Louise McSharry: ‘I was so angry, I needed to get a grip’
As her new talk show launches on 2FM, Louise McSharry talks to Liadan Hynes about estrangement, body image, cancer and pushing yourself professionally at the national broadcaster
THERE’S a scene in Louise McSharry’s memoir Fat Chance in which she goes into a meeting with some senior 2FM producers in the summer of 2013 to convince them that she is capable of covering Ryan Tubridy’s holidays for two weeks. At the time, she was relatively unknown as a broadcaster; this was the station’s most important show. But she knew she could do it.
“I’m really bad at loads of things,” Louise smiles now as we chat over tea in the Radisson hotel, down the road from RTE, where she is just back to work after maternity leave. Her second son, Ted, is seven months old.
“Talking about money stuff; confrontation stuff in general. The one thing I know I can do is present a radio show. I’ve never, ever doubted my ability. I doubt myself in every other way.”
She recalls how she knew her two “extremely senior” colleagues at the meeting were thinking “‘Who is this girl? What the hell are we doing here?’ So I really had to sell myself. But it was amazing, because I could see them melting. By the end they were on board.”
Louise is right: she can do it. She is a natural communicator, possessing that skillset all great radio broadcasters have: the capacity to be interesting and articulate no matter what the subject, and the ability to establish an immediate intimacy with people.
She’s 37 now, and has been working in radio for 20 years, since her start on UCD student radio. Yesterday saw the launch of her new weekend morning show, Louise McSharry on 2FM. She will play some music, but this is very much a talk show.
“It’s really exciting because I’ve done this kind of radio before, but only in someone else’s slot. I’ve never been given permission to make something of my own. This would not have happened if I hadn’t demanded it,” she adds.
“And I mean demanded it. I’m getting better at standing up for myself in professional situations; this is definitely the most I ever have. I felt like I needed to start making what I want to happen with my life happen.”
Louise has always wanted to do talk radio. “I want it to be interesting, to be useful, to be honest, to be entertaining,” she says of her new show, adding with a laugh, “Even if we get two of those, so long as the honesty is there throughout, both from the perspective of me being honest with the listener, and my contributors being honest when they’re sharing. I don’t want there to be any filler on this show.”
It seems likely she will succeed. Being seen to be genuine and authentic has all kinds of currency at the moment, on social media in particular. But Louise has, well, genuinely been open and honest about herself for years now. It’s the kind of quality which means people open up quite naturally to her; because you know she gets it.
Born in Dublin, Louise’s father died when she was three, and her mother Dee’s alcoholism took over her life. When Louise was seven, she and her mother and her brother Andrew moved to LA, where the situation deteriorated; at one point, her mother’s boyfriend attempted to rob a gun shop, at gunpoint, while Louise, Andrew and Dee sat in the car outside.
Eventually, Louise and her brother went to live with their aunt and uncle, Ruaidhri and Ger, who also lived in the States, and whom she now refers to as her mom and dad. Eventually, the family moved back to Dublin when Louise was a teenager.
She started a degree in UCD but chose to work over finishing it, and having worked with Newstalk for several years, she moved to Galway for a time to work with iRadio. Along the way, she met Gordon Spierin, her now husband, who also works in RTE.
In the final chapters of her book, Louise recounts how she begins to see her mother again after years of estrangement. Dee was by now very ill with cancer; she has since passed away. Louise, in a postscript, writes that she is pregnant. That baby was Sam (3), her first son.
Becoming a mother when you have lost a parent, or had a difficult relationship with your mother in particular, can unleash all kinds of things. Was this the case for Louise? She’s sad, she says, because she feels like the boys could have created a new chapter in her relationship with her mother.
“When we came back together after that long period of separation, I certainly didn’t know what I was supposed to be with her. She didn’t feel like my mother anymore. There’s no blueprint of, like, how you do estranged mother and daughter coming back together,” she smiles ironically.
“So I kind of feel like if she was alive, the kids would have given us a focus outside of ourselves. And maybe we would have had something nice and new.”
She describes how for the last few months she has been back in therapy, recounting how at her last session she had a very significant realisation.
“I’ve been so mad at my mum for so long, and in the years since she died I have been more mad, because she left a really complicated situation that we have to deal with.
“But then I had this realisation in therapy that when I think about what kind of parent I want to be, the person that I’m trying to emulate is her, from when I was a really small kid. Because when she was good, she was incredible.
“I think that one of the reasons that I’m okay is because I really felt loved. And it was amazing to realise that even if I’m mad at her, and even if things didn’t go the way we wanted to, she gave me that — that ability to be a loving mother.”
It was realising how angry she was feeling that spurred her to go back to therapy in the first place.
“One morning I had something in town — it was one of those mornings, everything went wrong, and I was so angry in the car that I actually thought ‘You need to get a grip, this is not safe, you’re so angry. If you’re not careful, you could do something stupid in the car. Not paying attention or being distracted.’”
She knew things couldn’t continue at this level. “I was also a bit worried because I had a bit of post-natal depression with Sam. I had been conscious of that, and I didn’t want to slide into that after Ted.”
She finds the desire to erase women’s challenges in motherhood, particularly in early motherhood, extremely frustrating across the board.
“This idea that we don’t have a right to complain, just because we’re lucky to have kids, is insane. You can be grateful for something and also have difficult moments at the same time. It’s possible to feel two things
‘When I was pregnant, people asked me questions about stretch marks — and I was like: “Look babes, I’ve had stretch marks my whole life, I’m not worried about stretch marks in pregnancy...”’
at the same time.”
It is, she points out, a silencing of women. “On Instagram you’re always supposed to be happy. If you express that you’re unhappy, people go for you on it. And if you say you’re not happy about that then they say ‘you’re putting yourself out there, what do you expect? I’ve every right to make a comment. I’ve every right to be as rude as I want.’”
Louise has long talked about her own journey with body image, recounting in her book how she spent years hating her physicality, before finally coming to a much more positive place.
Right now, she describes how she is going through a not-great period with body stuff.
“I’d kind of forgotten what that was like. Because I had it constantly for 30 years, and then I had a lovely five years without it, and because I’ve put on a bit of weight I’m just back there now. And it’s just rotten. But I just have to do the work to get myself out of it. Do the work mentally,” she adds.
“It’s just normal, post-baby stuff that so many women go through. Maybe I thought I was immune to it, because I don’t value my body based on its appearance for the main part.
“For example, when I was pregnant, people were always asking me questions about stretch marks — and I was like: ‘Look babes, I’ve had stretch marks my whole life — I’m not worried about stretch marks in pregnancy’.
“By the same token, I was like ‘I’m not worried about getting my body back. Because I don’t have that kind of body in the first place.’ I’m not trying to get back to a flat stomach; I’ve never had a flat stomach, I never will.”
It’s a constant process, an ebb and flow. These days, Louise is more interested in body neutrality than body positivity, explaining that she feels that the body positivity movement has lost all meaning.
“It is still in principal if not in name about the very real systemic challenges that fat people experience. So less about I don’t like what I see when I look in the mirror, and more about when I go to the doctor I don’t get the appropriate care because I’m judged based on my body.”
She’s not convinced that it is necessarily realistic to ask people to love every bit of their body, or to love what they see when they look in the mirror.
“I think if you can get to that point that’s amazing, and I would love to be there. I’m not there, I don’t think I’m ever going to get there.
“What’s better for me is if I can divorce my value from the physical appearance of my body. I think it’s much healthier for me if I focus on my body’s truest purpose: being active; living life; producing babies; and getting away from my body as a clothes horse.”
Ironically, what helped originally in her more positive attitude to her own body was her diagnosis with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and her subsequent recovery; it’s now five years since her diagnosis and treatment.
“I don’t worry about it a lot,” she says now. “From what I know — and if this is wrong I don’t want to be told — I’m not more likely now to get cancer than anybody else.
“But having had cancer, I know how likely it is that I’ll get cancer. Whereas before it was never a thing that I thought would happen to me. Now I’m like ‘yeah it might happen to me again’. But I’m kind of at peace with that.”
During her chemotherapy treatment, one day she went to see The Theory of Everything, the film about Stephen Hawking.
“I had this absolute breakdown during it, because the randomness of illness just hit me really hard. That you can be walking along in your life and everything’s fine and then out of nowhere you can be have cancer or whatever. But I kind of have come to terms with that, because there’s just nothing you can do about it.”
If anyone is equipped to cope with this knowledge of life’s uncertainty, it is Louise, who since childhood it would seem has experienced inordinate amounts of it.
“I find it very hard to feel permanent about anything,” she acknowledges with a smile. “And I didn’t really realise that until I got married. And then my husband was like ‘you know I don’t ever think about us not being married...’ And I was like ‘what?’” she laughs.
“I think about it all the time. Like, I think about all the possibilities and eventualities of everything. It’s not a worry so much as a practicality.”
It’s possibly a hangover from her childhood; she had a lot of things to worry about as a kid, she reflects. Adult, realistic things. She used to be the kind of person who would caretake everything, real child-ofan-addict behaviour she says.
Now, she’s too busy for that kind of thing, between the two boys, and her new show. She’s not sure how the show will look in a year, she admits, what it will be like. Chances are it will be a reflection of Louise herself: funny, intelligent, honest and an exceptional conversationalist. A natural.
Louise McSharry 2FM, weekends 9-11am