“Your bit is really funny”.
“No, my bit is crap, but I was HOOTING at yours”.
One of the biggest perks of writing a book with your best friend is that you have a constant sounding board. Not only that, but you have somebody reassuring you that the 2000 words you just vomited onto the page made them laugh six times and they can’t wait to read what you write next. The second biggest perk is that you only have to write half a book!
Getting Oh My God, What A Complete Aisling just right was always going to be a challenge because we were taking a character that we – and thousands of other people – had known for ten years since we first created her. She needed to transform from a caricature on a much-loved Facebook page into a multi-dimensional woman with a backstory and a family and a pathological fear of missing a hotel breakfast. It’s included in the price! It would be a sin to pass up the mini croissants, the rubbery sausages and the glacially slow toast rotator!
We needed to portray Aisling faithfully, and with love and warmth, but then throw in dashes of sadness and loss all the while making people laugh with her, rather than at her. We were lucky in that Aisling had lived quite an insular life up until the point we meet her in the book. There were so many things, foods, people she hadn’t tried or met, so there was plenty of scope for humour. We were also lucky that we had created someone so relatable, no matter where you’re from. From Aisling’s thoughts on brunch culture (there are now officially too many ways to cook eggs) to her Dad’s collection of Everyday to Medium Good to Very Good jumpers, there’s a bit of her in all of us, and teasing out those bits has proven so rewarding, and often very funny.
Acknowledging that something you’ve created is funny can be tough. It’s an extremely Irish trait (although probably not exclusively Irish) to react to someone telling you that your outfit is nice with “Oh, these old rags?! I found them in a bin. I look dreadful”, rather than simply saying “Thank you. How very kind”. It was so important for us for this book to hit the right notes in terms of humour and tone and heart, that having readers – strangers – get in touch to tell us how much they’ve laughed and cried has been so gratifying and morale-boosting. We’ve got better at saying “Thank you. How very kind”.
Emer McLysaght and Sarah Breen’s hilarious book Oh My God, What a Complete Aisling is out today published by Michael Joseph. To get your copy click here!
