Caroline O'Donoghue

Rachel is a student working at a bookstore when she meets James, and it’s love at first sight. Effervescent and insistently heterosexual, James soon invites Rachel to be his roommate and the two begin a friendship that changes the course of both their lives forever. Together, they run riot through the streets of Cork city, trying to maintain a bohemian existence while the threat of the financial crash looms before them.

When Rachel falls in love with her married professor, Dr. Fred Byrne, James helps her devise a reading at their local bookstore, with the goal that she might seduce him afterwards. But Fred has other desires. So begins a series of secrets and compromises that intertwine the fates of James, Rachel, Fred, and Fred’s glamorous, well-connected, bourgeois wife. Aching with unrequited love, shot through with delicious, sparkling humor, THE RACHEL INCIDENT is a triumph.

The Rachel Incident

rachel

Sitting in his pokey little office, I thought what I always do when I’m in a small room with a man I’m not related to, which is: 

We knew we loved each other, but we didn’t know what to do with it.

Andre Bohrer

"The thing about Carey," James said once, when we were up late and commiserating over our hopeless men, "is that he would walk over hot coals for you, but he won't commit to lunch plans.”

He sighed a strange, tired sigh. "You can do anything without me." He fell asleep then. Leaving me to bask in the oddness of the comment, and to wish that he had stopped at the word "anything."

The year in Shandon Street did a lot for me, but it did this most of all. It detached me from any kind of inherited moral system. I stopped sizing others up in accordance with the values I had been taught: who was a loser, who was closeted, who was cheating on their wife. I learned the value of context, and of people.

When something good happens to you at that age, you can't settle with the notion that it's a one-off. You want it to be the beginning of a tradition. That's how I felt about that night: I wanted it already to be a memory, a foundational one, a first evening of many similar evenings. I wanted future nostalgia, a rear-view, years-old fondness for something that had literally just happened.

“If you weren’t looking closely, you would have seemed fine… but I was looking closely, so.”

But, even through my tears, I could feel something happening within myself. I had told a stranger to fuck off, and I had meant it. I had drawn a line with someone. I had never really done that before.

It was like finding your favourite pair of boots under the bed.

It was like finding them on the last day of your lease, the boxes already in the van, having assumed that they must have been left at an ex-lover's house, or simply vanished by your own carelessness.

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