Caroline O’Donoghue’s ‘The Rachel Factor’: A Fun Millennial Horror Story

Irish writer Caroline O’Donoghue, in October 2023 in Cheltenham (England).David Levenson (Getty Images)

The new wave of Irish female writers is obsessed with sex and Caroline O’Donoghue knows why. Abortion was completely illegal in Ireland until 2018, gay sex was illegal until 1993. The last “Magdalene Laundry,” the place where single mothers and “wayward” women were confined and forced to work for the Catholic Church, closed in 1996. “You know how all the scary movies from the 1950s are about aliens Because everyone was afraid of communism, she says in several interviews. So all these Irish girls telling their lives write horror stories. millennial because we couldn’t think about sex without thinking about all its worst consequences.” This is the background context of his novel The Rachel Factor, Published by Libros del Asteroide. It is a love story between an impoverished heterosexual who is sick of literature and a working-class homosexual with uncontrollable charisma in the second largest city in Ireland during the crisis of 2008.

When they meet, they are both closeted. Rachel is desperate for someone to touch her “and terrified of spoiling myself.” James thinks coming out “is a political decision and not practical, at least for a gay man.” Their paths cross in that magical time we romanticize in middle age—going out every night and making friends effortlessly. “I had inadvertently memorized the names of nearly 100 people between the ages of 18 and 30 with part-time jobs,” Rachel observes, “each of whom had a boyfriend or girlfriend in a campus radio band or in charge of guest lists at concert halls.”

They meet, fall in love and blossom together in a broken apartment where they are poor and happy, two strongly interconnected fantasy worlds that protect and alienate them from the world. “I had been studying literature for almost three years, I had read about the Bloomsbury group and about Paris in the twenties, but I was not able to see the emergence of a scene that was taking place before my eyes. It never occurred to me that the bands I saw, or the clothes we wore, the people we slept with, were the edges of a larger circumference, the makings of a circle.” Nor do they relate the lack of work with the crisis and the recession. Their relationship evolves when they both become infatuated with the same Victorian literature professor. Dr Byrne and his editor wife play the role of the fabulous intellectual couple, with their George Foreman barbecue, handmade Nepalese rug and counter-top piled with flaky cream tarts and ham and brie sandwiches, serving as an aspirational vehicle for two children peering together over the edge of adulthood, with not-so-predictable complications.

O’Donoghue, who found fame writing the teen trilogy All Our Hidden Gifts, She has a special talent for peeling back characters’ masks, layer by layer, to reveal their tender inner flesh. The vulnerability of asymmetrical relationships. “Sometimes I feel like I was in a coma or something before I met you,” Rachel tells James. But when he tells her that he knows exactly what she means, Rachel doesn’t know if he means that he recognizes that she was in a coma or that he felt that way too.

When the plot explodes, a cathartic episode that transforms the sitcom into that horror story millennialeach particle settles into place with astonishing precision, rearranging the cosmos in surprising and satisfying ways. The Rachel Factor is being adapted for the small screen by the North American production company UPC.