Jennifer Zamparelli

On maternal guilt and Nazi feminists

It is newspaper policy that a third person is never allowed to sit in on interviews, no matter how big the star. But when they’re this cute, how can you say no? Jennifer Zamparelli’s 16-month-old daughter, Florence, is propped in a high chair between us, with eyes as big as saucers, listening intently as the presenter discusses motherhood.

Can you take me right back to the start, I ask.

She looks at me awkwardly. “You mean the night she was born?” I had meant Jennifer’s childhood. But not wanting to look a gift horse in the mouth, I chance my arm.

“Well, now that you mention it . . . did Florence acquire her name in the same way Brooklyn Beckham acquired his?” (The child of David and Victoria Beckham was conceived in a hotel in the famous borough of New York City.)

“No, if that were the case, we would have called her Vicar Street,” she laughs.

“It was around his [her husband, Lau Zamparelli] birthday. We were at a Jurassic 5 gig in Vicar Street.”

She sees the image in her head and has to clarify. “Not actually in Vicar Street . . . or around the back, for that matter. But then we travelled to Italy, and the city was just somewhere that we loved.”

The thing about Jennifer is that she is what an Irish person would affectionately call a funny fucker. And she’s that way without trying.

She picked up her deadpan delivery at an early age. She grew up in Baldoyle in Dublin, the youngest in a family of eight. She says, “When you come from a big family, you have to have a sense of humour.”

At Christmas, they used to pile around the TV and watch all the greats: Brendan O’Carroll, Billy Connolly, Lee Evans. She maintains she is the dullest of her clan, once they are seated around a dinner table. Her nearest sibling is seven years older. Were you a surprise? “I think we were all a bit of a surprise, to be honest,” she says in her best knowingmammy voice. “I think back in the 1980s, they were all a little bit clueless. They didn’t know what they were doing.”

As a kid, what she remembers of Baldoyle is a good-looking boy on her block named Nicky Byrne.

Her standout memory of the man whose face went on to adorn the bedroom walls of a million little girls, involves a football tournament when they were both 10.

Jennifer played her heart out, and was sure she was going to be awarded ‘man of the match’; a goal she lobbed in the back of the net should have secured it for her. But when her big moment came, her name wasn’t called out — instead, a spiky-haired Byrne sauntered past her to collect the prize.

“I was fucking raging,” she seethes. Byrne seemed to have it all. “He was always the cool kid. He was always the good-looking one.” Did you fancy him at age 10? “Oh yeah, I’d say so. Everybody fancied Nicky Byrne,” she smiles. “I still do.”

Whatever ‘cool’ was back then, Jennifer took a while to find it.

During one of her teenage phases, she spent a couple of weeks in the full rave attire, another as a rocker: “I had the drainpipe jeans and Doc Martens; they were never going to be attractive. Then there was the bomber jacket . . . then I shaved the back of my head, just halfway up. Then, a couple of weeks later, I did the Chicago Bulls look, the jacket and hat and all.”

Thoughts of her East 17 phase still makes her toes curl.

After finishing her Leaving Cert, she started a secretarial course, but left halfway through when a businessman walked into the class and asked for help in his cable company. Both her hands shot into the air: “Get me out of here,” she pleaded with him, recalling her dramatic exit.

From there, she left for New York and took up a job as a waitress in a bar called The Blarney Rock, opposite Madison Square Garden. “I was a terrible waitress, but I had the gift of the gab. I was making $250 in tips a night.”

When she came back to Ireland, she put her loquacious nature to even better use. In sales — where she says she made £60,000 in her first six months, with no training; and in drama school. Using that combination, she shot to fame on the British television series, The Apprentice. The UK media portrayed her as an ice maiden, a reputation she quickly shook off when she returned to Ireland, and became known as one of the country’s most famous funny women.

But first there was the photographic studio, Bella The Makeover Studio, which coincided with the tail-end of the Celtic Tiger and the explosion of social media. It offered clients a glamorous makeover and photo shoot. Mainly female clients would come in with their best dresses and get made over by professional stylists to look their picture-perfect best. “We had a great time, but the hardest people to sell to, coming into the studio, were the really good-looking young girls, because they are so critical of themselves,” Jennifer says.

“They would walk in the door and they would look amazing; they wouldn’t have a blemish, and the photographs would be stunning, but they were so self-conscious because they were comparing themselves to other people who were Photoshopped online. It was really sad to see. It’s a terrifying thing. Especially when you become a parent of a girl.”

Everything worries Jennifer since her first child arrived in April last year.

“I never was a worrier and now I find myself going to bed getting little pangs of anxiety. You just become more aware of what’s going on, and every time I drive into the RTE car park I ask myself, ‘Am I doing the right thing? Working and having a kid?’ Because you just have this new thing called guilt. Every. Single. Day. It’s great fun,” she says, smiling.

“It comes and goes, and then you say to yourself, ‘Look, I want to be a good role model and I want her to grow up knowing I work hard’, and you’ve got to think of that when you are leaving her with a minder for a few hours.”

Jennifer is now at the helm of 2fm’s morning radio show Breakfast Republic with Keith Walsh and Bernard O’Shea, and co-writing the second series of the hugely successful Bridget and Eamon with Jason Butler and Bernard O’Shea. She describes her typical routine: “I get up at half five, I brush my teeth, I have a pang of guilt. I go downstairs, have a coffee, have a little bit of guilt with the coffee. I go into work in the car, have that conversation with myself: guilt, guilt, guilt.

“I get into work for about half six. Lau is normally with Florence when she wakes up at 8am, if he is not filming; otherwise it’s the minder. I do the radio show, and brainstorm some scenes for the new TV show with Bernard and Jason, and then get home at about 1pm before she wakes up from her second nap.”

Splitting her time between work and Florence has torn her, and, on occasion, the tears have flowed, travelling between her home and RTE.

“It happened the last time when I was filming Series One [of Bridget and Eamon]. I got home late and I hadn’t seen her all day, and the next day I went into the radio and I didn’t see her the day after that, and that killed me. I was driving home and I was asking Lau to keep her awake for me. It was just for my own . . . so I could see her, but she was knackered, and Lau was like, ‘It’s not fair on her’, so that was hard and she probably became a little bit

‘I never was a worrier and now I find myself getting little pangs of anxiety. You just become more aware of what is going on’

clingy. But women do that every day. Do you know what I mean?”

In ‘big muva’ mode, she says there isn’t any cod acting with the lads that will get in the way of getting her work done so she can get home to her child. “I don’t fuck around, oh I don’t fuck around, and the lads would say that I would be very efficient with my time.”

She usually spends the afternoon with Florence, puts her to bed at 7pm, and switches on her laptop to co-write the next series of Bridget and Eamon. She does that until 10pm. “I have the evening to ignore my husband and write,” she says chirpily.

So when does Lau get a look-in? “He gets the weekends. He understands. He is in the business, so he gets it and it’s not forever, that’s the thing. There is always an end.”

She describes, too, the sacrifices she makes. “Friends, laughs, having that glass of wine in the middle of the week and having a social life. But it’s a huge reward, and I can go out on the weekends and we will get a babysitter in when she’s asleep.”

Jennifer lights up when she speaks about Lau. The pair met when Jennifer was directing a play in Bristol and Lau stepped in when one of her actors fell ill. She flirted heavily with him. “I probably threw myself over his car,” she recalls, but he wasn’t reading the signs. It wasn’t until she got him to come to a party in her house that they fell madly in love.

Did you organise it just so you could invite him? “Yep. I think I probably set up that production company so I could meet a man, to be honest with you.”

She brought him home to meet her parents. “Everything was going great. He had his own car, his own house, worked in insurance, did the drama on the side. He turned to me the day we landed back home to Bristol said, ‘I’ve just been accepted back into drama college, so I am going to sell my house, leave my job and move to London’.”

They had a long-distance relationship for four years.

Was that hard? “It’s what you make it. You don’t have to shave your legs for a week, and then you see him while you’re looking all fabulous, and then you have really good quality time together, but it’s not hard because you’re busy, and because it is something that you want.” I ask if trust was an issue. “It was. It was,” she says, elongating the word. “He was in drama school and I am two years older than Lau — I know it’s hard to believe — and he was over there with all these young ones flinging themselves at him. It was really hard and really stressful, and we broke up for a while.”

She broke up with him via text. “I was living in Dublin at the time and I was probably feeling very insecure.”

During the split, a friend took her to see the movie He’s Just Not That Into You.

“It was like: he is just not that into you if he doesn’t buy you flowers; he is just not that into you if he doesn’t want to marry you . . . and I was sitting there thinking, ‘He doesn’t even want to move to Dublin’.”

But Jennifer’s break-up text must have shaken Lau into realising what he was about to lose. They stayed in touch, and he landed on her door several weeks later. Within no time, he was down on one knee.

Today, she says, being married to an Italian has its quirks. “He cooks all the time; his family are mad, but no madder than mine. He is very family oriented. He speaks with his mother every day, sometimes twice a day, on FaceTime; there’s a lot of that.”

She looks at me with a raised eyebrow when I tell her that I know Italian men are famously very close to their mothers and family. “We are actually all going on holiday together,” she adds, giving a big thumbs-up. “Luckily we get on, thank god.”

If only Lau’s 91-year-old grandmother could get the hang of her name: “She calls me John,” Jennifer says. “For the last 10 years. She can’t say Jen. She’s like, (Jennifer adopts an Italian accent) ‘Ahhhhhhh

John-ay, John-ay’, and I’m like ‘It’s Jen. Jen’.”

When the family toasted Jen’s pregnancy around the grandmother’s dinner table, Jennifer smiled as the traditional toast was made.

“Auguri e figli maschi,” they chimed. Afterwards, she found out what the traditional Italian salutation meant — may you bear only sons.

Jennifer went into the delivery ward armed with a whale music CD and a bouncy ball under her arm, intent on having a natural birth. Hours later, she was having a caesarean section, screaming (she does an impressive take on the scene from

Alien): “Just fucking cut it ouuuuuuut.” Her advice to all expectant mums is: “Take the drugs.”

When Florence arrived, they were thrilled with their little girl.

“She is great at the football, but oh yeah, there were killings over what jersey she was going to wear for the Euros. Luckily somebody sent me in a full child’s kit of the Ireland strip, so I lashed that on her before he got there. But, I mean, it’s hard, because she doesn’t even look like me. Look at her, look at her,” Jennifer says, looking genuinely disgusted that there is none of her in the beautiful, cherubic face looking up at me.

I don’t know, I don’t know, I can kind ofsee...

“No, no, no,” she cuts me off. “Don’t be one of those. She is just him all over. People are like: ‘Are you sure it’s yours?’” She has your eyes, I venture. “She doesn’t, she actually has his eyes, and they are brown. Don’t . . . you’re not good at this . . .”

I think for a second. She has your gender, I say.

“She has my gender,” Jennifer agrees, looking reassured.

What is the one thing no one tells you about being a mother?

“Nobody tells you that you may lose some friends, nobody tells you that you become ruthless with your time, but nobody tells you that it’s the best crack in the world. That you actually become closer to your other half and nobody can make you laugh like that little person.” Why did you lose friends? “Maybe it doesn’t suit them or their lifestyle, but I am happy to lose those friends. I will hang onto the ones that really matter, because, at the end of the day, you probably do, for a while, become a terrible friend, because if something happens the baby you are going to ditch that friend, and if they don’t have kids, they don’t understand.

“People should be a bit more understanding, I suppose, but if they are not willing to stick around and help you through that, because it’s a tough time and your emotions are all over their place, then they are not worth having around in the first place.”

Her other gripe is reserved for extreme feminism. “You don’t need to be so Nazi about being a feminist. If you are a feminist, it’s all about letting people do what they want; equal rights and equal pay. If you see me differently for taking my husband’s name, you are being a bit of a Nazi feminist.”

She’s already being asked about baby number two. “It does bother me because it’s nobody’s fucking business, and if I want to have one, I will. There is even pressure on her,” she says, nodding towards Florence.

“I find myself lying for her already because people are asking, ‘Is she talking yet? And I am like, ‘Oh yeah, oh yeah’. I call her Snapchat because she says something and then never says it again.

“There is pressure from every angle. You don’t want to let your work down, you don’t want to let your child down. It’s just about dealing with that and finding a balance and saying to everybody, ‘Fuck off, I am doing me best’.”

And I guess you can’t get better advice about being a mother than that.

Fitzpatricks Shoes, 76 Grafton St, tel: (01) 677-2333, or see fitzpatricksshoes.com Allicano, 4 Johnson Place, D2, tel: (01) 677-3430

Photography by Kip Carroll Styling by Liadan Hynes Assisted by Emily Callan Hair by Paul Davey, assisted by Fiona Power, DaveyDavey, 23 Drury St, tel: (01) 611-11400, or see daveydavey.com Make-up by Dearbhla Keenan for Brown Sugar, 50 South William St, D2, tel: (01) 616-9967, or see brownsugar.ie

Photographed at The Liquor Rooms, 5 Wellington Quay, D2, tel: (087) 339-3688, or see theliquorrooms.com

‘He was over there with all these young ones flinging themselves at him. It was really hard and really stressful’