The online version has the same pics: https://archive.ph/otSFoIf anyone can screenshot the Sunday Independent article about her mothers book I’d really appreciate itits a memoir
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Thanks so much
Her mother was a really nice woman. This all stinks. And the family always had money. Had a house on park avenue!!
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Sex & Relationships
‘The objective of the book wasn’t to hurt my family, it was to free myself’ – Author and activist Rosita Sweetman on her candid new memoir
Rosita Sweetman talks about finding catharsis in writing a new memoir that delves into her childhood, as well as the broken marriage in which her husband had an affair with her sister, leading to Rosita’s estrangement from her siblings
Left, Rosita Sweetman with daughter Chupi and son Luke before her marriage broke up.
Author Rosita Sweetman talks about her new memoir Girl with a Fork in a World of Soup. Photo: Marc O'Sullivan
"If you can go back and cry the tears you couldn’t cry at the time, scream the screams, you couldn’t scream, whatever, you integrate the hurt self with the today self," says author and journalist Rosita Sweetman. Photo: Marc O'Sullivan
Rosita Sweetman homeschooling her daughter Chupi. Photo: Dave Conachy
Left, Rosita Sweetman with daughter Chupi and son Luke before her marriage broke up.
Author Rosita Sweetman talks about her new memoir Girl with a Fork in a World of Soup. Photo: Marc O'Sullivan
Liadán Hynes
Sun 27 Apr 2025 at 02:30
Although much of Rosita Sweetman’s explosively honest new memoir, Girl with a Fork in a World of Soup, documents the turbulent years of her marriage, the crux of the story, the two events from which it feels all subsequent events follow, come almost at the start, when she is only a child.
After a small, unexpected inheritance, Sweetman and her twin sister, aged nine, are sent to boarding school. “Mum got 300 quid in an envelope one night from Archbishop McQuaid. Because a relative of hers had left his millions to him,” she tells me almost casually.
She describes the splitting of self that took place under the strict rule of the nuns at the Sacred Heart school she and her sister were sent to, writing: “When I emerged, seven years later, I was a different person: bumptious on the outside, frozen on the inside. Divided, as R.D. Laing would say, from my Real Self.”
It’s a separation of self that seems to follow her into adulthood, where she finds professional success but enters an unhappy marriage. “I think it affects you so, so deeply. That terrible repression of nuns, who were all probably 17 themselves when they were thrown into a convent. So they were totally repressed in their sexuality, in their humanity. Then they repressed us.”
The next event happened not long after the sisters had been sent away.
They had grown up in a large, loving family, nine siblings in total, and were “sandwiched safely in the middle… the clamour and certainty of being in a tribe”. There was a big house by the sea in Dublin, ponies, family holidays to the west, an orchard, parties, homegrown food, summers playing in their garden.
Not long after the sisters were sent to school, their younger sister Cathy, who had a hole in her heart, died, just shy of her seventh birthday. The event shattered the family. Now, aged 76, Sweetman is estranged from all her siblings.
“For the first part, for the happy part, up until my younger sister died, I loved being part of a big family. We had our own house and a big garden that mum’s aunt had left to her. We had our own world in a way, and it was a happy world. Obviously, bad things happened, but you felt safe in it. That was the main thing. I loved being part of a big family. I didn’t feel deprived or overlooked,” she tells me now. We have met in a restaurant in Rathmines, near the home she shares with her daughter, jewellery designer Chupi, her son-in-law and her granddaughter. Sweetman lives in the basement flat.
"If you can go back and cry the tears you couldn’t cry at the time, scream the screams, you couldn’t scream, whatever, you integrate the hurt self with the today self," says author and journalist Rosita Sweetman. Photo: Marc O'Sullivan
A striking presence with almost strawberry blonde hair, pale skin and red lipstick, she’s wearing an elegant woollen navy jumper and layers of delicate jewellery. In person she speaks gently, almost diffidently at times, a surprising contrast to the fierce urgency of the prose in her new memoir, which covers the story of her childhood, her marriage, and becoming a single parent, documenting domestic strife and familial estrangement. One of the founders in the early seventies of the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement, Sweetman has been a prominent voice in her writing and activism on matters such as feminism, the church and the State.
“There was no money, but there was happiness, there was love, there was doing stuff,” she says of her childhood up to her sister’s death. “My dad worked as a judge in the Land Commission. He had a month off every year, so there’d be a month’s holiday in Connemara, or West Cork.”
But Cathy’s death proved cataclysmic, it “shattered everything”. Devastated by grief and, in a time where counselling would have been unheard of, siloed within their own pain, her parents’ marriage essentially fell apart. Although they remained living together until Sweetman’s father passed away. The book suggests things had always been a little bit strained with her mother, “He was the gentle one, yeah, my mum was the fierce one,” Sweetman says now.
She writes of feeling rejected by her mother, who became almost ghost-like in her grief in the aftermath of Cathy’s death, while her father’s health, compromised after TB, worsened. The family home, Seabank, was sold. Money was tight.
“I think when my little sister died, that killed my mum and dad’s marriage. And then when dad died, it was only six years later or something, that killed the family in a way,” she tells me. “Mum was really diminished and incredibly sad. Profoundly depressed, and didn’t really come out of it.”
The title of the book is a quote from Noel Gallagher that she came across on a YouTube video. “He said about his brother, ‘He’s like a boy with a fork in a world of soup’,” she says, adopting Mancunian tones. “I was thinking of all these complicated titles, and I suddenly thought, ‘No, I love that’.”
What does the phrase mean to her?
“It’s like somebody who’s complicated and is in the world and finds it difficult to cope in a way.”
Later in the book, there’s a very vivid description of the impact of living with a partner who is suffering from depression — the man who turns his face to the wall in bed — the egg shelling, the energy drain as everything circles around this one person. It seems similar to what she experienced earlier, in her mother’s home as a teenager, I suggest. “Absolutely, yeah. I think it was Jung who first said, you marry the parent you had most difficulty with, because you failed the first time around. And the second time around, you think, this time I’ll win. But you probably can’t because you only learned that when you come out the other end. You’ve repeated the pattern to try and save yourself this time around. So in a way, I married mum.”
Eventually, Sweetman moved to London. She got work with the BBC as a runner and moved in with the man who would eventually become her husband.
Quickly, the relationship descended into a grim pattern. Intense love bombing would inevitably be followed by irritation (on his part), then anger. We see Sweetman treated with cruelty, humiliation, coldness, infidelity. One scene depicts the aftermath of her having had an abortion, her partner leaving her in pain to have a drink with an ex-girlfriend.
Alongside the trauma of her relationship, she traces the establishment of her writing career, journalism and books, On Our Knees, Fathers Come First and On Our Backs: Sexual Attitudes in a Changing Ireland.
“Well, aren’t you the cheeky one?” Nell McCafferty says of her work in a phone call she quotes in the book. She was 21 when she started the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement. “Joyful,” she says of herself then. “You know the way you are when you’re young? And the women’s movement was joyful. It felt great. It’s like you were part of this really exciting new movement.”
What was the response of official Ireland? “There was a lot of anger. We were denounced from the pulpit,” she smiles, clearly not bothered. “I feel we’re at the apex of toxic masculinity at the moment. Two-thirds of the world is being run by insane men at the moment.”
The contrast between her personal and professional life is striking, interviewing Charlie Haughey, Desmond Guinness, on the front line of Ireland’s feminist movement, alongside the personal subjugation at home.
“One of the things that people always ask you when you come out of a really toxic relationship is, ‘Why didn’t you leave?’,” she says now. “I saw FKA Twigs, that beautiful young British singer, and she was suing a guy for abusing her in a relationship,” (the singer is suing her ex-partner actor Shia LaBeouf). Somebody asked her, ‘If it was that bad, why didn’t you leave?’ And she said, ‘Because it was that bad, I couldn’t leave’. I thought that was really insightful. Particularly when you have small children, you’re so exhausted and all your energy is going.
“And yet in another way, you know exactly what’s going on. There’s one part of us that’s always aware. ‘I know what’s going on. I know he’s having affairs. I know this, this, this.’ But you can’t actually press it all into one because it’s too painful in a way.”
She describes the slow isolation that can happen in a turbulent marriage. “I think it happens slowly. It’s like boiling a frog. You go into cold water, and you don’t realise it’s gradually getting worse and worse, and hotter and hotter, until you’re so diminished in your confidence. It’s your confidence, your belief that you can take up room in the world.”
As a couple, they travelled, living the expat life, drinking, partying, wild behaviour. The book documents her husband’s affairs. He leaves repeatedly. She herself has an affair, “sauce for the goose was sauce for the gander, right? Hadn’t we liberated 70s kids done away with all that exclusivity nonsense? Sure we had.” When he finds out, she writes: “That night’s love making felt more like punishment
Eventually, they return to Ireland and move to an isolated house in Wicklow. Here, Sweetman spends much of her time alone with their one, then two, small children, daughter Chupi and son Luke.
She writes about how she eventually faces the fact that her husband is having an affair with her eldest sister, the fallout from the affair, her family taking sides, her own sense of being gaslit, of doubting herself. By now she is afraid of her husband, who comes and goes. He is prone to displays of anger.
In tandem with the strife taking place in her marriage, is the story of Sweetman’s family, from whom she is now entirely estranged.
One of the book’s most extraordinary scenes is a family summit led by the psychiatrist, Ivor Browne, whom Sweetman attended as a patient. The event takes place in a room “all very ‘one flew over the cuckoo’s nest’”, she writes. Things take an extraordinary turn; “Ivor said he was first going to go around and ask each person if they’d slept with J (her husband),” matters then escalate into a physical fight.
“It goes in waves, the way grief goes in waves,” she says now of the situation with her family. “Of course, writing the book brought up a lot of grief. I had a dream where one of my sisters said, ‘It was your fault dad died’. And I woke up and I had, God, this intense grief that I’d lost all of them. I was just going through that moment when you wake up and you’re still happy, just thinking of each of them by their name. We all came from Mum and Dad,” she says, shaking her head sadly.
Eventually, Girl with a Fork in a World of Soup traces the marriage’s end and Sweetman becomes a single mother to two children under four, in late 1980s Ireland, living in an isolated rural setting. Before this happens, she describes her own behaviour towards her son and daughter escalating in terms of anger. In a book full of deeply personal revelations and subject matter she says it was “very painful” to revisit, these parts. Admitting to one’s own failings as a mother feels like something that must have been especially difficult to write about, I suggest.
“Very. Facing up to it was incredibly painful. But I felt I had to be real about myself as well. One of the worst parts of it all was how I became to my two children. That was one of the worst outcomes of the break-up, and the family, and everything.” The children were “tiny” when the marriage ended, Chupi nearly four, Luke 18 months.
How did she sustain herself?
Left, Rosita Sweetman with daughter Chupi and son Luke before her marriage broke up.
“In a way, the children keep you going, because they’re so in the present. You have to get up every day. You have to make breakfast. You have to get them dressed. They pull you on into reality. And they were lovely,” Sweetman, who homeschooled her children, smiles.
“That’s the most important thing. That’s what the kids kept saying at the time: ‘It doesn’t matter mum, as long as we’re OK’ . They were really young. That was their mantra.”
“It was late ’80s. It was actually quite odd,” she says of becoming a single mother in Ireland at that time. “The kids and I were living in Hollywood, up in West Wicklow. So it was even odder. I think I was the only separated woman. I remember driving down the road one day, and you do look terrible because you’re in such shock, I think. I remember one of the farmers, he saw me come and just jumped into the ditch. We were an oddity.”
It was hard to get much work done and she credits Anne Harris of the Sunday Independent with giving her some journalism.
“We had nothing. We had a beautiful old house, an old stone lodge. It was like a two-storey cottage. We had to let go of it because of pesticides [Rosita took a case against Coillte over the alleged spraying of a pesticide near the house]. So hard,” she says, shaking her head. “For a while, we shared, all of us together in Dublin. With Luke and with Brian, Chupi’s now husband. And then Chupi and Brian, they were the first to say, ‘We have to get a place on our own. We’re going to get married. We want to be alone,’” she laughs.
How was that for her?
“It was hard, yeah. Seeing Chupi go, but it was great as well. They made a beautiful little home in Portobello. And then Luke, he said on Mother’s Day, it must be 10 years ago, ‘OK, I’m going now, Mum’. He just walked out the door,” she laughs. “But I suppose one of the things with homeschooling, you build up a good trust with each other, I think. Because you have to. We were in our little world. You have to get to know each other, otherwise it couldn’t work. I trust their decisions. They go when they need to go.”
Now, she lives in the basement flat of Chupi’s family’s home, a living situation which means she gets to spend copious amounts of time with her young granddaughter. “She’s so wonderful. ‘Have you put on your second face, granny?’ she asks when she sees me taking my lipstick out. It’s wonderful. I can see Chupi in her. So it’s like loving Chupi a second time.
“Chupi and Luke have obviously both read (the book) and both love it. I think they had very different reactions. Luke is really cut and dry about it. I think she finds it a bit more painful.”
It is not the first time Sweetman has written a memoir, but she says this time she was determined to tell the story properly. “In a way, I think with writing, you have to just try and get as close as you can to the truth. And forget everything else. Because otherwise, you might as well go and do another job. One of the things actually that really helped was going into therapy. I just found this amazing, amazing woman, four or five years ago.
“She trained with Ivor [Browne]. A beautiful man. And her thing, which was Ivor’s thing, (is) everything is a reaction. Say a child is abused, the child can’t comprehend what’s happening and can’t name its feelings. It’s just the experience happens. But then the child is an adult man or woman, say, and there’s a roaring alcoholic.
“So you have to take that adult person, bring them back to when they were abused, and help them to feel the feelings that they couldn’t bear to feel without exploding at the time. And if you can go back and cry the tears you couldn’t cry at the time, scream the screams you couldn’t scream, whatever, you integrate the hurt self with the today self. Because then you become a whole person.”
It was this treatment that enabled her to write the book so honestly. “I think I was able to go right into the core of it because of the work I’d done with her.”
How does she feel about her family now, having written this memoir all about their relationships?
“How do I feel about them? I feel really sad. We all look incredibly alike, we all have this face,” she says, putting her hands to her cheeks. “Just basically mum’s face. We all have the same voice. We’re very, very alike. I feel sad. The objective of the book wasn’t to hurt them. It was to free myself and then hopefully show other women or men who are trapped in really bad s**t that you can get out. That resistance is possible, and it doesn’t just help women, it helps men. It helps society to break out of abuse.
“I think obviously, you have to be aware of other people,” she says of writing her memoir. “But then you have to be aware this is your story. They can do their story. I think one of the things of being empathetic is you overthink how other people will feel. Really your only job is to think about yourself, and Chupi, and Luke - I think about them all the time - but not to think about wider things. It’s a story that... I hope it will resonate with women. They can say, ‘Yeah, God, if she can do it, I can do it’. That sort of feeling.”
‘Girl with a Fork in a World of Soup’, by Rosita Sweetman, published by Menma Books, €17.50, is out early next month
Welcome! Discover your full benefits as a Premium subscriber.
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Sex & Relationships
‘The objective of the book wasn’t to hurt my family, it was to free myself’ – Author and activist Rosita Sweetman on her candid new memoir
Rosita Sweetman talks about finding catharsis in writing a new memoir that delves into her childhood, as well as the broken marriage in which her husband had an affair with her sister, leading to Rosita’s estrangement from her siblings
Left, Rosita Sweetman with daughter Chupi and son Luke before her marriage broke up.
Author Rosita Sweetman talks about her new memoir Girl with a Fork in a World of Soup. Photo: Marc O'Sullivan
"If you can go back and cry the tears you couldn’t cry at the time, scream the screams, you couldn’t scream, whatever, you integrate the hurt self with the today self," says author and journalist Rosita Sweetman. Photo: Marc O'Sullivan
Rosita Sweetman homeschooling her daughter Chupi. Photo: Dave Conachy
Left, Rosita Sweetman with daughter Chupi and son Luke before her marriage broke up.
Author Rosita Sweetman talks about her new memoir Girl with a Fork in a World of Soup. Photo: Marc O'Sullivan
Liadán Hynes
Sun 27 Apr 2025 at 02:30
Although much of Rosita Sweetman’s explosively honest new memoir, Girl with a Fork in a World of Soup, documents the turbulent years of her marriage, the crux of the story, the two events from which it feels all subsequent events follow, come almost at the start, when she is only a child.
After a small, unexpected inheritance, Sweetman and her twin sister, aged nine, are sent to boarding school. “Mum got 300 quid in an envelope one night from Archbishop McQuaid. Because a relative of hers had left his millions to him,” she tells me almost casually.
She describes the splitting of self that took place under the strict rule of the nuns at the Sacred Heart school she and her sister were sent to, writing: “When I emerged, seven years later, I was a different person: bumptious on the outside, frozen on the inside. Divided, as R.D. Laing would say, from my Real Self.”
It’s a separation of self that seems to follow her into adulthood, where she finds professional success but enters an unhappy marriage. “I think it affects you so, so deeply. That terrible repression of nuns, who were all probably 17 themselves when they were thrown into a convent. So they were totally repressed in their sexuality, in their humanity. Then they repressed us.”
The next event happened not long after the sisters had been sent away.
They had grown up in a large, loving family, nine siblings in total, and were “sandwiched safely in the middle… the clamour and certainty of being in a tribe”. There was a big house by the sea in Dublin, ponies, family holidays to the west, an orchard, parties, homegrown food, summers playing in their garden.
Not long after the sisters were sent to school, their younger sister Cathy, who had a hole in her heart, died, just shy of her seventh birthday. The event shattered the family. Now, aged 76, Sweetman is estranged from all her siblings.
“For the first part, for the happy part, up until my younger sister died, I loved being part of a big family. We had our own house and a big garden that mum’s aunt had left to her. We had our own world in a way, and it was a happy world. Obviously, bad things happened, but you felt safe in it. That was the main thing. I loved being part of a big family. I didn’t feel deprived or overlooked,” she tells me now. We have met in a restaurant in Rathmines, near the home she shares with her daughter, jewellery designer Chupi, her son-in-law and her granddaughter. Sweetman lives in the basement flat.
"If you can go back and cry the tears you couldn’t cry at the time, scream the screams, you couldn’t scream, whatever, you integrate the hurt self with the today self," says author and journalist Rosita Sweetman. Photo: Marc O'Sullivan
A striking presence with almost strawberry blonde hair, pale skin and red lipstick, she’s wearing an elegant woollen navy jumper and layers of delicate jewellery. In person she speaks gently, almost diffidently at times, a surprising contrast to the fierce urgency of the prose in her new memoir, which covers the story of her childhood, her marriage, and becoming a single parent, documenting domestic strife and familial estrangement. One of the founders in the early seventies of the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement, Sweetman has been a prominent voice in her writing and activism on matters such as feminism, the church and the State.
“There was no money, but there was happiness, there was love, there was doing stuff,” she says of her childhood up to her sister’s death. “My dad worked as a judge in the Land Commission. He had a month off every year, so there’d be a month’s holiday in Connemara, or West Cork.”
But Cathy’s death proved cataclysmic, it “shattered everything”. Devastated by grief and, in a time where counselling would have been unheard of, siloed within their own pain, her parents’ marriage essentially fell apart. Although they remained living together until Sweetman’s father passed away. The book suggests things had always been a little bit strained with her mother, “He was the gentle one, yeah, my mum was the fierce one,” Sweetman says now.
She writes of feeling rejected by her mother, who became almost ghost-like in her grief in the aftermath of Cathy’s death, while her father’s health, compromised after TB, worsened. The family home, Seabank, was sold. Money was tight.
“I think when my little sister died, that killed my mum and dad’s marriage. And then when dad died, it was only six years later or something, that killed the family in a way,” she tells me. “Mum was really diminished and incredibly sad. Profoundly depressed, and didn’t really come out of it.”
The title of the book is a quote from Noel Gallagher that she came across on a YouTube video. “He said about his brother, ‘He’s like a boy with a fork in a world of soup’,” she says, adopting Mancunian tones. “I was thinking of all these complicated titles, and I suddenly thought, ‘No, I love that’.”
What does the phrase mean to her?
“It’s like somebody who’s complicated and is in the world and finds it difficult to cope in a way.”
Later in the book, there’s a very vivid description of the impact of living with a partner who is suffering from depression — the man who turns his face to the wall in bed — the egg shelling, the energy drain as everything circles around this one person. It seems similar to what she experienced earlier, in her mother’s home as a teenager, I suggest. “Absolutely, yeah. I think it was Jung who first said, you marry the parent you had most difficulty with, because you failed the first time around. And the second time around, you think, this time I’ll win. But you probably can’t because you only learned that when you come out the other end. You’ve repeated the pattern to try and save yourself this time around. So in a way, I married mum.”
Eventually, Sweetman moved to London. She got work with the BBC as a runner and moved in with the man who would eventually become her husband.
Quickly, the relationship descended into a grim pattern. Intense love bombing would inevitably be followed by irritation (on his part), then anger. We see Sweetman treated with cruelty, humiliation, coldness, infidelity. One scene depicts the aftermath of her having had an abortion, her partner leaving her in pain to have a drink with an ex-girlfriend.
Alongside the trauma of her relationship, she traces the establishment of her writing career, journalism and books, On Our Knees, Fathers Come First and On Our Backs: Sexual Attitudes in a Changing Ireland.
“Well, aren’t you the cheeky one?” Nell McCafferty says of her work in a phone call she quotes in the book. She was 21 when she started the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement. “Joyful,” she says of herself then. “You know the way you are when you’re young? And the women’s movement was joyful. It felt great. It’s like you were part of this really exciting new movement.”
What was the response of official Ireland? “There was a lot of anger. We were denounced from the pulpit,” she smiles, clearly not bothered. “I feel we’re at the apex of toxic masculinity at the moment. Two-thirds of the world is being run by insane men at the moment.”
The contrast between her personal and professional life is striking, interviewing Charlie Haughey, Desmond Guinness, on the front line of Ireland’s feminist movement, alongside the personal subjugation at home.
“One of the things that people always ask you when you come out of a really toxic relationship is, ‘Why didn’t you leave?’,” she says now. “I saw FKA Twigs, that beautiful young British singer, and she was suing a guy for abusing her in a relationship,” (the singer is suing her ex-partner actor Shia LaBeouf). Somebody asked her, ‘If it was that bad, why didn’t you leave?’ And she said, ‘Because it was that bad, I couldn’t leave’. I thought that was really insightful. Particularly when you have small children, you’re so exhausted and all your energy is going.
“And yet in another way, you know exactly what’s going on. There’s one part of us that’s always aware. ‘I know what’s going on. I know he’s having affairs. I know this, this, this.’ But you can’t actually press it all into one because it’s too painful in a way.”
She describes the slow isolation that can happen in a turbulent marriage. “I think it happens slowly. It’s like boiling a frog. You go into cold water, and you don’t realise it’s gradually getting worse and worse, and hotter and hotter, until you’re so diminished in your confidence. It’s your confidence, your belief that you can take up room in the world.”
As a couple, they travelled, living the expat life, drinking, partying, wild behaviour. The book documents her husband’s affairs. He leaves repeatedly. She herself has an affair, “sauce for the goose was sauce for the gander, right? Hadn’t we liberated 70s kids done away with all that exclusivity nonsense? Sure we had.” When he finds out, she writes: “That night’s love making felt more like punishment
Eventually, they return to Ireland and move to an isolated house in Wicklow. Here, Sweetman spends much of her time alone with their one, then two, small children, daughter Chupi and son Luke.
She writes about how she eventually faces the fact that her husband is having an affair with her eldest sister, the fallout from the affair, her family taking sides, her own sense of being gaslit, of doubting herself. By now she is afraid of her husband, who comes and goes. He is prone to displays of anger.
In tandem with the strife taking place in her marriage, is the story of Sweetman’s family, from whom she is now entirely estranged.
One of the book’s most extraordinary scenes is a family summit led by the psychiatrist, Ivor Browne, whom Sweetman attended as a patient. The event takes place in a room “all very ‘one flew over the cuckoo’s nest’”, she writes. Things take an extraordinary turn; “Ivor said he was first going to go around and ask each person if they’d slept with J (her husband),” matters then escalate into a physical fight.
“It goes in waves, the way grief goes in waves,” she says now of the situation with her family. “Of course, writing the book brought up a lot of grief. I had a dream where one of my sisters said, ‘It was your fault dad died’. And I woke up and I had, God, this intense grief that I’d lost all of them. I was just going through that moment when you wake up and you’re still happy, just thinking of each of them by their name. We all came from Mum and Dad,” she says, shaking her head sadly.
Eventually, Girl with a Fork in a World of Soup traces the marriage’s end and Sweetman becomes a single mother to two children under four, in late 1980s Ireland, living in an isolated rural setting. Before this happens, she describes her own behaviour towards her son and daughter escalating in terms of anger. In a book full of deeply personal revelations and subject matter she says it was “very painful” to revisit, these parts. Admitting to one’s own failings as a mother feels like something that must have been especially difficult to write about, I suggest.
“Very. Facing up to it was incredibly painful. But I felt I had to be real about myself as well. One of the worst parts of it all was how I became to my two children. That was one of the worst outcomes of the break-up, and the family, and everything.” The children were “tiny” when the marriage ended, Chupi nearly four, Luke 18 months.
How did she sustain herself?
Left, Rosita Sweetman with daughter Chupi and son Luke before her marriage broke up.
“In a way, the children keep you going, because they’re so in the present. You have to get up every day. You have to make breakfast. You have to get them dressed. They pull you on into reality. And they were lovely,” Sweetman, who homeschooled her children, smiles.
“That’s the most important thing. That’s what the kids kept saying at the time: ‘It doesn’t matter mum, as long as we’re OK’ . They were really young. That was their mantra.”
“It was late ’80s. It was actually quite odd,” she says of becoming a single mother in Ireland at that time. “The kids and I were living in Hollywood, up in West Wicklow. So it was even odder. I think I was the only separated woman. I remember driving down the road one day, and you do look terrible because you’re in such shock, I think. I remember one of the farmers, he saw me come and just jumped into the ditch. We were an oddity.”
It was hard to get much work done and she credits Anne Harris of the Sunday Independent with giving her some journalism.
“We had nothing. We had a beautiful old house, an old stone lodge. It was like a two-storey cottage. We had to let go of it because of pesticides [Rosita took a case against Coillte over the alleged spraying of a pesticide near the house]. So hard,” she says, shaking her head. “For a while, we shared, all of us together in Dublin. With Luke and with Brian, Chupi’s now husband. And then Chupi and Brian, they were the first to say, ‘We have to get a place on our own. We’re going to get married. We want to be alone,’” she laughs.
How was that for her?
“It was hard, yeah. Seeing Chupi go, but it was great as well. They made a beautiful little home in Portobello. And then Luke, he said on Mother’s Day, it must be 10 years ago, ‘OK, I’m going now, Mum’. He just walked out the door,” she laughs. “But I suppose one of the things with homeschooling, you build up a good trust with each other, I think. Because you have to. We were in our little world. You have to get to know each other, otherwise it couldn’t work. I trust their decisions. They go when they need to go.”
Now, she lives in the basement flat of Chupi’s family’s home, a living situation which means she gets to spend copious amounts of time with her young granddaughter. “She’s so wonderful. ‘Have you put on your second face, granny?’ she asks when she sees me taking my lipstick out. It’s wonderful. I can see Chupi in her. So it’s like loving Chupi a second time.
“Chupi and Luke have obviously both read (the book) and both love it. I think they had very different reactions. Luke is really cut and dry about it. I think she finds it a bit more painful.”
It is not the first time Sweetman has written a memoir, but she says this time she was determined to tell the story properly. “In a way, I think with writing, you have to just try and get as close as you can to the truth. And forget everything else. Because otherwise, you might as well go and do another job. One of the things actually that really helped was going into therapy. I just found this amazing, amazing woman, four or five years ago.
“She trained with Ivor [Browne]. A beautiful man. And her thing, which was Ivor’s thing, (is) everything is a reaction. Say a child is abused, the child can’t comprehend what’s happening and can’t name its feelings. It’s just the experience happens. But then the child is an adult man or woman, say, and there’s a roaring alcoholic.
“So you have to take that adult person, bring them back to when they were abused, and help them to feel the feelings that they couldn’t bear to feel without exploding at the time. And if you can go back and cry the tears you couldn’t cry at the time, scream the screams you couldn’t scream, whatever, you integrate the hurt self with the today self. Because then you become a whole person.”
It was this treatment that enabled her to write the book so honestly. “I think I was able to go right into the core of it because of the work I’d done with her.”
How does she feel about her family now, having written this memoir all about their relationships?
“How do I feel about them? I feel really sad. We all look incredibly alike, we all have this face,” she says, putting her hands to her cheeks. “Just basically mum’s face. We all have the same voice. We’re very, very alike. I feel sad. The objective of the book wasn’t to hurt them. It was to free myself and then hopefully show other women or men who are trapped in really bad s**t that you can get out. That resistance is possible, and it doesn’t just help women, it helps men. It helps society to break out of abuse.
“I think obviously, you have to be aware of other people,” she says of writing her memoir. “But then you have to be aware this is your story. They can do their story. I think one of the things of being empathetic is you overthink how other people will feel. Really your only job is to think about yourself, and Chupi, and Luke - I think about them all the time - but not to think about wider things. It’s a story that... I hope it will resonate with women. They can say, ‘Yeah, God, if she can do it, I can do it’. That sort of feeling.”
‘Girl with a Fork in a World of Soup’, by Rosita Sweetman, published by Menma Books, €17.50, is out early next month
Sorry, cross posted.
I'm also sensing a massive back story here with the family.
I'm also sensing a massive back story here with the family.
I spotted a necklace I bought a few years ago for 600 euro is now nearly double that!
She was homeschooled so maybe didn't get much exposure to other people
Her family are posh.