“Like all other girls of the 90s, my first introduction to feminism – well, pseudo-feminism, really – was the Spice Girls and girl power,” Louise O’Neill says. The novelist’s second YA book, Asking For It, came out two weeks ago, and she is currently cresting a rising wave of publicity buoyed by a tightly-knit online following of young, socially engaged feminists.

Feminism is a lynchpin of O’Neill’s work, and she’s keen to discuss it as it relates to her books and life in general. But back to the Spice Girls: “I think it was really exciting at the time, this emphasis on the fact that, as a girl, you could do anything. I don’t remember thinking that I couldn’t do anything, but it was nice. It was just packaged with such shiny clothes and amazing shoes that everyone wanted. I was probably too young for Riot Grrrl, Bikini Kill, that kind of thing.” 

Circumstantial age-related issues aside, O’Neill is still a fan of angry women with guitars. “I listened to (Hole’s) ‘Doll Parts’ on repeat while writing Only Ever Yours. It just seemed to perfectly epitomize the energy that I was trying to achieve. I listened to ‘Asking For It’ when writing my second novel, so it felt like such an uncanny coincidence when my editor suggested it as a title.”

It was Margaret Atwood’s seminal dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, that would provide the preliminary framework for O’Neill’s feminist education and also for her first novel, which is set in a similarly terrifying-yet-plausible misogynist world in which women are bred either to be subservient wives or sexual objects. She explains, “It just blew me away. I really felt afterwards that the way in which I viewed the world (had changed). It gave me a vocabulary with which to articulate myself.”

“When I was a child, I wanted to be Barbie. I wanted to be perfect and almost plastic. That desire to be smooth, flawless, and in some weird way, sexless, is such an odd yearning to instill in a small child” – Louise O'Neill 

A later spell interning at Elle under then style-director Kate Lanphear also provided Louise with ideas for Only Ever Yours, which is preoccupied with the harmful effects of living in a world that values women only for their youth and beauty. While at Elle, she suffered a relapse of the anorexia and bulimia that had been affecting her since the age of fifteen. But she holds no animosity. “I can't deny how much the fashion industry influenced that book,” she says.

“Fashion at its best is an art form and I don't appreciate hearing it dismissed as shallow or meaningless. That being said, there are major issues within the industry. The obsession with thinness and youth, and the marginalisation of models of colour being a few. I was weary of seeing women being treated as mere commodities, not just by the fashion industry but by the world at large.”

Commodification and objectification of women looms large in both Only Ever Yours and Asking For It, in which the protagonist, Emma, is viciously gang-raped and has to deal with the local fallout in a small Irish town. Many images running throughout the books are concerned with women being split and metaphorically disembodied. There are a lot of references to doll parts, doll bodies, being perfected by plastication – bent beyond abstraction. In Emma’s nightmarish post-rape interior dialogue, she sees herself split into separate pink fleshy parts, no longer under her ownership. It is extremely jarring.

“I read Natasha Walter's Living Dolls a few years ago and while I don't agree with everything she argued in her book the idea that women are becoming more 'doll like' stuck with me,” O’Neill elaborates. “When I was a child, I wanted to be Barbie. I wanted to be perfect and almost plastic but as I get older I see how odd that is. That desire to be smooth, flawless, and in some weird way, sexless, is such an odd yearning to instill in a small child.” 

“I'm interested in female characters who are unpleasant, unlikeable, weak, vulnerable; characters who make mistakes and fuck up” – Louise O'Neill 

Her main characters, freida (deliberately not capitalised) in Only Ever Yours and Emma in Asking For It are decidedly not one-dimensional. Instead, they are products of their environments, sympathetically rendered but pocked with flaws. “The trope of the 'strong female character' is one I find annoying and definitely wasn't something I wanted to perpetuate in my novel,” agrees O’Neill. “I'm interested in female characters who are unpleasant, unlikeable, weak, vulnerable; characters who make mistakes and fuck up. Characters who are real, who are authentic, who are human.”

Despite the perceived heaviness of the themes, her books are picking up rave reviews and more than respectable sales across every generation. Plus, O’Neill says, “YA isn’t a genre. It’s really more of an estimated age range.”

“For me, the story always comes first, I want the books to be engaging and compelling. But I hope that once the reader finishes that they have questions and ideas and are enticed to further explore feminism... Young women today have access to a feminist community of the kind I could only have dreamed of at their age.”

The success of Only Ever Yours only seems to be picking up momentum, with production company Killer Content picking up the film and television rights. Responsible for cult classics like Larry Clark’s Kids and the Oscar-winning Boys Don’t Cry, Killer Content is also responsible for Todd Haynes’ hotly-anticipated feature, Carol. “Killer Content are wonderful,” Louise says. “Adrienne Becker, the producer (and company CEO), is one of the most dynamic women I have ever met in my entire life. I think they are going to do an amazing job.”

So high is the praise for O’Neill that The Guardian have pronounced her the best YA fiction writer “...alive today,” she finishes. “That’s my new Twitter and Instagram bio!” she says, tongue in cheek. “I’m just going to milk this for all it’s worth.”

Louise O'Neill's new novel, Asking For It, is out now.