Louise O’Neill’s first book Only Ever Yours took the YA world by storm and now she’s back with a second, Asking for It , about rape culture. Teen site member Patrick Sproull caught up with her during Yalc 2015 to ask about her reasons for writing the book, how she went about researching it and what we can expect next…

No hyperbole here but Louise O’Neill is the best YA fiction writer alive today. Patrick Ness, Malorie Blackman and John Green are all exceptional authors, producers of the finest YA books in recent years, but none of them match up to Louise O’Neill.

Her first novel, Only Ever Yours, was lauded from every corner of the literary world as an astonishing piece of feminist fiction. She was compared to Margaret Atwood and praised by the likes of Jeanette Winterson and Marian Keyes, while five-star reviews popped up across the web. O’Neill is different because she is refreshingly honest in her writing, skewering modern concepts of beauty, objectification and patriarchy. Her books are also pleasingly adult (so much so that her first book was recently re-released as an adult novel) and it’s heartening to see a YA writer who treats their readers so maturely.

Suffice to say, then, that a not-inconsiderable weight of expectation has been heaped onto O’Neill for her second novel, Asking for It. We met at the Young Adult Literature Convention (Yalc) in July to discuss the book, and O’Neill was everything I expected her to be: thoughtful, mightily intelligent and thoroughly engaging company.

Asking for It is about a teenage Irish girl who is raped at a party and the book chronicles the fallout from that act. It’s a devastating novel: a genuinely heartbreaking, sickening and truthful examination of society’s penchant for victim-blaming, its treatment of women and the concept of rape culture. Something I told O’Neill when we met was that I read Asking for It on a train and got travel sick – and I never get travel sick.

Despite the anticipation, Louise O’Neill was able to disregard the hype. “I signed a two book deal with Quercus and I said, ‘I’m going to have a first draft of the second novel written before Only Ever Yours comes out’. I felt like, if it was well received I was going to be busy and if it was badly received then it would be really hard to go back and sit down with Asking for It,” she says to me in the bustling Yalc green-room.

“There is pressure and I know that some people are going to like it and some people will say, ‘no, I prefer the dystopian novel’ but I can’t control that. The only thing I can control is that I want to write the book that I feel I have to write. This is what Asking for It is. Obviously, it’s really nice to get good reviews and it’s really nice when people respond to your work, but again, it’s out of my control. As I said, I really hope that people respond to it in the same way – fingers crossed.”

I tell O’Neill that few YA authors today could write Asking for It, not least because it’s so emotionally draining, but also because many writers wouldn’t touch the subject of rape with a bargepole. “Yeah, I will admit that and sometimes I think it sounds a bit indulgent to say, ‘oh, you know I found this book quite hard to write’ but I did,” she says. “Asking for It was a harrowing book to write; I felt completely depleted when it was finished and a lot of that was the reading I had to do around it and the research I had to do, meeting people who were victims of rape and having to interview them. I was having constant nightmares where I was raped and I think because I was so entrenched in it…” She breaks off.

I ask O’Neill to guide me through her research. “Well, it started off actually when I was researching Only Ever Yours because with Only Ever Yours, it wasn’t so much research, it was reading the Vagenda and Jezebel and all those kind of blogs. Rape culture was something that I was really fascinated by and I wanted to explore it more in Only Ever Yours but I didn’t want to overload the narrative with too many issues.

“I came across two different cases – the Steubenville case and the Maryville case in the US – which were very similar in that they were small towns in the US in which the football team were the local heroes, and at a party the two young girls in both cases passed out and were gang-raped by members of the team. And in general the local community really rallied round the men rather than the victims. I was so interested in this and also by the fact, especially with the Steubenville case, that they took videos and photographs and posted them on Twitter and YouTube and Facebook without any sort of concept that that is public and what they’ve done is illegal.

Louise O'Neill: Sometimes we become so accustomed to the world we live in that we fail to see the problems in it' Read more

“Obviously, there are the moral implications of it but also the fact that it was illegal and there could be consequences. I was really interested by that mindset and having grown up in a small town I wanted to transplant that into an Irish context, so after doing a lot of reading around those cases I visited the Rape Crisis Centre in Cork and I interviewed Mary Crilly, who gave me a few booklets on the law in Ireland and different statistics around rape. I also spoke to a number of people who had been raped and then as well as that, when I was finished, I got Mary Crilly and a lawyer to read it, someone who specialises in rape cases in Dublin, just to make sure I hadn’t made grave, stupid mistakes.”

Would Asking for It have panned out the same way if it had been set in a city? O’Neill hesitates. “I don’t know,” she says. “I suppose the reason why I put it in a small town context was because there was those two cases in America in a small town and I could see the correlations between small town life and jock culture, and how those two translated to my own small town. Not to the same extreme, but I just think it was something I was really familiar with and that really interested me.

“You know,” she says, changing her mind. “It probably would have been similar. I mean, there are cases in Dublin and in London as well where victim-blaming occurs. I just felt it was so interesting because it was a small community and that’s a microcosm.”

Asking for It did feel slightly, to me, like an indictment of small-town life and hive mind communities. O’Neill understands and is extremely apologetic when I tell her. “I know, I know, which is terrible because I’m from a small town in West Cork and I’m actually really nervous about it,” she says. “My dad’s read it and he never said ‘this is really worrying’ or anything like that but he would never censor me in that way anyway. I think that my hometown has been so incredibly supportive and encouraging and just couldn’t have been more delighted for me and Only Ever Yours and its success. The town in Asking for It isn’t based on my hometown and I would hope that if something like this happened that the people of the town that I live in wouldn’t react in the same way. I don’t think they would but you can’t tell.”

She pauses for a second. “There was a case in Kerry about an hour away from where I live where a girl had been raped by a man and she brought him to court and afterwards the local priest and a group of local people all shook his hand as they were there to support him. She didn’t have anyone, she had like one family member and I think someone from the Rape Crisis Centre to support her, but everyone else just completely turned their backs on her.”

Louise O'Neill: my journey to feminism Read more

Feminism today means so much to so many people – myself wholeheartedly included – with celebrities like Emma Watson, Jennifer Lawrence and Amy Schumer banging the drum for it, and the promotion of feminism by both genders is encouraging discussions about the way society treats women. In 2015 feminism is, quite rightly, everywhere. So, I ask, why does Louise O’Neill think it’s taken so long for feminist YA fiction to emerge?

“I remember when I was writing Only Ever Yours, I’d had the idea when I was living in New York in 2011 and I was a little bit worried when I came home because The Hunger Games had been so huge and the movie rights to Divergent had just been signed so I was like, ‘the dystopian market is really saturated, am I making a mistake because by the time I write this novel and get it published, will the market have collapsed?’ ”

“But I felt that the feminist aspect was what most interested me,” she says. “I could feel that there was a lot of energy going up around that; the Vagenda had just started, the Everyday Sexism project had just started and there seemed to be more of a conversation about feminism. I think people were talking more about women’s rights and saying we’re not there yet, there’s still more that needs to be achieved. The late 90s and early 2000s were like a feminist wasteland where people were saying that we were living in a post-feminist era and we don’t need feminism anymore. I think that this sort of literature was being written because people are beginning to understand that there is a lot more work that needs to be done.”

At Yalc, O’Neill met her fans who came to her signing in droves. As she wrote on her blog afterwards, “Some of them were men, many were women in their twenties and thirties, but most of the queue consisted of teenage girls. They gushed over the book, they asked for selfies, their hands shaking as they tried to take them, a few of them began to cry as they told me how important this book was to them.” How does she think Asking for It will be received by readers of both genders?

“My father was actually the first person to read it – he was the first person to read Only Ever Yours as well – and his reaction was really interesting because he said that it really made him think and that it was a difficult book to read, it really brought up a lot of problems in our society, particularly how we view women, and he said it was a frightening look at rape culture and victim blaming.”

She pauses to clarify the question. “How do I think it’s going to be received? I think what’s been really interesting to me is that I do think a lot of men tend to get quite defensive when you bring up rape issues and a lot of that is because we still have this image in our head that a rape is when you’re walking down the street and a stranger pulls you into an alleyway with a knife. So with date rape and stuff, I think a lot of guys – and a lot of women, too – will think, ‘God, I think that’s actually happened to me or I think I’ve done that’. That makes people incredibly uncomfortable so I think this book is probably going to infuriate a lot of people because it’s going to push those kind of buttons.

Free read! Only Ever Yours by Louise O'Neill Read more

“I really hope it does educate people about the issue of consent. I’m not blaming boys, it’s about education. Girls are constantly taught ‘don’t get raped’ but boys aren’t taught not to rape and I think the problem is that there’s such a pressure on boys to lose their virginity, to have sex, to have loads of sexual partners, that they sort of push things as hard and as fast as they can… it’s blurred lines. It gets difficult because they’re so desperate to have sex so that their friends don’t make fun of them that they’re pushing girls past the point of comfort, so I hope that when they read it’ll just make them think about those issues a little bit more.”

After Asking for It, what’s next for O’Neill? “It’s funny because I just had a meeting with my editor and my agent yesterday to discuss going forward and I have a few ideas, but it’s been so hectic since Only Ever Yours came out – it just hasn’t lost momentum, it’s been growing and growing and growing,” she says, although she doesn’t sound tired at all. “I really want to take just a couple of weeks, rent a cottage in Connemara with no wi-fi, just me and my notebook, no laptop, and take a bit of time to flesh out these three ideas I’m really interested in. I want to see which one I’m going forward with next.” She takes a pause. “I really felt that this book took a lot out of me.”

Louise O’Neill appeared at Book Trust’s Young Adult Literature Convention (Yalc) at London Film & Comic Con. Her second novel Asking for It is published on 3 September.