What happens when you stop trying to be the woman everyone wants you to be, and start asking what you want instead?
At 38, Louise O’Neill had the life she thought she wanted. The relationship. The home. The future. Then it all ended, taking with it not only the life she had built, but her certainty about what a successful, happy life was supposed to look like.
Heartbroken but restless, Louise decided not to rebuild the same life all over again. Inspired by her father’s advice to go out and live a bigger life, she began saying yes. To risk. To desire. To adventure. To the possibility that there might be another way to live.
What followed was an extraordinary dating odyssey across Paris, London and New York, meeting a different man each night. The stories are outrageous, intimate and frequently hilarious, but the men are only the beginning.
Because as Louise steps outside the life she thought she was supposed to want, she begins to question the rules that got her there in the first place. Why are women still taught to make themselves smaller, easier and more pliable to be loved? Why are we so frightened of ageing? How do we measure success when marriage and motherhood are no longer inevitable milestones? What has modern dating done to intimacy? And what does it mean to desire men at a moment when masculinity itself feels increasingly contested?
Turning her trademark sharp, fearless eye on ageing, beauty, sex, motherhood, modern masculinity, loneliness, ambition and the pressure to settle, Louise examines the contradictions of being a woman today while implicating herself in every one of them.
Fearlessly honest, fiercely intelligent and laugh-out-loud funny, A Bigger Life is a memoir about what happens when you stop shrinking yourself to fit the life you’ve been given and asks us all to reflect on the question at the heart of the book: What does it really mean to live a bigger life?
