LBOY2015 Shortlist Review #3: 'Only Ever Yours' by Louise O'Neill

'Only Ever Yours' by Louise O'Neill

Review by Sarah Nuttall

Summary:

freida and isabel have been best friends their whole lives. Now, aged sixteen and in their final year at the School, they expect to be selected as companions - wives to wealthy and powerful men.

The alternative - life as a concubine - is too horrible to contemplate.

But as the intensity of the final year takes hold, the pressure to be perfect mounts. isabel starts to self-destruct, putting her beauty - her only asset - in peril.

And then into this sealed female environment, the boys arrive, eager to choose a bride.

freida must fight for her future - even if it means betraying the only friend, the only love, she has ever known...

Review:

Only Ever Yours is the debut novel of the talented Louise O’Neill. A satirical novel on society’s obsession with female beauty and the pursuit for physical perfection, it was well received by the YA community as well as being shortlisted for the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize and winning the inaugural YA Book Prize.


freida and isabel have been best friends their whole lives; born from the same batch of eves they are genetically engineered women designed to be the right standard of physical beauty and perfection. Along with their sister eves for twelve years they have attended The School awaiting the day of The Ceremony, the day were they will finally discover which role they will receive on leaving school – companion, concubine or chastity. The greatest of these is the companion; a role which allows the eve to be owned by a husband and the possibility of having sons. Next, are the concubines; designed for sexual pleasure. And lastly, is the common chastity; remaining at the school to develop the future generations of eves to attain their futures. The chastities teach the eves the rules; be pretty; do as you’re told; don’t be different; and don’t break the rules. They eves are drugged with pills to help them sleep and keep their weight within target. Their classes revolve around learning skills that men will find useful and critiquing the beauty and weight of their fellow eves. The pressure is immense and when the boys arrive to claim their brides the eves descend into the final rounds of their high pressure game of "'win or lose"; for this is what they were designed for; this is why they were made. 


I was absolutely floored the first time I read Only Ever Yours and having read it a second time it still has had a strong emotional effect on me. Although the story is fiction, it comes from such an honest core, using our society’s obsession with physical beauty so that it offers more of a reflection on modern society that, on the surface, may resemble a standard YA dystopian novel. The eves are trained to analyse, critique and manipulate each other all in the name of beauty and by conforming to one type of beauty, the eves are faceless; mere clones encouraged to have no personality. The eves viciously attack each other’s physicality; the eves with the highest beauty rankings setting the standards and implementing a self-perpetual cycle that cannot be broken. The onslaught is relentless.


Social media and TV offer no reprieve to the eves; instead, it is used to reflect back to them the standards and ideals they must achieve. It’s a frightening parable but one which will resonate with most. Who amongst us hasn’t witnessed someone’s physicality described negatively? Hasn’t seen a magazine label a woman too skinny, too fat, or simply labelled a bitch? Read a description of a woman’s age and beauty rather than her profession achievements? A mere glance on the internet can bring up the worst and nastiest comments from faceless commentators, with users hounded off social media by taunts of weight, beauty or accusations of stupidity. The most popular cosmetic surgeries across the world are breast augmentation, nasal surgery and eyelid surgery as women across the world alter their faces and bodies to achieve one goal. Butt implants are the fasting growing surgery. It’s a vicious onslaught and although it’s a personal choice and, for some, surgery may have a positive life change, perhaps some would feel happier with their perceived imperfections if there were more standards of beauty than what’s currently reflected.


The desire for physical perfection is summed up perfectly by O’Neill. The standards don’t make our eves happier or healthier, indeed they make them less so; physically and spirituality they are stupid, dull, insipid and mean. The eves are constantly pulling each other down but are never content or happy. Indeed, our happiest characters are those that have accepted themselves and their bodies. It’s a positive and much needed message and one I hope younger women will see and champion because there is beauty in everyone and to deny your beauty to fulfil another’s standard is a loss to the world.


Only Ever Yours is a truly remarkable book, not only for its positive messages, but for introducing us to the wonderful O’Neill who I’m sure will continue to create wonderful books and interesting books. For a debut author, her writing is exceptional; great dialogue, complex and interesting characters and an uncanny ability to understand and connect with her characters. I understood the motivations and could empathise with the characters in the book; from isabel’s attempt at defiance to freida’s overwhelming desire to be a companion; megan’s drive to be Number One and Darwin’s confusion at the eves' interlocking love/hate relationships. A truly wonderful book and one that deserves to be in every school library.  

Rating: 5/5 Stars  ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Sarah Nuttall

Sarah is an active contributor for the YAfictionados blog site. She has written posts for the Waterstones blog and has worked as a bookseller (for 9 years), a Children's bookseller (for 6 years) and is now a manager at her local bookstore. Needless to say, Sarah is a valued member of the YAfictionados team - a true Children's and YA literature expert.

Louise O'Neill Talks Inspiration, The YA Book Prize and What's Next

Louise O'Neill is the phenomenal debut author on the lips of YA readers nationwide. Her debut, 'Only Ever Yours', has claimed the inaugural YA Book Prize, an Irish Book Award and was shortlisted for the Waterstones Children's Book Prize. We can expect big things from Louise and her hotly-anticipated follow-up, 'Asking For It, publishes in September.


Follow Louise on Twitter: @oneillo

Buy 'Only Ever Yours':

- Amazon

- Waterstones

- Foyles

The interview

1.For those that haven’t read Only Ever Yours, could you sum it up in 140 characters? 

The Handmaid’s Tale meets Mean Girls. (With a side of Heathers for good measure.)


2.Where did the premise for the novel come from? 

 On a very cold January day in New York, I was waiting in a Starbucks for the subway to start running again. I was reading one of those terrible gossip magazines that had red circles of shame drawn around the body parts of female celebrities deemed to be somehow unacceptable. All of a sudden, a vision flared in my mind. It was of a young girl in a bikini, standing in front of a classroom of other girls while a teacher in long black robes drew circles around her ‘defective’ body parts in red marker. The other girls were pounding their fists on their desks, shouting FAT, FAT, FAT. 

And I thought to myself – a world in which women are bred for their beauty.

 
3.How long did it take to pen it and how difficult was it to build and develop the world in which it is set? 

I had the idea in January 2011 but I didn’t start writing it until March 2012. At that point, I had all of these ideas for the world and the characters so when I actually started putting words down on the paper, it seemed to flow easily. I had a first draft written by the 31st of August 2012

 
4.Who was your favourite character to write? 

megan was always fun to write because she could be such a bitch. I had an entire back story created for her in my mind so I always felt she was more sympathetic than perhaps she was perceived. She’s so different to me and that forced me to give more thought and consideration to her motivations.

 
5.If you had to write from the perspective of one other character, which character would you pick and why? 

I would have been interested in writing this story from megan’s perspective or Darwin’s point of view. I deliberately kept isabel as quite a shadowy character in the narrative so I think it would be strange giving her a voice in that way.

 
6.You explore sexuality and gender (and even touch on race) and force the reader to face a very dark and twisted world. The most frightening aspect of the world you’ve created is that it holds some kernels of truth that are relevant to our society. How conscious were you of this in the writing process? 

Every single thing that I write about in Only Ever Yours was inspired by something that happened in real life. Every day, I would look at my Twitter feed, or read an article on the Vagenda or Jezebel, or see a post on the Everyday Sexism Project and I would instantly want to include that in my novel. It was about 140,000 words when I initially finished it and the book in its present form is approximate 92,000 words. We cut a lot – not everything I wanted to include was helpful to the pacing!

 
7.The novel is very intimate and personal. I know you’ve suffered from an eating disorder in your personal life and you share this in the love through frieda. What elements of frieda’s character mirror your experiences?  
 
freida is a work of fiction and she isn’t based on me. Writing is like acting in a way, you try and figure out a way into each character’s head, try and figure out what it is that makes them behave in the way that they do. Everyone has experienced grief, shame, fear, love, hope, sadness... It’s about remembering how that felt and then thinking about how a particular character would see those emotions.

 
8.How did you find the publication process? 
 
I’m very, very busy! There are a lot of invitations to events and speaking engagements and literary festivals.

I’m lucky enough to have incredible people working with me. From my agent and my editor to all the team at Quercus shouting about Only Ever Yours on my behalf, I’ve felt encouraged and supported from the very beginning.

 
9.The novel has achieved tremendous success in both Ireland and the UK. Were you surprised by this? How did you react when you discovered you won the Bookseller YA book prize? 

While I was writing the book, I remember telling a friend that I thought if I managed to do justice to the idea, that I thought the book could be important. She looked at me like I was crazy! I didn’t think I was the best writer in the world but I believed in the story, in the message. I was hungry for something like Only Ever Yours to exist and I hoped that other people might feel the same way.

As for the awards... well, I think I’m a bit psychic. I had the strangest feeling with both the Irish Book Awards and the Bookseller prize that I had won, whereas when I woke up on the morning of the Waterstones Book Prize, I knew that I had not. 

It was a huge honour to win the YA Book Prize because the shortlist was so incredibly strong and the judging panel was made up of people whose opinion I truly respected. The entire event was so well organised – it was a pleasure to be involved.

 
10.Now that Only Ever Yours has been published, what’s next?

Only Ever Yours is going to be released as an adult book in July 2015 which I’m very excited about. My second book, Asking For It, will be published on the 3rd of September. It’s about a young girl, Emma, who wakes up the morning after a party to find images of her sexual assault all over social media. It deals with issues of consent, rape culture, and victim blaming.

 
11.Do you have any unusual habits when you write?
 
I meditate for about ten minutes beforehand, then I invoke all the angels, saints, gods and goddesses that I can think of to surround me and to help me connect to the greater consciousness from which all the best ideas come from.

Yes, I’m a bit weird.


12.You’re on Mars and you have meagre food reserves. You have no communication with Earth and you’re down to your last two canisters of oxygen. You have just enough time to read five books. What five would you choose? 
 

THIS IS SO HARD. God. 

Amongst Women – John McGahern

Skippy Dies – Paul Murray

The Secret History – Donna Tartt

Oryx and Crake – Margaret Atwood

Are you there God? It’s Me Margaret. – Judy Blume.
 

Thank you so much for taking the time to answer our questions. I have so much respect for any author that puts so much of themselves into a novel; the good parts and the dark and you certainly don't hold back. Congratulations on your success and good luck for what lies ahead (though I doubt you'll need it).