SIAN
Good morning and welcome to BeBelle podcast! Today I've invited the best-selling author, award-winning stylist, fashion writer and wardrobe wellness coach Anne Marie
O'Connor to chat to us. AnneMarie, hello and welcome!
Anne Marie
Thank you for having me Sian.
Sian
I'm excited. I won't tell anybody she was supposed to be here last week but she was in Dublin.
Anne Marie
It was that moment of steely panic. I had gone on Instagram and I was watching Sians story and she goes 'I'm really looking forward to interviewing Anne Marie O'Connor and it's like the blood just drained from the top of my head to my toes and I started shaking and I left you that panicked message "I'm in Dublin next Friday!"
Sian
Yeah that's got me in trouble a few times actually so no listen, you're here I'm so glad to see you! I'm absolutely delighted you could make it.
Anne Marie
Yeah likewise I'm delighted to be here!
Sian
Good stuff. so BeBelle, what do we do? Well we'd like to start from the beginning this is all about you. You talk, I listen and if I want to take you back somewhere I'll take you back. So where did it all begin for you? Where were you born?
Anne Marie
Well I was born in New York, Long Island. So my mom is from an island called Inish Puffin which is off the coast of Galway and she moved to New York when she was 17 and she met my father who is from Brooklyn. My father's parents are both fromKerry. So they emigrated independently from Kerry. Funnily enough they only lived apparently about nine miles away from each other just outside Tralee and I believe they met at a dance in Brooklyn.
So then my mom met my dad, I was born in Long Island. My father died when I was four so my mother moved us back when I was 12 years old. So I moved to a town called a Athenry. My mother's sister had lived there and was selling her house and she turned it into a guesthouse and I went to school in Athenry and I went to university in Galway and I'm just gonna keep talking…
Sian
So your first schooling years were in New York?
Anne Marie
Yeah they were in New York. So I did a year in junior high school and I was
only 12 and I moved over.
Sian
That's quite a difficult time to move because well, for me going from Junior school to senior school I know I was really worried about going from junior to senior without my friends
and yeah it was a big time for me.
Anne Marie
You know it's funny because my sisters, we've had this conversation and a lot of people do say "well was it difficult" but it wasn't difficult for me simply because I think I was always a late starter anyhow so I was a bit younger in attitude you know? I wasn't as advanced I was always a late bloomer with things so I think I just..I'm quite adaptable anyhow so I think I kind of fell into it. My sisters, who were 17, I have twin sisters, they said they were much more resistant to it yes because they were already you know they were much more rebellious and there was two of them you know and when we were kids like I learned to walk in Ireland and I we used to come and have summers here every couple of years. I learned to walk here so I was a very late bloomer again! I was like nearly a year and a half but rumor has it when I did walk I ran. It's ironic because I walk everywhere now I don't have a car so it’s weird how life turns out!
Then we came back when dad passed I was five but they had planned the trip and mom said you know "dad would probably want usto take it" so I came back when I was five and I came back when I was seven so we would spend our summers on Inis Puffin where my grandmother lives. It's funny, when we moved back when I was 12 we spent our summers there and I got my first job there and my first kiss there and so I had a load of firsts there.
Sian
But losing the parent at a very young age that must have been very difficult?
Anne Marie
Yeah, I mean I think you don't really realize what the repercussions are of losing someone in your family until you get older. Yes I had delayed grief when I was 16 my mother took me out of school for a week and she basically, she was amazing. I was very confused. I didn't know whether a lot of the memories I had were assumed memories I collected and I created a narrative in my head based on what people had told me and I was confused as to whether they were organic and authentic to my own experience. It's really difficult because I think when you lose someone so young the assumption is that you haven't lost anything and it used to hurt a lot when people said that and I thought "well that's my father you're talking about".
My mother said "you've actually lost the most because you have the fewest memories and as you know memories dissipate with time and I think I was clinging on to that very slippery rock and she's like "no these are yours" and she was able to quantify and to know she was such a wonderful mother to say "those are your memories don't let anyone tell you they're constructed or otherwise. If that's what you have then then those are yours baby girl". So and I'm very grateful for that because it just...it just felt like a blessed relief. Yeah it's a difficult thing, I think.
I think grief at any age is really hard you know and it's difficult. How we process things, I find that there are times whenI still miss him and I get choked up. Someone asked me at a party once "oh you know you lost your father quite young and all" and my voice cracked. It's like, just a casual friend who I didn't really know too well and then I was mortified thinking "I'm like 46 tonight and sometimes it still hits you".
You know all the times you can talk about it not without emotion, but without feeling overcome by emotion. So yeah it's one of those things I think that in life people should be very mindful of because people deal with grief quite differently and you could have a good day or you can have a bad day.
Sian
I always think grief is always with you and it will depend on my hormone levels how I'll respond.
Anne marie
I think the wonderful thing about grief though if you look at the positive side of it is this a sign that you've lived and you've loved. There's grief because it's the outpouring of love you know? So there's a positive way, I suppose, of reframing.
Sian
Well you know you're alive don't you? They always say you havn't lived unless you've experienced loss.
Anne Marie
Exactly that to know that you're alive
Sian
So you moved back then at 12 and yes you went to school…
Anne Marie
Yeah we were in a very small farming town in Ireland and I went to uni and I spent a year in Italy and that was amazing. So I went to the University of Bologna.
I studied Italian and English for my undergraduate and then I did a master's in literature and publishing but as part of my Erasmus program I won a scholarship to go to the University of Bologna and I studied a renaissance theatre. It was wonderful and one of the best years I
think that I've ever spent. You know you come alive. You learn to look after yourself. I have stories after stories of things that happened there.It was it was just such a wonderful place because it's the left capital of of Italy so it's not very conservative it's the gay capital, it was Russian so I think it has a history of outliers and rebellion and if you can look under the porticoes of the wall you can see a lot of bullet marks from the time that Mussolini and the fascist regime had ahold at that time.
It's also the gastronomic capital of Italy, I should really be hired as a tour guide! So it's where tortellini and tortelloni is made and they call it the grassa of capital so when you go there it's like everyone tucks into food it's all about the bread and the pasta and the wine.
We had some amazing experiences! There's a great Opera House there and once they sell the tickets for the for the Opera there are some kind of like leftover seats, the ones
behind the pole! So what you do is you form a queue at like 6:00 in the morning and then you'll get your ticket for 20,000 lira at the time which I think was about 4 euro. I remember watching… I can't remember what it was again, the name the it doesn't matter, they
names of the operas escape me, but I just remember it was three hours long and I was behind a pole but it was wonderful. So you have these very unique experiences
Sian
Did you travel Italy at all?
Anne Marie
Yes because the one thing Mussolini did do is he created great infrastructure! Bologna is right in the center of Italy so you're equal distance to Rome, Florence and to various bigger cities. So we took advantage of that. I remember taking a train to Rome once and we were we were in a student residence and it was taken over by this kind of.. the students in in Bologna
had very socialist leanings and they had taken over our student residence. I mean it was the things that we put up with! I didn't have enough Italian to know how to say "excuse me, I won a scholarship how does this affect me" so I was like yeah okay grand. so what we're going to do is we're gonna take over, we're gonna lock the door we're not gonna let the man in.
The Portineria and is the man who sat at reception and allowed people in, got your post etc so they locked him out and they were taking over. It was this big protest and I was like “yes yeah yay... I don't know what I'm yaying?”
Within a couple of days they had cut off our water so we had cold water we were boiling pots of water to wash our hair. I'm like "I did not sign up for this" but what I did sign up for was a protest march to Rome. So they're like "we can get you to Rome you know we're gonna have this big protest march", and myself and this guy from Dublin who was in the residence as well
we're thinking, "we could probably get there really cheaply couldn't we?"
The tickets were something like four euro return, which was an amazing price.
But we were like yes! Power to the people! So we got on the train and everyone had their banners and their t-shirts and their slogans and everything. So we scooted off. We
did a lightning tour of the Vatican, we took pictures just about everywhere, we had a bowl pasta ,you name it we did the whole thing and then we scooted back to the train. They were like "so wasn't it amazing" and I was like "it was the best day of
my life". "What part did you enjoy?" "I enjoyed all of it!, especially the bit that we weren't at!"
Sian
I visited there in February and all of the marches were on because of the recession and initially I was like "oh my god this is... it was like something out of “Les Miserable" but the police were everywhere and so I didn't know where to be looking because the police are just beautiful!
Anne Marie
We used to call them the Armani police because there's two different types of police. There's the police who do things and then there is the the police who kind of pose. They have white gloves and I figure if you're wearing white gloves and Miami Vice sunglasses you're you're not you're not doing much to patrol the streets!
Sian
Lee said to me that some people join the police force just to wear the uniform!
Anne Marie
Oh I believe it and they're having their coffee and all and but you'll see there's police who are actually police and then there is police who are just there to look fabulous!
Sian
What would be your favorite city in Italy?
Anne Marie
I loved Florence because I went back again as an adult and I just thought it's got the perfect mixture of art and history. It's got everything that Rome has but it's got that village feel. If you go to a restaurant you'll have these big wooden tables and you're breaking bread and you might just have pasta with pepper and butter and it's the most sublime thing you've ever
tasted and a glass of red wine. It's very rustic so and you can go on wine tasting tours, pasta-making tours, in the Tuscan hills… You can you can do these little short day trips and
what not so there's there's something for everyone and it's it's relatively inexpensive. I remember we went back, I went back with friend of mine, so we did everything from just sitting and having the communal tables where you're breaking bread and eating pasta to Michelin star restaurants that really aren't that expensive and everything's quite unassuming.
So it's low-key high-end. You can have the cheap and cheerful or you can have your michelin-starred restaurant if you want that experience. You've got a mixture of different experiences and it's just still quite hearty. I mean we flew into Pisa, this is
years back, so we flew into Pisa and we took a bus but you can fly into the
Florence airport.
Sian
So when you were going doing all of this, what were your expectations? Where did you
think it was going to take you? What did you want to do?
Anne Marie
Well I always knew that I wanted to write. I loved it. I didn't have a career in mind. When I was
younger, I wanted to be a doctor and I just like faint at the sight of blood! I've always loved reading, I've always loved writing, I've always had a very active imagination and I just knew that I wanted to do English in in university so I liked the idea of psychology but I didn't do it. That's the one thing I kind of think I wish I pursued that but it's quite clinical and technical I don't know how clinical I am. I'm not the most...I'm a bit more creative kind of anchored
in being very organised. I still have a good balance between left and right
in terms of you know how I think but I'm definitely more creative than clinical so I like the idea
of psychology in terms of how it rolls out with how people interact as opposed to doing clinical trials.
I had studied French in school and it was a subject that I was good at. I wasn't necessarily great at it but I liked it. I remember you could do four subjects in your undergrad and I just didn't like the department and I remember the guy who was in the audio department we were repeating things on a microphone and the guy listened in and said "do you call that French?"
So I just didn't feel like really understood but in the Italian Department they were like "come
on in" but because it was my first year learning it and my mother was like "are you insane? You've done five or four years whatever it was at French and school and now you're giving that up to do Italian?" So I said "I just have to do a second subject with English" and she's like
"well why don't you do the thing that you've studied" and I just said I prefer Italian and I did really well in it. I think it's if you have an aptitude for languages anyhow and you have a genuine interest in something and someone makes it enjoyable and they're also like nobody is judging you. You can make a mistake and they're like "no this is how you say it keep going"
No one's mocking you. The Italians,they're much more laid-back you know? It wasn't a elitist and there was a certain assumption in the French department that if you hadn't been to France they're like "oh well you haven't been France" you know and I hadn't. It was more inclusive in the Italian department. I worked really hard. I studied non-stop, you had to because our professor was like "your job now is to be fluent and in four years time. That's your job and you won't pass until you're 100 percent fluent". The great thing about being in Bologna was they do their exams orally okay yeah so nothing is written so for me that was always a challenge because I was always a better writer than a speaker and even like I had friends who did maths I was like "how did you do maths orally?" and they said you do it on
the board but you have to explain your process to the professor. So I'm like "oh my
god that's interesting". I had to know everything off the top of your head. Not only did you have to know your subject matter, you had to be conversational enough to be able to communicate that in your exam. It stood me in good stead. I finished my four years. I did my masters in literature and publishing, and I'll be honest going to be a professor. I did not know
what the opportunities were in the nineties. I was all I was always like "I'm going to be
professor was sure what else would I do". I had my I got my endorsements from our professor and I was sending off my application for Berkeley University to do a PhD there and I didn't send it. I still wanted to. To this day I'm like "why didn't I like why" and my mom and a friend of mine said to me "you're 24, what do you have to offer the world? Why don't you go live and then come back and then do it?" I remember it felt like a blessed relief. Again a friend of mine said "look you know you spent all these years in a library we don't want to find you covered moss in 4 years time still in the library! So I just said yes and I kind of I clumsily went
from job to job.
Sian
When you say clumsy, what kind of jobs were you doing?
Anne Marie
Oh good lord, I did everything! First of all what I did when I came out of university is that I took a job teaching English. I was covering someone's maternity leave and they offered it to me full-time as she wasn't coming back and I had that horrible sinking feeling. I thought this is not where I need to be right now and I didn't want to be responsible for shaping Leaving Cert students. I just thought it was too big a responsibility I declined and I waitressed. Then I went to Italy and I taught English as a foreign language because that's what you do and you decide not to take on a teaching job you take another one! Then I came back and I decided that I
was going to move to Dublin and I did. I took weird jobs like I sold heart monitors to the elderly like cold calling for like two weeks and then I did temp I was temping everywhere. I was the worst receptionist! I was constantly dropping calls. I would do things like clear up people's databases and then I became a recruitment consultant and clearly I confuse that with being a
social worker and I think they wanted to fire me but they couldn't and they were trying to think
of like creative ways and how they were gonna get rid of me and I did them the kindness of going. I left and I worked for a publishing company which I enjoyed but they went bust and so it only lasted 11 months. Then I worked for a magazine doing ad sales which I hated and so I was trying to do advertorial so I was writing copy. So all the while just to backtrack, from about the time that I was working in the publishing company, I was doing work freelance for different magazines so I managed to get some work for Elle and in OK in London and then I was doing like little bits and bobs anything that I could scrape together. It's funny to look back on it and think this is all pre-internet when you were writing letters to someone or the height of sophistication was to send an email on a hotmail address you know or something like that or fax you know?!
So at that point a friend of mine and I both of us had just said I was looking to break into journalism and and writing she was looking to get into acting and she had an agent and
everything and we just said well we moved to London! We made a really quick fast and dirty decision. It was one of those things that's like the byproduct of youth and I kind of miss that confidence and that feeling like I had nothing to lose. That's why six weeks later we were in London! We lived for a month with a friend. Bless her, she like took us under her wing and then we moved to Finsbury Park.
Sian
Oh very posh!
Anne Marie
No, it was different at the time. As a friend of mine said when you spell it backwards it's "crappy rub sniff". I remember this guy had tried breaking into our apartment just as we were going out that evening so so we went down the fire escape and we ran to the pub (because that's what you do). We were meeting our friends and we're saying "You're never gonna believe what just happened *two pints Heineken please* Oh someone just tried breaking in!" and they said "did you call the police?" and we're like "no?" so yeah we were tiny bit
Flaky.
We moved then to Islington, which is lovely. We shared that. That was the dream. That was three-and-a-half years. It was a four-bedroom Victorian house with a roof garden and a back garden and rent control. But then the landlord decided to gift it to his son, so then I had I moved to Tower Hill, then I moved again, all Northside and things got a bit iffy towards the end. A lot of things happen that pointed me towards moving back, and happened in in very quick succession which leads me to believe that sometimes the universe, or god, or whatever you want to call it is kind of showing you the neon sign. I had gotten within, a very short space of time, we had the 7-eleven bombings, the day before. I lived in old gate or took those
lines everyday and I was like I think I was on a few trains before obviously it happening whatever but you just think crikey, that could have been me! It just shook your sense of safety to it's core. I got a call from the bank. The following day my account had been scammed.
I managed to get the money back but it was all this back and forth to the Police station blah-blah-blah and then I got assaulted. I got attacked on my doorstep. So and it all happened within very like quick succession and I was thinking of moving home my sister just said "would
you just come home you're quitting your job tomorrow". At this stage, may I just insert, that started working in a full-time really great job. I worked at Screen International as the the publishers assistant and I also was the event organizer for the Oscar Moore Foundation. What they did was it was an award that they gave to European screenwriters so they were
trying to keep all the screenwriting talent from the grip and the best boy to the writers within Europe. So it was Eric Felner and a few others. Richard Curtis and Emma Thompson was on the board and stuff like that so it was great. It was lovely to work in that. I worked in that for about a year and a half I think it was and then I moved to radio. I worked for kiss-fm. It was great I was again in an assistant position but I worked for the sales and marketing team so I did all the kind of branded content. I was a web editor for the Magic website. Then I moved back to Ireland and I was doing some contract work based on what I had done before and I thought I'm going around in circles. All the while like I said I'd been freelancing doing bits for
Different magazines and I always had that interest in fashion and I thought I can either continue going around chasing my tail and not jumping and taking the leap, which is what I was doing. I was always going sideways. There was that fear. I thought again it was a bit of a full-circle moment, nothing to lose, do it, and so 11 years later to bring you up to speed!
Sorry that's like the longest story!
Sian
So obviously you're an award winning fashion stylist and then the writing came back in?
Anne Marie
yeah I mean the writing was always there. I started when I went full-time freelance. I kind of fell on my feet with working for The Examiner. I was doing some more general stuff. I was doing everything from travel to beauty and fashion fashion but my interest was in fashion. So the fashion editor was taking a year off. I think she was traveling and so the job came up and at the same time they were like "we want to send you to Paris Fashion Week and London" and it was just like a dream come true Everything just fell into place. It was weird. I worked for RTE I got a job as the stylist on The Afternoon Show and so there were a lot of opportunities that came my way and I think it was one of those things. I lept on all of them and it bore fruit and it was the right timing. I had had a blog at the time, this is in the days when the height of sophistication a blog was just text. I think I was one of the first fashion bloggers in Ireland and I ran a series of events called "The Fashion Bloggers Brunch" and that was just to get to know people because it's hilarious at the time I couldn't get six people together to go to this now you would have god knows how many! It's unreal how its proliferated and expanded and but the whole face of blogging had changed in a very short space of time and it wasn't my kind of my jam so to speak. I had wanted to write books and I had an idea for a book so I folded the blog and then I started pitching the idea for "The Happy Closet” and that came about yeah so that was like for me I think one of the the biggest things that I've ever wanted to do was write a book. It's funny, I had always been into short story writing and poetry writing and creative writing and I didn't know what my story was and I think it all comes back to what my mom said because now I have a third book that I want to write. I have it I'm just trying to find the time to write it! I have it all planned out and my mom is like "you've got to get experience in life that's what informs everything you know."
Sian
That's true.We always talk on here about as you know as you get older you always look back on your younger self and go "oh my god I thought I knew all that" and yeah I can't wait to be 50 because I'm excited about what I'll learn in the next few years. And I loved the happy closet and thank you so much. So if you don't know I only started reading again this year after a huge break, like, since school
I'm just not a reader but I just thought you know screens take up too much of our time so now I read everyday when I go to bed and that's my new book!
Anne Marie
And good news both books have been chosen to be made into audiobooks.
Sian
So obviously the podcast is called BeBelle, so what, in a sentence, is being Bell to you?
Anne Marie
Being Belle is being in a good mood I think for me. I find you know I've always had challenges with kind of feeling blue and feeling down and I think kind of working freelance sounds exciting but when you're facing the challenges and you're making the decisions on your own
and you live alone and sometimes you feel like it's an echo chamber. I listen a lot to a lot of New Age philosophy and there's a theory that you know obviously we're all electricity you know our mood is a vibration you know when someone "lights up a room" it's right there in the
metaphor. So I think for me the challenge is always trying to, without sounding fae, is being grateful. I have to force myself sometimes because sometimes I get into the loop of "poor me life sucks". I'm like "no what do you have?" And it's endless once you start writing it down.
It's like this is what you have to be grateful for. You're standing on two legs that work so me being my own kind of mother going "cop on". But you know gratitude is infectious and
so is happiness, it's true. You catch it and you want to catch those feels and if you can
kind of generate that good mood.
Have you ever noticed when you're in a terrible mood terrible things happen? That's
always when you're in the worst traffic and like you know busy creates busy. Everything is contagious. It’s contagious. Sometimes it takes a lot of work and it takes me kind of mentally slapping myself upside the head!
Sian
So this is a question that one of your predecessors left. What did you last binge watch?
Anne Marie
Mind Hunter season two. It's on Netflix. It's all about the psychology behind serial killers but it's phenomenal! I won't ruin it for you.
Sian
Last question; what's your greatest piece of advice for someone?
This has to be a one-liner. I always think that they're the best ones.
Anne Marie
I'm the worst person to give advice
"Consider your own counsel."
Sian
I like yeah I like that a lot you know? We've talked a little bit about that today and we've talked about lighting up the room and I think you light up the room and I really want to thank you for coming on I've had a lovely day.
Anne Marie
Thank you so much! Thank you
Anne Marie
Thank you for having me Sian.