some of the area’s more salubrious gastropubs. The author really captures the energy of ‘finding yourself’ as a young person in your twenties. The fun & possibilities. The chance for reinvention and taking chances. The euphoric heights and soul crushing lows - and Orla certainly experiences all of this. After moving to Cheltneham via Dublin for uni, Orla is ready to take on the big smoke and moves in with an up and coming band, Shiva in Kilburn. (Or County Kilburn if you will 😂). Orla juggles trying to achieve a career within music for herself all while balancing two jobs and a headonistic lifestyle.Definitely! The way we live now, it’s just… with WhatsApp, it’s impossible to actually switch off and give yourself real headspace unless you literally just turn your phone off. It’s so important to give yourself that, you have to do that. The best ideas come from giving yourself the space and time to have those things. I think it’s hard work but it’s really worth the effort to actually just give yourself a break from your phone and not be on social media or WhatsApp and just sit with yourself for an hour or go for a walk for an hour and not let the world and let the ideas come out. I think in terms of preparing for interviews, you just have to know your shit. You just have to prepare, you have to read the books, you have to listen to the other podcasts, listen to the interviews, you have to do all that. You then have to think about what you want out of that person, having listened to everything else and read everything else, what interests you? What will set this interview apart? What will make this interview different from every other interview they’ve done, if they have done those interviews? So that’s important as well. I guess you have to not be afraid to trust yourself in terms of what you’re curious about, hopefully, your listeners/readers will also be curious about them. You want to be asking the questions that are just on the tip of the listener’s tongue, the ones that they really want to know, you want to be asking before they’ve even thought of them. Macmanus arrived in London in 2001, the year Brian Dowling won Big Brother. “A very different time,” she laughs. In the novel, which is set around the same time, Orla is dealing with a lot of issues at home. Her father has left her mother and is living with another woman. There’s a sense that she is running away not just from her life in Ireland but from herself, from the problems she doesn’t want to face. A scene at a music festival, where she has a sexual experience she can’t quite remember, is powerful.

However, The Mess We’re In is a book with a main character that you get entirely frustrated with, her decision making is just so off and you cannot fathom why she would do what she does. But that is one of the best parts in my opinion! ¡I just love a flawed main character!!!! It’s the turn of the millennium and, landing in London with nothing but her CD collection and demo tape, Orla Quinn moves into a squalid Kilburn house with her best mate and a band called Shiva. A dizzying tale of young adulthood and the glimmering freedom and not-so-good decisions that come with it.’ CHLOE ASHBYI could barely read this one fast enough. It absolutely fizzes with the energy of youth as Orla navigates her new life in the city. Living with a band on the brink of stardom and trying to find her own feet in the music business, her new life is full of opportunity and excitement. How does she feel about quitting her job at the BBC now, nearly two years on? “It still feels new. It feels amazing to have been able to have the space and the choice to do it, to be able to walk away from a job like that. It’s not something I take for granted.” In the pub where Orla works, run by a tough Irish woman, she is exposed to Mayo Dave and Gerry, who left the old sod to make a living in London. I would have liked their stories to have been fleshed out more. They are potentially more interesting than the callow young men that Orla associates with. Sweet Thing is one of Annie MacManus’s favourite songs. For the Irish broadcaster, DJ, events producer and now novelist, songs and music offer a creative portal through which she imagines scenes, places, people and feelings. She says she sometimes thinks through songs, the lyrics offering a way to visualise. It’s no accident, then, that the spirit of Sweet Thing is imbued in her debut novel, Mother Mother, the book itself a new doorway she assembled, the threshold of which she’s crossing into the next phase of her creative life. Orla has moved to London from Ireland in pursuit of a career in the music industry- Orla sings, produces and plays guitar, so music is a huge part of her existence.

This book has left me a little befuddled. The writing is okay, the story is okay. Everything is okay but it's not great. Her debut Sunday Times Bestselling novel, Mother Mother, was published in 2021 to critical acclaim. Her writing has featured in the Guardian, Irish Times, Stylist and Independent. She regularly publishes articles via her own blog. I’m so sad it’s over. I could have read another sixty chapters . . . A fantastic read’ JOANNE MCNALLY She describes a recent Saturday afternoon visit to Maggie’s Bar. “My oldest, who is nine, was playing darts with a regular. I was sat with Maggie having a pint, and my youngest, who is six, was just sat at the bar, like an oul wan, for half an hour. But that actually meant so much to me, like profoundly. It scares me how much it meant. Like, what does it mean?”Coming of age book which anyone who has left home to try to find themselves/leave a mess behind will identify with. I laughed out loud in some parts. The offer led to some deep conversations with family and friends. It’s not as though Macmanus will be celebrating today’s coronation of King Charles, but on the other hand she is conscious of how much Britain has given her. She recalls her mother’s response. “She was saying ‘England has been so good to you, look what it’s given you: it’s given you a husband, a job in the most amazing institution of British media, it’s given you a happy home, it’s given you friends for life.’” Macmanus’s response? “I was like, ‘All right, Mum, Jesus Christ,’” she laughs. “Because she’s right, you know. It really did make me look at things differently. It didn’t make me accept it, though.”