Since 2018, Irish writer Caroline O’Donoghue has been putting lowbrow in the limelight. Her popular podcast Sentimental Garbage – which has a particularly dedicated Australian fan base – began life as a defence of chick lit and romance fiction. These days, it offers witty and sincere takes on all kinds of cultural touchstones that are often framed as guilty pleasures, from the generation-defining music of Avril Lavigne to the high drama of Sex and the City to the incredible versatility of the word ‘like’. In this conversation, which has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity, Caroline talks to Griffith Review Editor Carody Culver about rediscovering our pop-culture obsessions without the cringe factor. 

CARODY CULVER: When did you first become aware that women – so often it’s women – are made to feel ashamed for enjoying certain forms of pop culture?

CAROLINE O’DONOGHUE: Selfishly, I think it was when I was promoting my first novel, Promising Young Women. I had very consciously modelled that book on Bridget Jones’s Diary and Marian Keyes and all these books I had grown up with and hadn’t questioned the validity of. But the whole point of the novel was that it began in this [particular] way – ‘I’m a millennial woman enjoying an office job in the big city and just broke up with my boyfriend’ – it’s a very familiar narrative, but I wanted to subvert it by taking it in a kind of Angela Carter [direction] and making it feel like a classic gothic novel. What I love about gothic literature is that it’s drawn from a period where women spent the bulk of their time in their homes, and how a building itself can kind of turn on you, history and ancestry can turn on you, and then you have corridors going on forever and wallpaper patterns repeating. Now people spend the most time at work, and I was fascinated by the modern office as a gothic landscape. So it was this purposeful thing of starting one way and then veering another. But when I read the reviews and gave interviews, the framing of the questions, rightly or wrongly (even from very respectful interviewers), was like, ‘You start with a wink towards shitty literature.’

I felt like the stuff [I enjoyed] was being derided and I knew I wasn’t alone in feeling like it was worth defending. So the podcast was born out of that, and from there I just kept on expanding, and then I didn’t really care about covering commercial women’s fiction anymore because it kind of felt like that battle had been won – Emily Henry and all of these emerging romance novelists are scooping thick deals and getting reviewed in big places. So I keep extending what counts as garbage.

CC: There’s also a wonderful element of friendship. I love listening to your Sentimental in the City miniseries with Dolly Alderton because the two of you obviously have a great relationship. But the whole podcast taps into that special pleasure of finding a person with whom you share a cultural obsession and being able to go really deep with them. 

CO: Definitely – that lovely thing of meeting someone you think is cool and then realising you both love Jilly Cooper. It’s the most delicious feeling. 

CC: There are so many elements of culture we’re made to feel a little bit guilty for loving, and at the same time there’s a huge appetite for re-examining or celebrating these elements. When you talked to Sloane Crosley for the Enya episode, she had a great observation about ‘the laundering of our tastes’ and how we can shame ourselves as much as feeling that shame from external sources – you know, ‘I love Spice World, but it’s really daggy.’

CO: I love that word. I love that.

CC: Spice World, though – an iconic film! Do you think that idea of laundering our tastes is connected to social media and our urge to consciously curate a version of ourselves for an audience in a way that we didn’t maybe twenty years ago?

CO: It’s fascinating, isn’t it? Now, with the great reclamation of guilty pleasures, there are so many podcasts on cultural figures that are based on this concept. Being the kind of person who listens to an old Britney Spears album has a kind of a weird cachet.

CC: We wear our tastes very publicly now – I suppose we always did in a way, like when you’d have posters all over the walls of your teenage bedroom. But today anyone can have a look at your Instagram feed. Remember early Facebook, with that section of your profile where you could fill out all your likes? The hours I spent thinking which of my favourite bands or books were cool enough to admit to liking publicly…

CO: That was the most curated I’ve ever been! I remember that so well. I remember, in the novel section, really going hard on F Scott Fitzgerald and Nabokov. And back then I was doing it to impress an invisible boy who didn’t exist. But now there’s that quite cynical [aspect] of social media where we’re curating, we’re showing off, we’re constantly laundering and showing ourselves to be the kind of person who wants to free Britney. That’s a type of person we all know, and we all like that person. I also think that in digging up these slightly older things that were big ten years ago – there’s something very hungry for community in that, and I can only really speak to it as a millennial, but I think as a generation we’re in a bit of an identity crisis. Particularly now, because most of us are becoming parents and home owners or not home owners or not parents, decisively, and I think there’s a loneliness in the generation that [makes us] use pop culture as an olive branch.

CC: Sentimental Garbage seems to be particularly resonant for millennial women, and so much of the culture you talk about in the podcast is from the ’90s and the 2000s, when we were kids or young women: Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill, Gilmore Girls, Barbie, noughties fashion. I imagine that for many listeners, certain episodes of Sentimental Garbage are very nostalgic – so I was intrigued to hear you say on the show that you don’t think of yourself as a nostalgic person. 

CO: It’s funny, whenever I read reviews of my work and delicious praise, the word ‘nostalgia’ comes up all the time. I really don’t think of myself as nostalgic at all, and I wouldn’t think my friends do either. Dolly is incredibly nostalgic – she loves to go through old WhatsApp messages. She likes to go back to the beginning of a WhatsApp thread and read through it like it’s a novel, which is so sweet. She’ll often quote reply to something one of us said three years ago – one day she was like, ‘this private joke was absolutely unhinged’ and I wrote back in all caps ‘MAKE PRIVATE JOKES WITH ME NOW!’ I don’t want to talk about how great the summer of ’69 was with somebody – it makes me think about death. 

CC: The flipside of nostalgia.

CO: Yeah, it’s an illness. But then I’ve positioned myself as somebody who’s constantly going through the trash of yesteryear with my raccoon paws and saying, ‘Wasn’t it grand?’ I think it’s more that I’m drawn to things I misunderstood rather than things that are just old, and I’m also interested in diagnosing the culture through what we loved, what we made and what we despised. It’s becoming much more clear to me the older I get. In [my new novel] The Rachel Incident there’s quite a lot about abortion and abortion non-access. I started to realise as I was writing it that while abortions have a huge effect on people who need them, they also have a huge effect on people who don’t need them. Growing up in Ireland with such limited access [to abortion] completely changed how I felt about my body, how I felt about men, how I felt about sex. And there’s only one thing I can trace that to, which is the culture I grew up in. So I use the phrase ‘diagnostic nostalgia’: why are we this way? It’s following the thread back to the jumper rather than just being like, ‘Wasn’t it better in 2004?’

CC: Sentimental Garbage also doesn’t critique that culture of the recent past through the lens of today – you’re not looking at something from ten or twenty years ago and saying, ‘That’s very problematic…’ 

CO: I find that so boring.

CC: It’s so boring! Of course we can all look back and say, sure, that movie didn’t age very well – but we can still find joy in it and appreciate that it’s a product of its time. It seems like that’s very much a part of the show’s ethos.

CO: I think it’s also a reaction to my employment history. We used to have this website in the UK called The Pool, which was like Mamamia – a feminist lifestyle website, and the whole idea of it was, you know, the internet is such a busy and violent and weird place, what happened to good, fun, friendly zones? But because it was an investor-led business we had to keep proving growth, and the things that would get the most hits would be the most boring stuff, like ‘The Daily Mail has done this, shame on the Daily Mail.’ The one where I felt like I was done was a Kate Middleton story. Pictures of her were taken with a long lens when she was on holiday and she was sunbathing topless. The Daily Mail ran the photos, and then we ran the photos and said, ‘How dare the Daily Mail.’ We cropped out her nipples, so I guess that’s feminism. 

I hated that, but what I also hated was these incredibly banal and pointless articles, like ‘[the song] “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”: Problematic or No?’ I just found it really unintellectual. Here’s what I hate the most about it: it seems to back-pat the writer or the reader simply for being born at the right time. Is your self-esteem so low that you have to congratulate yourself for being born at a time when sexual harassment is slightly more frowned upon than it was then? It’s like just identifying that makes you a cultural critic.

Something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is how we overemphasise what pop culture can give us, but we haven’t thought about what it can’t. What art can give you is a sense that you’re not alone – it can transport you, it can inspire you. What it can’t do is tell you how to vote. When people are constantly funnelling political motives into work that was created in the spirit of apoliticality, it almost shows a lack of an outlet. 

CC: We’re also at this particular moment in time when there’s so much content and so many different ways to engage with it. The world isn’t in a great place, so perhaps we’re putting intense pressure on sources of entertainment to give us this kind of moral or political guidance. 

CO: Like, ‘Why isn’t Barbie feminist enough?’ It’s also increasingly pointless. Particularly because we’re living in an incredibly fractured pop-culture landscape – we’re not in a world anymore with thirteen channels, where four movies come out a month, where we’re basically all seeing the same stuff. I don’t know what the number-one movie is right now.

CC: It’s probably a Marvel movie.

CO: It’s probably a Marvel movie. But we’re living in incredibly tailored and very specific pop-culture worlds, which I think is a great thing, by the way. Me and Michelle Andrews were talking about this on the Kylie Minogue episode [of Sentimental Garbage] – we perceived there to be way less female-celebrity vitriol today because the celebrity experience is far more tailored. You see as much of Britney as you want to see, and you never feel like she’s being pushed on you. That’s why I think people hated Kylie Minogue, because they felt she was being pushed on them. So that’s the great thing about pop culture now. But the not-so-great thing, or rather the thing we’re missing, is that the huge steps forward in diversity – while they’re wonderful for the actors and the community involved – I think they give us a false sense of security about how big the domino effect is going to be.

And again, the more we pressure these pieces of culture to have political significance, the more we divorce ourselves from the realities of whatever community is being represented on screen [by an actor in], say, a Marvel movie – we’re not actually learning anything about that community or engaging with their struggles. 

CC: In the very first episode of Sentimental in the City, you point out that ‘you don’t have to like [Sex and the City] to have seen it a billion times’. How do you know when a piece of pop culture has become part of the firmament? I wonder if a single TV show or movie or book can have the palpable effect on the culture that it might have had twenty years ago. 

CO: Even the Marvel movies – I don’t think they’re mass culture anymore. Obviously many, many people saw Avengers: Endgame, but I think in general people are taking it or leaving it and it’s not watercooler conversation anymore. Taylor Swift is the only monocultural thing I can really think of. Or the Titanic submersible – that felt like the OJ Simpson trial, a moment where everybody on Earth was ripped for the next update.

CC: I think that’s part of why Sentimental Garbage is so captivating and so popular – we don’t have those singular pieces of culture that occupy everyone’s attention, so it’s lovely to remember some of the things that did have an outsize influence.

CO: Perhaps if I’m nostalgic for anything it’s that: a whole populace being captivated by something enough for everyone to have some kind of opinion on it.