Book-review post!
This is another one where I had a lot of thoughts, so just this YA/crossover title for this post.
Louise O’Neill – Asking For It
(Thanks muchly to Quercus, via Hachette Ireland, for the review copy.)
Louise O’Neill’s debut was a dark dystopian novel in which women were valued for how they look. Her second novel is set in the modern world, where – well, the same applies. In a small town in Cork, Emma O’Donovan has just turned eighteen. She’s beautiful and she knows it. She has her bitchy moments; she’s jealous of her friends; she’s slept with a number of different guys and made them promise not to tell. She has sex because it’s there – because the guys want it – because it’s what you do after a few drinks. She’s a teenage girl caught in a world that gives her mixed messages about her sexuality, and she understands this instinctively without ever articulating it. One of her closest friends comes to her once, after having sex without consenting. You didn’t say no, Emma says, and tells her not to make a fuss. And as heartless as this may seem, it’s also savvy advice.
Because one night, one party, it’s Emma who’s out of it, Emma who’s determined to prove that she’s cool, Emma who accepts the offer of drugs, Emma who’s been drinking. And it’s Emma who wakes up the next day with no memory of what’s happened, having been dumped on her front porch half-naked.
Whatever happened to her, she must’ve had it coming to her. This is the logic she applies to her own situation, and the logic most others do too. And what happened doesn’t remain a secret in the era of the smartphone. It’s not too long before the photos emerge – four guys and an unresponsive Emma in a variety of positions, both intimate and degrading. Being barely legal means there’s no issue around pornography involving a minor, but it does mean that when these photos become known to the teachers in her school, they need to be reported to the police. And so begins a year of hell for Emma, which we see snapshots of as the narrative jumps ahead to the anniversary and the days when everyone’s talking about ‘the Ballinatoom case’ and ‘the Ballinatoom girl’ – not just in Ireland but all over the internet. Emma doesn’t want to be brave. She doesn’t want to be the girl who’s viewed in her small town as ruining the lives of the defendants, of their families – she just wants all of it to never have happened.
This is not an easy read, but it’s an important one. It is achingly honest – much as it would be lovely to see Emma view herself as a brave, unconflicted victim of a horrific crime, she can’t. And much as my own angry-feminist voice says that of course that’s what she is, her inability to see things that way is incredibly relatable and true-to-life – as well as echoing what so many of her community and the world at large thinks. Even if the boys were maybe a bit in the wrong, didn’t she have it coming… wasn’t she responsible in some way? Shouldn’t she have taken action to prevent…? No one made her drink or take drugs or wear that outfit… Not only that, but this is part of a broader culture where drunken, dubious-consent sexual experience is normalised. Emma is not the ideal rape victim – these are guys she knows! Guys she’s flirted with! Even guys she wouldn’t mind sleeping with! But that doesn’t make what happens any less of a sexual assault.
This is a book that empathises, rather than imagines. Because there is too much in here that is painfully familiar – priests shaking the hands of rapists to offer support, photos of teenage girls going viral and having her blamed for it, the ongoing slut-shaming. This is not some distant future or some hypothetical situation. This is a story that has been lived by many young women in our digital age, and what O’Neill’s novel does is give the survivor a voice and makes us listen. We mightn’t like Emma, or want her to be our BFF. But we can step into her shoes for a bit and feel how unfair it is. How powerless it makes her feel. How guilty, how ashamed.
How scary it is to live in a world, our world, as a girl people would rather use than respect, rather shame than believe.
Asking For It is published by Quercus Books on September 3rd, and is launching in Dublin in Eason’s O’Connell St on Wednesday September 2nd.
