My Friends: A Guest Post by Gráinne O’Hare
Witty, funny, and deeply relatable — this story brings to life the messiness of growing up and the friendships we carry into adulthood. When letting go feels like the only way forward, can friendship still endure? Read on for an exclusive essay from author Gráinne O’Hare on writing Thirst Trap.
Hardcover
$25.00
$28.00
Thirst Trap: A Novel
Thirst Trap: A Novel
In Stock Online
Hardcover
$25.00
$28.00
A bitingly funny novel about your late 20s as you stare down 30—when do you tire of morning hangovers, days of dead-end entry-level jobs, and late nights at bars? This friend group is about to find out.
A bitingly funny novel about your late 20s as you stare down 30—when do you tire of morning hangovers, days of dead-end entry-level jobs, and late nights at bars? This friend group is about to find out.
Newcastle upon Tyne, a university city in the northeast of England, is a forty-minute flight from my hometown of Belfast. When I travel from one to the other, I spend more time queueing in the airport than I do in the actual air. Nevertheless, when I moved to England in 2017, Belfast felt a million miles away.
I started indulging in an unhealthy amount of rose-tinted nostalgia. I waxed lyrical about my favourite convenience store chain as though it were some sort of quaint, off-the-beaten-track patisserie. I looked through photos of myself and my friends in bars and clubs like a historian doing research into Studio 54, mentally captioning each picture with an anecdote from that night. I watched The Fall and Line of Duty because they were filmed in Belfast, my focus on the gritty crime drama dwindling as I remembered that the public library used as a police station facade in the latter series was one I had frequented at the age of twenty-one because I had a crush on one of the librarians.
On several particularly bleak sleepless nights, when I had been in Newcastle two months and had not yet managed to get a job, I found myself on Google Street View, swiping through a route that began at a city-centre bus stop and went past the Belfast Law Courts, finishing at the office block in which I’d worked before leaving. It was not a remotely scenic route, but it was predictable, comfortable – home.
When I started writing a story set in Belfast, predictability and comfort were never the main themes. The characters I wrote were in dead-end jobs and never-ending situationships, yo-yoing between party highs and hangover spirals. What made it feel like home was that the characters were going through it together – coaxing each other to have one more drink, mixing medicinal brews in their shared kitchen after a rough night, dishing the highlights (or lowlights) of a one-night stand. While I still missed the pubs, the clubs, the unparalleled convenience stores of Belfast, it was clear from my early drafts that what I missed most were my friends.
I had daily voicenote exchanges with my university friends from Belfast, and I made incredible friends in my new home in England, and I came to terms with the fact that it wasn’t chocolate tequila shots at Limelight, or the covers band at Filthy’s, or even the lunchtime meal deal from Centra that made me feel at home. While Belfast is an important part of my debut novel and my own life, the most important thing I learned writing this novel is that home is wherever my best friends are.
