Anchor Baby – the audio

At night, I lie in bed – lights off, fan on, eyes closed – and I try not to think. But I can’t help it. When I lie down during the day, I fall asleep in seconds, and never on purpose. I’ll just have a little lie down here for five minutes , I think to myself, and don’t wake until the baby does, one, or two, sometimes three, hours later. But at night, when the intention is there, sleep evades me. I...

Bear with me, because we’re going to start out talking about someone we’ve come to associate with a certain type of nail, and that person is Khloe Kardashian. She recently appeared on the cover of L’Officiel Italia, a “fashion, luxury and lifestyle” magazine (aren’t they all, I hear you ask), styled by none other than her sister Kim. Can I just say: I truly, sincerely, deeply wish that celebrities...

I am really, really sad. Everything is great, and still I am sad. Summer is here. The sun is shining and my flowers are blooming and I take pleasure from those things – I upload a photograph of my flowering magnolia to the plant group I joined on Facebook because I’m so proud – but, beneath it, still I am sad. There is nothing wrong. But still I am sad. No matter how much I tell myself that it’s n...

The biggest story on my personal WhatsApp this week – populated, as of course it is, by former journalism students, people I met on the college newspaper and ex-media peeps (I think, of the friends I made in my time in newspaper and magazine journalism, 75% of them now work in PR, marketing or “content”, outside of media itself) – was The Irish Times ’ AI-produced op-ed . A piece ran in the newspa...

I read Emily Henry’s Happy Place the day before yesterday and, despite its title, it made me cry at least four times. It’s not a spoiler to say that Happy Place is about a breakup, at least, not unless you’re the type of person who avoids even reading book descriptions, and if you are, well, I suppose I’m sorry. The premise of the book is that a broken-up couple has to pretend not to be broken up...

Who was the first person to decide that we shouldn’t judge books by their covers – and how were they so utterly out of touch with how (a) humans and (b) book cover designs work? I can honestly say, hand on heart, that I have never once in my life bought a book whose cover I didn’t at least sort of like. I would probably estimate that 80% of my book purchases are made based on, if not cover alone,...

I believe there are some things you have to experience to truly understand them. Take getting cum in your eye, for example. That’s just not something you can explain to someone. They need to go through it themselves to know the agony. That dirty little intro is actually more telling when it comes to what’s wrong with me than what’s wrong with America. What’s wrong with me is that I can’t deliver b...

I dropped Atlas off to his first half-day of daycare this morning. It’s in a neighbour’s home, three minutes’ walk from ours; I found her through the housing estate Facebook group, which is by and large preoccupied with “for sale” posts and sightings of “suspicious” characters, caught on people’s Ring doorbells. “This guy walked right up to my front door and looked around,” said one recent post, a...

At a whopping two hours and forty-nine minutes, John Wick 4 – the final installment of the Keanu Reeves-led action series – is just 25 minutes shorter than Titanic . It’s longer than Avatar . I could make a semi-decent loaf of sourdough in the time it took me to watch Keanu mow down assassins in what has to be the most complex shoot-em-up in history, a sprawling epic that takes us from New York Ci...

There’s a park downtown in Fort Wayne, Foster Park , and don’t get me wrong – it’s nice! But people talk about it with the sort of reverence one might reserve for the Japanese gardens. Foster Park feels smaller than St Stephen’s Green. (It’s not; I Googled it. It is 10 times bigger. I am not good at sizing things, clearly.) It’s cute and the grass is well kept and there’s a nice walking track arou...

I don’t even have the excuse of having got addicted early. A bit like I did with smoking, I started watching The Bachelor at an age when I should have known better, in fact, going in with The Bachelorette ’s 17th season. Its star was a smiley brunette named Katie who seemed, oddly to me – hadn’t they just met? – to these men to have a reputation as someone who was sexually open and unrestrained. I...

I cried today in Panera Bread, where I’d gone to have lunch with my parents, my sister and three of her four children. I was trying to get my point across when my voice started to catch and my throat started to tighten and the tears started to fall down my cheeks and I thought, this is embarrassing but also, childishly, at least this is embarrassing them, too . Then I announced that I was going ba...

They say – and by “they” I mean, my Dad – that to assume makes an ass of me and u (lol), and honestly never has that been truer than right now, as I grapple with the results of a scientific poll (again, lol) I conducted on Instagram Stories. Lindy West did Labyrinth for her latest Butt News, and, as always, I couldn’t read without reciting an extract for Brandin. (I love reading out loud. I think...

In the autumn of 2010, at the age of 25, I moved into a tiny, terraced cottage in a Stoneybatter cul de sac. It was the first time I’d ever lived alone. The cottage was one of a handful built in the early 20th century in an area with, I once read, the lowest ratio of green space to buildings of any in Dublin. The homes had been built to house workers for the nearby Guinness factory, and gardens ha...

Shakira has broken YouTube records with the release of a new diss track aimed squarely at her ex husband, former Barcelona and Manchester United player, Gerard Piqué. “I won’t get back with you, not even if you cry, not even if you beg me,” she sings and, later, “No hard feelings babe, I wish you good luck with my so-called replacement” (rumoured to be a 23-year-old public relations graduate who w...

This is the festive hill on which I will die. Santa Claus: The Movie , the 1985 film starring John Lithgow as the bad guy, Dudley Moore as the (slightly creepy / weird?) elf and David Huddleston as the world’s most convincing Santa Claus (see above) is unparalleled in its Christmas greatness. It is the GOAT of Christmas movies. It is the shining example of festive film success and it will never be...

I first saw Titanic in the cinema, in the UCI in Tallaght, to be precise. I used to love that cinema for its Ben & Jerry’s concession stand – Cineworld had an even bigger, better one but soon turned it into Baskin Robbins and that was that. Anchor Baby is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. At UCI, though, I would b...

When my son was born, I became a new mother – but it wasn’t my first foray into parenting, not really. Anchor Baby is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. I’d become a parent around eight months previously, when I married Brandin and became stepmum (stepmom, they say) to his two boys, aged nine and seven, of whom he...

I have always had a certain dismissive attitude – I was going to write “disdain”, but it felt too harsh (but is it more truthful?) – towards those who endlessly romanticise their country of origin, years after they have left. If you miss it so much , I’d think, why don’t you just go back? Then, of course, I found myself here, in Indiana, instead of there, in Ireland. I started to use the word “hom...

This is – and is not – a trick question. I suppose the answer is, a lot. They have a lot in common. They are both in their fifties, for one; Kidman is 55, while Evangelista is 57. They are both among the most famous faces of their generation, having joined the ranks of the A list in the 1990s, when Evangelista was one of the original school of supermodel, alongside Cindy, Naomi and Christy, while...

It feels, right now, a little like I can’t get a break – not to be too dramatic about it. I mean, spoiler alert: I have Covid! And a fractured ankle! And an almost-one-year-old! And it’s all a lot! But there are some good plans made this week so I guess that’s something to be optimistic about, and every week I endure in this boot brings me one week closer to not being in this boot. Lest there be a...

I’ve been looking up flights to Ireland, to go home one last time before I begin the process of applying for my Green Card, after which point I won’t be able to leave the country – or, rather, re-enter the country – until it’s been granted. Flights are too expensive, though; post-Covid staffing issues, among other things, have cut down on flights going to and from Fort Wayne, and the cheapest I co...

It turns out, just taking a little pause and giving myself permission not to stress about work has made me feel a lot better. So here’s something I wrote. I may not be back on a regular schedule this week but you’ll get some work. I love you all in a platonic way xo In keeping with my pledge to take some time to myself, I spend the weekend at home, relaxing, doing a jigsaw and listening to a podca...

Our beloved podcast did not make the shortlist in a single one of the Irish Podcast Awards’ categories and we are outraged ! However, you can help by voting for NWMS in the Listeners’ Choice Awards . Help us prove that we’re worthy of aalllllll the accolades by giving us your vote! As a thank you, here’s tomorrow’s episode of Not Without My Sister , which will come to all podcast platforms early t...

I’ve been thinking about Kim’s diamond earring more frequently than I’d like. Earlier this week, I dropped the new butter dish my sister had bought me as a gift. It was from Anthropologie, the bougie fashion and interiors shop (a sister to Urban Outfitters) I like to buy overpriced bedcovers from, and I had admired it a few months earlier, only for her to buy it for me as a no-reason surprise, pre...