Interview with Elaine Farrell & Leanne McCormick, authors of Bad Bridget: Crime, Mayhem and the Lives of Irish Emigrant Women
Elaine Farrell & Leanne McCormick, author of Bad Bridget: Crime, Mayhem and the Lives of Irish Emigrant Women recommends a fascinating flurry of books! Before jumping into the interview, please check out Elaine & Leanne's book:
Review from Book Depository:
Ireland in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was not a good place to be a woman. Among the wave of emigrants from Ireland to North America were many, many young women who travelled on their own, hoping for a better life. Some lived lives of quiet industry and piety. Others quickly found themselves in trouble - bad trouble, and on an astonishing scale.
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Bad Bridget: Crime, Mayhem and the Lives of Irish Emigrant Women
Elaine Farrell and Leanne McCormick, creators of the celebrated 'Bad Bridget' podcast, have unearthed a world in which Irish women actually outnumbered Irish men in prison, in which you could get locked up for 'stubbornness', and in which a serial killer called Lizzie Halliday was described by the New York Times as 'the worst woman on earth'. They reveal the social forces that bred this mayhem and dysfunction, through stories that are brilliantly strange, sometimes funny, and often moving. From sex workers and thieves to kidnappers and killers, these Bridgets are young women who have gone from the frying pan of their impoverished homeland to the fire of vast North American cities.
Bad Bridget is a masterpiece of social history and true crime, showing us a fascinating and previously unexplored world.
Buy On:
Easons €15.99
Book Depository €14.65
Waterstones £14.99
Wordery $15.70
Q. Do you have a favourite smart thinking book (and why that book)?
Leanne: Review from Book Depository:
In this personal, eloquently argued essay - adapted from her much-admired Tedx talk of the same name - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie offers readers a unique definition of feminism for the twenty-first century, one rooted in inclusion and awareness. Drawing extensively on her own experiences and her deep understanding of the often masked realities of sexual politics, here is one remarkable author's exploration of what it means to be a woman now - an of-the-moment rallying cry for why we should all be feminists.
(All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing) Review from Book Depository:
In this dazzling debut, Emilie Pine speaks powerfully from her painful personal experience - on the emotional labour of caring for her alcoholic father, on the unspeakable grief of miscarriage and infertility, on the social taboos around menstrual blood and female pain, on the ways young women use their own bodies as a weapon against themselves. Courageous, humane and uncompromising, devastatingly poignant and yet never self-pitying, these pieces investigate and challenge society's assumptions around pain, strength, resilience and identity, ultimately embracing joy and hope in the business of living.
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s We Should all be Feminists. It’s the perfect pocket-sized rallying cry, that’s both personal and powerful.
Elaine:
I found Caroline Criado Perez’s Invisible Women fascinating, although it did make me a bit cross too! I also loved Emilie Pine’s Notes to Self. It is so engagingly written and one of those books that is really hard to put down.
We Should All Be Feminists
Buy On:
Easons €5.49
Book Depository €6.78
Waterstones £5.99
Wordery $6.45
Notes to Self
Buy On:
Easons €10.49
Book Depository €9.56
Waterstones £9.99
Wordery $10.16
Q. What's the most recent smart thinking book you've read (and how would you rate it)?
Leanne: Review from Book Depository:
Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine and Mary-Jane are famous for the same thing, though they never met. They came from Fleet Street, Knightsbridge, Wolverhampton, Sweden and Wales. They wrote ballads, ran coffee houses, lived on country estates, they breathed ink-dust from printing presses and escaped people-traffickers. (All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing) Review from Book Depository:
Every day a beloved father dies. Every day a lover departs. Every day a woman turns forty.
All three happening together brings a moment of reckoning.
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Hallie Rubenhold, The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper was accessible but clearly so well researched and gave back the voices to the women involved.
Elaine:
I’ve just finished reading Elizabeth Boyle’s Fierce Appetites, and found it really interesting. She weaves together historical research and autobiography, and it works! Next I’m reading Pragya Agarwal’s Hysterical.
The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper
What they had in common was the year of their murders: 1888.
Their murderer was never identified, but the name created for him by the press has become far more famous than any of these five women.
Now, in this devastating narrative of five lives, historian Hallie Rubenhold finally sets the record straight, and gives these women back their stories.
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Book Depository €11.55
Waterstones £10.99
Wordery $12.70
Fierce Appetites: Loving, Losing and Living to Excess in My Present and in the Writings of the Past
Medieval historian Elizabeth Boyle made sense of these events the best way she knew how - by immersing herself in the literature that has been her first love and life's work for over two decades.
Fierce Appetites is the exhilarating and deeply humane result. Not only does Elizabeth Boyle write dazzling accounts of ancient stories, familiar and obscure, from Ireland and further afield, but she uses her historical learning to grapple with the raw and urgent questions she faces, questions that have bedevilled people in every age. She writes on grief, addiction, family breakdown, the complexities of motherhood, love and sex, memory, class, education, travel (and staying put) with unflinching honesty, deep compassion and occasional dark humour.
Fierce Appetites is captivating and original - as an insight into the mind and heart of a groundbreaking scholar, and as a wise and reassuring account of what it is to be human.
Buy On:
Easons €11.99
Book Depository €16.33
Waterstones £14.99
Wordery $18.56
Q. Do you have a favourite childhood book?
Leanne: Review From Book Depository: Classic tales by Laura Ingalls Wilder about life on the frontier and America's best-loved pioneer family.
(All links earn commission from purchases that help fund this site. Prices accurate at time of writing) Review From Book Depository: At seven, Peggy made a terrifying journey through famine-stricken Ireland. Now thirteen, and determined to make a new life for herself, she sets off alone across the Atlantic to America. Will she ever see her family again?
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Laura Inglis Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods. I can still remember the descriptions of the snow and the snug cabin in the woods. I loved reading it to my own children as well.
Elaine:
I loved Marita Conlon McKenna’s Wildflower Girl, and Under the Hawthorn Tree. I’m not sure if it’s a coincidence that I then went on to research nineteenth-century Irish history!
Little House in the Big Woods
Inside the little house in the Big Woods live the Ingalls family: Ma, Pa, Mary, Laura and baby Carrie. Outside the little house are the wild animals: the bears and the bees, the deer and the wolves. This is the classic tale of how they live together, in harmony mostly, but sometimes in fear ...
The timeless stories that inspired a TV series can now be read by a new generation of children. Readers who loved Anne of Green Gables, Little Women, and Heidi will be swept up by this timeless rural coming of age saga. Perfect escapism for readers aged 8+. Beautifully illustrated by Garth Williams.
Buy On:
Easons €8.07
Book Depository €8.13
Waterstones £7.99
Wordery $7.99
Wildflower Girl
An extraordinary story of courage, independence and adventure.
The other books in the Famine trilogy are Under the Hawthorn Tree and Fields of Home.
Buy On:
Easons €8.99
Book Depository €9.08
Waterstones £8.99
Wordery $10.38
Q. Do you prefer reading on paper, Kindle or listening to an audiobook?
Leanne:
I use all three. I read a lot, so a Kindle saves my bookshelves from collapsing. I love an audiobook on a walk or in a car. But sometimes paper is just the best.
Elaine:
Definitely paper!
Q. Do you have a favourite bookshop (and why that shop)?
Leanne:
I’m also a No Alibis fan and Waterstones in Coleraine is always a very welcoming retreat.
Elaine:
I spend a lot of time in the children’s section of Books Paper Scissors with my six-year-old. It’s gorgeous! I love No Alibis for a lunchtime browse on a work day. We got to visit a few Dublin bookshops to sign our Bad Bridget book, so I added a few more favourites to my list, like Chapters, Dubray, Gutter Bookshop, and Hodges Figgis. And when I’m at home in Sligo, I can’t pass by Liber without popping in.
Many thanks to Elaine & Leanne for recommending a fascinating flurry of books! Please don't forget to check out Bad Bridget: Crime, Mayhem and the Lives of Irish Emigrant Women by Elaine Farrell and Leanne McCormick, published by Penguin Sandycove and is out now.
Daryl
Image Copyrights: Penguin Books Ltd (Bad Bridget, Notes to Self, Fierce Appetites), Transworld Publishers Ltd (The Five), HarperCollins Publishers (We Should All Be Feminists, Little House In The Big Woods), O'Brien Press Ltd (Wildflower Girl).
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