Our host Vick Hope is joined by comedian Joanne McNally.
Joanne is known for her sharp wit and self-deprecating humour, and her hotly-anticipated new show Pinotphile, which is selling out venues across the UK and Ireland, tackles everything from dating disasters to the wild journey of being single in her 40s. She’s also a primetime TV regular and one of podcasting’s best loved names, co-hosting the award-winning My Therapist Ghosted Me alongside her best friend Vogue Williams, and the hugely popular BBC Sounds format Joanne McNally Investigates. Joanne’s debut book, Femme Feral, a raucously funny and brutally honest blend of memoir and cultural commentary exploring modern womanhood, will be published in 2027.
Listen to the full episode here and read on to discover Joanne’s five most influential books by women.
I think it has aged well, because I think it’s probably not a cool take on being a woman, or that’s not the side of being a woman that you want to highlight for yourself. You don’t want people to know that you’re obsessed with looking a certain way or weighing a certain something or finding a man, but that is actually a really common female experience, so why pretend that it’s not or why judge it? […] There is something really lovely in seeing yourself represented like that.
I love knowing how I work or why I do the stuff that I do […] it’s such an interesting read. […] It’s just a really informative, fun read that you’ll get lots of really fun facts out of, and it really stuck with me.
To say I was enthralled, I could not put it down. I’d never heard of Miranda July, I don’t know where I’ve been, living under some rock. I’m 42 now, and so there’s this ominous presence of this perimenopause-menopause thing that’s coming and no one can tell you when it’s coming and you’re not gonna know when it comes, you’re just gonna go mental. And because I’m of that stage and age, I suppose it resonated with me as well.
I get a lot of women coming to me or messaging me if they’ve had breakups, and is there anything worse than a breakup? I think it’s actually worse than death, there’s no rejection in death. My father died when I was a teenager, and I’ve had breakups that have left me worse off because it was the rejection of it – they’re out there living their lives, again, with someone else. So I’m always very drawn to stories about breakups and I do enjoy a bit of revenge, I do.
I really saw myself in this book, and I wasn’t aware of Megan Nolan – this was her debut novel – and I just thought it was excellent, I could not put it down. It’s that thing, you cannot put down this relationship even when you know he’s in love with someone else – she knows all this, and yet she cannot walk away from it. […] It’s dark and wonderful.
