Christine Anne Foley: "The fragile male ego isn’t able to accept that maybe some men have done wrong"

I’m sitting down with Christine Anne Foley, who’s wearing a mustard maxi dress and has her foxy red hair styled in a neat bob.

The glamorous writer’s hotly tipped debut Bodies has been described as the ‘It Girl’ book of the year and deals with sex, revenge and feminine rage.

“I thought I was the luckiest woman in the world when I got on Raya,” Foley tells me, referring to the membership-based dating app. “I have had nothing but terrible experiences on Raya. I went on a date this weekend and he was grand. Whatever. Fine. Again, a lot of drinking involved. We were talking and Palestine came up.

“I was just like, ‘There’s a lot of drink on board. I have had so many arguments about this. I’m not talking about this right now’. I also know this guy is not going to have the same opinions as me and I don’t want to do this. We had been talking for four months. He flew over to meet me and said, ‘I was going to delete you on Instagram because you post too much about Palestine.’”

I feel I might just be privy to a delicious piece of gossip.

“I was like, ‘Delete me then, at this point I don’t care’,” the author continues. “He said, ‘I have a child, so it’s very upsetting for me to see children dying. You wouldn’t understand’. I said to him, ‘I would understand. Even though I don’t have a kid, I can still empathise with kids being brutally killed in a genocide’. He kept it up and said, ‘Your followers are not going to save the world’. And I said, ‘Can you not mansplain this to me right now?’”

The tone of Foley’s story changes.

“It triggered something in him,” she says. “To the point that he threw his drink down and ran out of the venue. He then told me he wouldn’t stand for that kind of behaviour, because he would never talk down to a woman – because he has a daughter. But it was the word ‘mansplain’ that really triggered something in him.

“The fragile male ego,” she insists, “isn’t able to accept that maybe some men have done wrong.”

Bodies takes shape in the space where men and women interact, with all the attendant sexual politics.

“It was kind of a cathartic thing for me,” Foley says. “I started to write about some of my terrible experiences with men and it took a bit of form. I started thinking, ‘Oh, this could be a novel maybe’. I didn’t want it to be autobiographical or anything like that. But I thought, ‘What could I do with this?’”

It was the main character that convinced her a work of fiction was genuinely on the cards.

“As Charlotte developed,” she explains, “I realised it was kind of about my experiences, but also my friends’ experiences – and my friends’ friends’ experiences. It just became about the ‘woman experience’.”

Bodies is a blisteringly honest tale about a young woman from rural Ireland, Charlotte, who moves to Dublin for college. It explores the unpleasant coming of age sexual experiences she has, from unfaithful boyfriends to drunken trysts and creepy advances. What’s important, however, is that Charlotte herself is not necessarily likeable.

“When I was writing it, I wanted to write something about the terrible experiences women have,” Foley acknowledges. “But I also wanted a protagonist who wasn’t just a victim. I wanted to suggest that men are terrible and do all these horrible things – but women aren’t perfect either. We can take those things and be just as fucking sadistic if we want to. I wanted the reader at the end to ask, ‘Is Charlotte just taking back control and getting revenge or is she crazy all along? And is that why all these relationships went bad?’

“There’s no answer. It’s about turning that fear into anger. We don’t often mix feminism and thriller.”

There’s something innately bold about Foley. Candid and gutsy, she is not quite what I expected from a so-called “Trinity novelist”.

“I didn’t really brush against any other writers during my time in college,” she says. “There is that whole Trinity novelist thing, which feels a bit icky or whatever. I went to school in the countryside. I enjoyed my time in school and in education, but I wouldn’t say I had the best social life. So when I went to Trinity, that was really nice because I suddenly found a group of people I really got on with, who I am still friends with.

“But I wasn’t part of the Literature Society, I didn’t write for any of the magazines. I wasn’t friends with any of the Sally Rooneys. She was a bit ahead of me and she would have been in the Hist, the debating society, and I would have been in the Pav (the college bar)”.

She muses on the dynamic between Dubs and culchies.

“Dubliners do have a tendency to say, ‘Oh country people are backwards’, and I hope that’s not something that comes across in the book. I came to Dublin when I was 17 and most of my friends in college were Dubs. They don’t know that we have the same experiences.”

Christine Anne Foley. Copyright: Bailey Shropshire - hotpress.com

In Bodies, Foley wanted to show that women tend to have the same kind of experiences with men, whether in a small town, in Dublin, or in Belfast.

We’re speaking just days after Irish soldier Cathal Crotty was given a suspended sentence for pleading guilty to a brutal attack on Natasha O’Brien, which he boasted about on social media. What did Foley make of the light sentence given to Crotty?

“When something like that happens,” she sighs, “it’s horrendously shocking, but also I’m not surprised anymore. What happened to her was absolutely horrific. He should not have been given any kind of suspended sentence. Will it create another conversation or will it just become another Paddy Jackson trial? Some men are rallying to support but not as many as you’d like.”

Foley considers the incidence of misogyny in dating culture.

“A lot of women have gotten to the point where they are like, ‘I can’t be fucked anymore’, literally and figuratively’,” she says. “I know a few female friends who are like, ‘No, I’m just not doing it anymore’.”

Other women are responding differently.

“At the minute,” Foley points out, “if you look at R&B stars like Doja Cat, Megan Thee Stallion or Cardi B, they’re all talking about sex.”

She offers her take on the sexually explicit ‘WAP’, by Stallion and Cardi B.

“I think it’s brilliant,” she says. “People are asking, ‘Why are women talking about their pussy?’ I’m like, ‘Men have been talking about their dicks for the last million years in songs’. All of rap is about them getting with women and fucking women and whatever. Now women are like, ‘Yeah! We like fucking.’”

The author brings it back to her own book.

“I think a woman having sex is attractive in a book at the minute,” she says. “Bodies is about a girl reclaiming power through her sexuality, but also subverting this idea of the perfect feminist.”

• Bodies is out now.