Something For The Weekend – Anna Carey's cultural picks
She is the author of seven acclaimed novels for young adults; her debut novel The Real Rebecca won the Senior Children's Book of the Year prize at the 2011 Irish Book Awards and her last book The Boldness of Betty was shortlisted for the same award in 2020. Her drama podcast The Famine Monologues was released by RTÉ in 2021 and her play The Making of Mollie was staged in 2024.
Her latest novel Our Song is her first book for adults - read an extract here.
We asked Anna for her choice cultural picks...
FILM
I'm a huge Ernst Lubitsch fan. Billy Wilder famously had a sign up in his office saying 'How would Lubitsch do it?' and I think that would still be a useful question for anyone trying to write comedy or romance or romantic comedy. The Shop Around the Corner is literally a perfect romcom and To Be Or Not To Be is just an incredible – and incredibly funny – anti-fascist film. Plus it has Carole Lombard in it, who I adore. I love his 1933 romantic comedy Design For Living. It's very much a pre-Code film, one of the daring movies made in the early 1930s before Hollywood introduced the Hays Code and started banning anything vaguely racy. Miriam Hopkins plays a woman who ends up in what's basically a throuple with Gary Cooper (good for her!) and Frederic March (meh). I paid homage to one of my favourite lines from Design for Living in a scene in Our Song.
MUSIC
I listen to a lot of French pop music. I've been a fan of classic French pop since my late teens and briefly ran a French pop club night in my early twenties, despite the fact that back then I didn't have a word of French (I did German and Latin in school and German in college). I started learning French at the Alliance Francaise about twelve years ago and once I could read French magazines I started discovering contemporary artists who aren't really big outside France. My favourites are all female solo musicians – Pomme, Pi Ja Ma and Clara Luciani, who are all very different but all make gorgeously melodic, kind of bittersweet music. In March I went to Lyon to see Clara Luciani play a big arena show and it was the most joyful thing – dancing for two hours with several thousand happy French people.
BOOKS
We're living in an excellent time for romantic fiction. My current favourite authors in the genre, who all have new books out this year, are Sarra Manning, Mhairi McFarlane and Katherine Center – I'm already looking forward to their next novels.Away from romcoms, one of my favourite new books is Elaine Feeney's Let Me Go Mad In My Own Way, about a woman who has returned to her family home in the west of Ireland and her family's history of violence and trauma. That sounds so grim, but Feeney has the amazing gift of writing about big, serious issues with such humanity and wit that the book is utterly compelling and sometimes funny. I loved it.
THEATRE
I love Sean O'Casey's Dublin plays. My dad's family were all dock workers from the North Strand and I drew on my family history to write my last YA novel The Boldness of Betty, which is set during the 1913 Lockout. O'Casey's plays were a brilliant resource for Dublin dialogue from this period – like, if I wanted to check if a slang expression was in use at the time, I'd check the plays. They're funny and angry and sad and very Dublin, and they all still have a lot to say about class and conflict and colonialism. Also I wrote my German degree dissertation on Brecht and Weill's Threepenny Opera and John Gay's Beggar's Opera and I still have a soft spot for both of them.
TV
I really, really love good telly. I think as an artform that can do things no other medium can. In terms of programmes that are currently airing or have just aired, I loved the latest season of Hacks. I am so invested in the lead characters Deborah and Ava, it physically pained me when they were at odds. It's such a funny, humane show, and while its focus is on a 70-something and a 20-something woman, I love that my own generation is represented by the comedy genius Kaitlin Olson, who plays Deborah's daughter. Speaking of women of my generation, I'm also really enjoying the second series of Poker Face – I could watch Natasha Lyonne genially solving preposterous murders around America all day.
GIG
Throwing Muses were a hugely important band for me growing up. I first discovered them when I was 14 thanks to their 1989 album Hunkpapa and I was in total awe of Kristin Hersh and Tanya Donelly – I had never seen girls playing the guitar like that before. I still love them and I can't wait to see them when they play in Dublin in August. Speaking of women playing the guitar, I'm really looking forward to CMAT in the 3Arena later this year – her Fairview Park gig was my live music highlight of 2024. And my last gig was a brilliant concert at Féile Roise Rua in Arainn Mhóir in Donegal. It's a singing festival held on the island every May with lots of fantastic folk and trad artists.
ART
I absolutely adored the Evie Hone and Mainie Jellett exhibition currently running in the National Gallery – it was brilliantly curated and the art was incredible. I studied History of Art in college and spent a lot of time in the National Gallery back then, and I love how it's developed its approach to exhibitions over the last few decades. Outside of Ireland, two of my favourite exhibitions of the last decade explored the links between painting and fashion – Balenciaga and Spanish Painting at the Thyssen in Madrid, which explored the connections between the couturier's masterpieces and the works of everyone from Goya to El Greco, and Sargent and Fashion at the Tate in London.
PODCAST
I used to listen to a lot of podcasts and weirdly over the last year I've listened to fewer and fewer, mostly because I do most of my podcast listening on walks and for the last year I've spent my walks listening to French pop music and thinking about how to wrangle various issues in the books I've been writing. I do still never miss an episode of the unhinged and very funny Irish podcast The Creep Dive, and, when it's airing, the Hollywood history podcast You Must Remember This.
TECH
I am always trying and failing to spend less time on my phone. But I'll recommend Bandcamp, which allows you to buy music directly from the musicians and then stream it via the Bandcamp app.
THE NEXT BIG THING...
The band Poor Creature, featuring Ruth Clinton from Landless, Cormac MacDiarmada from Lankum and John Dermody from the Jimmy Cake. They're incredible live. Their first album All Smiles Tonight is coming out next month and I can't wait.
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