‘Any Girl’ Book Launch Speech

It feels apt that three storms brought Any Girl into the world. This book feels to me like a quiet eye of a storm, it’s calm and gentle, but it has power, and hopefully also causes destruction to certain things everywhere it goes. It was 2012 when I first thought I should write a book. I can’t believe it’s happened. I can’t believe I’m here talking to you all now. A review in the Daily Mail last week said that “this book is a long exhale for Mia” and that is the greatest way to express how the last ten years have been, working quietly, holding on, patiently waiting for the time to the be right and now I can just breathe. Five years ago today our president Michael D signed the nordic model into law which criminalises the purchase of sex and decriminalises the sale, thereby contributing too a more equal Ireland for women where we reject the notion that female sexuality can be paid for.

I decided to wear this enormous pink dress because it’s a happy dress and this is a happy thing and it’s important to remember that because sometimes when something has been very hard, or if its about something grim, you kind of feel like you have to be very serious and whatnot, but it’s a very happy thing that I got this book done finally. I’ve had to dig into that feeling, because it’s hard to hold both the themes in the book and the fact that I’ve written a book in the same place.

Writing this book was mostly a nightmare, but my desire to contribute to a better future world for women and girls is what kept me going, and there are people who are already doing that, who inspired me the whole time, by being the people they are, doing the work they do, people who are not afraid of engaging with the darkest parts within society. This is not easy, most of us want to stay in the sunlight and pretend the shadow doesn’t exist. I’d like to say thank you to Mary Crilly from SVC, Noeline Blackwell from the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, Rachel Moran SPACE Internationa Tom Clonan for his bravery and his integrity, Monica O’Connor and Ruth Breslin who run the Sexual Exploitation Research Project in UCD, Sr Stan who founded Focus Ireland, and so many more, who are not here, and all the helpers and all the healers. All the volunteers, all the community workers. These are all people who dwell alongside the darkness and tell the hardest truths.

Thank you to everyone in Hachette, Ciara, Joanna, Breda, for their immediate passion for Any Girl. I feel so lucky to have had Jonathan Williams as my agent, helping me for the last two years. I’m so grateful to the psychic in Wicklow who gave me your name. Biggest thanks especially to Elaine Egan for all your support and reassurance during this scary time, and especially for being there without hesitation last Saturday morning for my 8am text messages.

I dedicated my book to the truth tellers and I hope that my book invites others to tell their own truths, the things they feel they have to keep secret, and the truths they see in the world around them, in their relationships, systems, cultures and communities they are part of, truths that maybe others might not want to see or acknowledge. But most importantly I want people, especially young women, to trust the truth inside themselves, that they can trust what they know and they can trust what they feel, as being real and valid, and they don’t need to gaslight themselves to fit in or prevent rejection or gain a sense of being wanted or loved or self-esteem or whatever else. I want us to build a new porn free, sex trade free, trafficking, punter free, strip club free, Only Fans free world. Where we have compassion and understanding for and support the women in the trade or in the strip club or on Only Fans, but we never give up holding the oppressive consumer — the men — to account for their misogynistic, sexist, and jaded attitudes which perpetuate the sexual objectification of women and girls which leads to things that happened to me in my book. I’m not alone, my story is not some sort of weird outlier. There are many, many middle class, privileged, educated young women who are in weird situations and being harmed by men and won’t know it for another ten years, when they realise they are traumatised.

Lets take back feminism, lets get rid of porn, lets end the sex trade, things don’t change that quickly but they do change. DRCC & Womens’ aid are only 40 years old. We’re not at the beginning but we are nowhere near the end and we won’t see anything close to the end in our life-times; men will continue to exploit vulnerable women and girls, porn is not going anywhere fast, but let’s leave the world in a slightly better place than when we came into it, and that means being personally accountable for the world we have, doing what we can, where we can, with what we have to give, being explicit, blunt and direct in our rejection of all the ways sexual objectification of women and girls happens, for our daughters’ daughters’ daughters’. It means being uncomfortable, being brave, taking social risks, being okay with being disliked, losing friends, it could mean being isolated, rejected, but it always, always, always, means telling the truth, and that is, at its heart, what Any Girl is all about.

I want to read my favourite poem for you, The Pomegranate by Eavan Boland. Among other things this poem speaks to me about the cyclical nature of loss and trauma, and how we are helpless to prevent the next generation of daughters from being harmed or in pain, but that each generation, we can be living legends of our own stories, our own myths, our own reclaiming of ourselves, our own resolving of our traumas. We can hand down to our daughters, not necessarily complete protection, but we can hand down power.

The Pomegranate, Eavan Boland

The only legend I have ever loved is
the story of a daughter lost in hell.
And found and rescued there.
Love and blackmail are the gist of it.
Ceres and Persephone the names.
And the best thing about the legend is
I can enter it anywhere. And have.
As a child in exile in
a city of fogs and strange consonants,
I read it first and at first I was
an exiled child in the crackling dusk of
the underworld, the stars blighted. Later
I walked out in a summer twilight
searching for my daughter at bed-time.
When she came running I was ready
to make any bargain to keep her.
I carried her back past whitebeams
and wasps and honey-scented buddleias.
But I was Ceres then and I knew
winter was in store for every leaf
on every tree on that road.
Was inescapable for each one we passed. And for me.
It is winter
and the stars are hidden.
I climb the stairs and stand where I can see
my child asleep beside her teen magazines,
her can of Coke, her plate of uncut fruit.
The pomegranate! How did I forget it?
She could have come home and been safe
and ended the story and all
our heart-broken searching but she reached
out a hand and plucked a pomegranate.
She put out her hand and pulled down
the French sound for apple and
the noise of stone and the proof
that even in the place of death,
at the heart of legend, in the midst
of rocks full of unshed tears
ready to be diamonds by the time
the story was told, a child can be
hungry. I could warn her. There is still a chance.
The rain is cold. The road is flint-coloured.
The suburb has cars and cable television.
The veiled stars are above ground.
It is another world. But what else
can a mother give her daughter but such
beautiful rifts in time?
If I defer the grief I will diminish the gift.
The legend will be hers as well as mine.
She will enter it. As I have.
She will wake up. She will hold
the papery flushed skin in her hand.
And to her lips. I will say nothing.