As You Were
Beautiful people, MAGNIFICENT people! We are back and we are ready to talk about the last book in our series on People What We Love Loads - Elaine Feeney's "As You Were"!
Points of note include:
- Clee is quite taken with Elaine. Like it could be a problem
- These characters being some of the most compelling we've seen in FOREVER
- The toll that patriarchal abuse takes on a person - often turning them into someone doling out their own share of pain to others
- The indignity of illness
- Is taking a decision out of someone's hands or keeping secrets to protect someone a good or bad thing?
- And a healthy aside about the atrocity that was the Irish Mother & Baby Home industry (Katie insisted we term it as such)
Tangents you ask? Oh they were plentiful. Including, but not limited to:
- The 2011 performance poetry crew, of which LC was briefly part
- Saoirse doesn't need your thoughts and prayers. No seriously. She'll scratch your eyes right out man
- Chloe's boobs are unexpectedly climate conscious
- Chloe needing to go to Vegas to see BTS - and the fact the girls all went to see the PTS in Seoul show a week or 2 ago
- Cliodhna, Saoirse and Chloe can still remember all of the stuff a bishop carries around with him. They insist they are not religious. Katie is still not talking to them.
As You Were is available at all reputable booksellers - go get yourselves a copy!
Catch the full episode
More on As You Were:
Sinéad Hynes is a tough, driven, funny young property developer with a terrifying secret.
No-one knows it: not her fellow patients in a failing hospital, and certainly not her family. She has confided only in Google and a shiny magpie.
But she can't go on like this, tirelessly trying to outstrip her past and in mortal fear of her future. Across the ward, Margaret Rose is running her chaotic family from her rose-gold Nokia. In the neighbouring bed, Jane, rarely but piercingly lucid, is searching for a decent bra and for someone to listen. Sinéad needs them both.
As You Were is about intimate histories, institutional failures, the kindness of strangers, and the darkly present past of modern Ireland. It is about women's stories and women's struggles. It is about seizing the moment to be free.
Wildly funny, desperately tragic, inventive and irrepressible, As You Were introduces a brilliant voice in Irish fiction with a book that is absolutely of our times.
More on Elaine Feeney:
Elaine Feeney is a writer from the west of Ireland and she has published three poetry collections including The Radio was Gospel & Rise (Salmon Poetry). She holds a degree in English Literature and History from The National University of Ireland, Galway and postgraduate degrees in Education from University College Cork and The University of Limerick. Her debut novel As You Were won the 2021 Dalkey Book Festival’s Emerging Writer Prize, The Kate O’ Brien Prize and The Society of Authors’ McKitterick Prize. It was nominated for Irish Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards, and shortlisted for the prestigious Rathbones-Folio Prize. Feeney’s work featured on Best of 2020 lists in The Telegraph, Sunday Times, Irish Times, Examiner, Irish Independent, The Herald, Evening Standard, Telegraph, Guardian and was chosen by the Observer as a top debut novelist for 2020. Her short story Sojourn was published in the Art of The Glimpse: 100 Irish Short Stories (edited by Sinéad Gleeson) and she wrote the multi award-winning drama WRoNGHEADED commissioned by the Liz Roche Company.
Feeney lectures in poetry and Creative Writing at The National University of Ireland, Galway, where she is a founding member of the Tuam Oral History Project. She also works on mentorship programmes and is interested in institutions and restorative justice, empathy in education, nationhood and working-class voices. She was Poetry Ireland’s Ambassador (2019) and was a judge of the Seamus Heaney Poetry Prize (2021).
To find out more about Elaine Feeney, visit