I don’t want to over-egg this but Noelle McCarthy is a rare being in Aotearoa. A style icon who just has a way of putting things together. The kind of style that is instinctive and can’t be taught, although I’m sure that when magazines were still a thing she pored over them. She could make a cigarette hole in a floaty dress sound glamorous until she gave up drinking and realised all she owned was books and clothes.
Noelle and I have bonded a bit over our books. She tolerates my drunk voice messages full of wild undoable ideas. Maybe she senses that I’m harmless, mostly. She is what I would call a ‘sniffer’, she trusts the world through her nose.
For someone who is so admired and mysterious, she is very brave in turning over like a cat and showing us the fur of her underbelly. She writes of one hangover after another in her new memoir Stakes. She writes about getting fucked and the kind of sex she used to prefer. Anonymous, doomed or half there. Unsolicited, I did her astrological chart online. I tease her about having Venus in Scorpio. I tell her the real reason she is so stylish is because of all the Libra in her chart combined with her Capricorn sun.
I’m not sure what was wrong with a life of drink and dresses and malignant affairs, it sounds like a perfect existence to me and I was surprised when I read Grand, her first book, how much shame and eventual boredom was attached to her drinking. I had assumed, stupidly, that she must come from some arty upper-class family where being stylish and cool was a natural state of being.
Stakes is ostensibly about Dracula and the theme of thirst and sexual surrender versus the secret to a happy life. Noelle is frightened to take her tall, handsome Guardian-reading university boyfriend home to meet her family, particularly Carol, her grieving, terrible, audacious, amazing mother, who survived losing two children two different ways and would probably narrow her eyes and get wolfy if you called her a survivor to her face. Especially if she had been drinking. Her fear about the boyfriend was all for nothing as the family enjoyed Misery and Carol crowed at the best bits. Michael sat drunk and happy, blissfully unaware he was from another class planet.
I prefer the McCarthys. They are funny and eccentric and I have a bad habit of enjoying people’s pain. Carol is so full of pain that towards the end of Stakes Noelle is still searching for the true source of it, she asks what it was that made her mother unable to tolerate a normal ordinary family life after all the trauma that had preceded it. As Carol lays dying Noelle also acknowledges Carol’s love of life, and her lust to keep on living. She was not a simple person and she is still haunting Stakes which was kind of a relief because I’m not really a vampire person. I don’t really understand the lore or the logistics other than wouldn’t having sex with a vampire be cold? Chilly to the touch?
Like many people with Irish whakapapa I like to torture my Irish writer friends (I have two) with funny or endearing Irish social media reels, when I’m as authentic as a green milkshake on St Patrick’s Day. There is no one who romanticises Ireland more than people who haven’t lived there for generations. Coincidentally both these friends are from County Cork, and I tell them my people are from Limerick and Shannon and the same ancient city where Noelle grew up when it still had trees.
I’ve found a man called Liam who lives near the cliffs of West Cork and I can barely understand a word he says. Recently he was given a tan and white short-haired Jack Russell puppy with a curly tail like a pig who he has called Tommy, and lets him eat cooked chicken in his car. He believes in ice-cream wafer sandwiches and flakes in his cone. He buys the same groceries every week, which always includes two jumbo packs of Barry’s Tea and two sacks of potatoes. His lives in a house which is so yellow it reminds me of the psychedelic submarine. Liam makes strangers hold Tommy while he takes photos of his beloved animal. When I send his Instagram life to Noelle she writes back that he reminds her of her Da. But it’s just the ice cream. Like Carol, and Noelle’s former incarnation Tommy walks to the very edge of the cliff. To the edge of the edge of the edge. Liam seems genuinely happy with his lot, with never having gone abroad. He still listens to Boney M which came out in 1978. The year Noelle and I were born.
Like many people born in the same year we share coincidences that can feel uncanny. We were both given Walkmans and the True Blue album by Madonna and share a mutual obsession with her song ‘Live to Tell’. I search online for a T-shirt of the album cover as a gift for her but most of them are tacky and badly reproduced. I finally found the perfect one from the original tour but it sold a few years ago for $650. On Temu it sells for less than $25. I wonder if even she could pull it off. But the labour oppression gets in the way of me buying it. Because almost no one has been more oppressed than the Irish.
Oppression is another unhealthy obsession for me and I have been obsessed with Irish history since I was 15. The English refined their violence and sadism on the Irish for hundreds of years before they turned to trade and legislation as a colonising force. They might be white but almost no one has had it as hard as them. Not that it’s a competition, or is it? For every Liam there are hundreds of ghosts forced to eat grass and who left from Cork for a better life.
Noelle sends me back a reel of a teacher explaining that it was a rare fine day in Ireland and one of the teachers applied sunscreen so they wouldn’t burn on their visit to the famine cemetery. I laughed and laughed when I watched it because going to the cemetery is also my idea of a good outing. I used to take my son and dog to a town cemetery and we’d eat Hawaiian burgers which was probably tapu and one of the many reasons I am cursed.
Noelle has done a remarkable job of synthesising her research and analysis with her own life and the life of another Irish writer Bram Stoker, the civil servant who created a monster. She deserves to be taken seriously as a scholar. She doesn’t just have style, she has achieved a state of grace.
My grandfather gave me my Irish whakapapa. Monday’s ReadingRoom extract from Stakes showed Noelle photographed by Jane Ussher in the Symonds St cemetery. A place where they dug up my Catholic tipuna to make room for a motorway. The Caseys, the Lorrigans and the Kilfoyles, forced out by the famine. They’d be proud to claim her as their own like I do.
I’m writing this from a hospital bed because despite being sober I fell over and broke my leg and ankle after attempting some cleaning. Never again. When I awoke from the general anaesthetic I wondered who was singing and it was me. The first song was ‘E Papa Waiari’ which I had last sung with my e hoa Angus at the Crown Hotel. This week it is four years since they died. The next waiata was ‘Pokarekareana’. I was on my back and butchering it. I sang it for my grandfather at his funeral and we attempted it at my book launch. Afterwards Noelle was crying and I asked her why. It was Carol’s favourite New Zealand song.
When we’re not being oppressed we’re a highly sentimental people. Watch out. I just asked Shirley, my 93 year old ward mate, where her people come from. Ireland she replies, because of the famine. She is having a wonderful time tormenting her oppressors.
Stakes by Noelle McCarthy (Penguin, $40) is available in bookstores nationwide. ReadingRoom is devoting all week to Stakes. Monday: an excerpt from the book, in which the author argues loudly and in public with her husband while they’re pushing their baby in a pram through Western Park in Ponsonby. Tuesday: a contemplation of the book by Joanna Cho. Tomorrow: a review by Anna Rankin.
