1.
Like most non-rich people who are also not definitively poor, I first encountered the realities of class in college. To move from community-school three-bedroom semi-detached suburbia, where I grew up, to fee-paying-school six-or-seven bedroom detached-house-with-atrium suburbia, where I went to university, isn’t quite to enact the vertiginous class dislocation described by Mark Fisher in his 2014 essay “Good for Nothing”, in which he suggests that, “Someone who moves out of the social sphere they are ‘supposed’ to occupy is always in danger of being overcome by feelings of vertigo, panic and horror.” But a dislocation is what it was; and the revelation of privilege evidently struck me with such force that I have now written two books about it. And here I am, writing about it again.
I arrived at University College Dublin in September 1999: the very apogee of the Celtic Tiger. Traffic jams general all over Ireland. Fianna Fail and the Progressive Democrats in minority coalition government. Mary Harney’s “between Boston and Berlin” speech—defining Ireland’s position in a boomtime neoliberal world—just under a year away. Cocaine (invisibly) and Nokias (visibly) everywhere. People kept asking me where I’d gone to school. I didn’t understand the question. “Just school,” I would say. “As in, the school up the road from my house.”
I am a slow learner. It took me three undergraduate years to work out what this oddly persistent line of questioning portended. One evening in the arts block, in September 2001, I ran into a recently made friend. He was scanning the results of a Maiden Speakers competition, posted on a noticeboard. “A good night for Gonzaga,” he said. “What’s Gonzaga?” I said. (We betray our class by the things we say.) “It’s, ah…” My new friend wrung his hands and frowned. Just possibly, he had never been asked this question before. “It’s a school,” he said. “It’s my school.”
A school. But Gonzaga, evidently, was not like my school. For one thing, it came with you, when you went to college. For another, it appeared to command something like loyalty, or esprit de corps: to me, a mystifying notion. Gonzaga, it appeared, partook of a network of inter-school collaborations and rivalries. You could be for Gonzaga and against some other school, whereas in my experience, what you were, if you were anything, was against the whole concept of school itself. And one more thing. Your parents paid money so you could go to Gonzaga. Ergo, if you went there, your parents were rich. (Current per annum fee for attendance at Gonzaga College: €6,605).
My curiosity was aroused. In tutorials, in the drama club, in the English Literary Society, in the offices of the college broadsheet, I started to ask people where they’d gone to school. “Michael’s,” they said, or “Blackrock” or “Holy Child” or “Alex” or “Muckross”. They were everywhere! And they all knew each other! Class, when you first become aware of it, presents the aspect of a conspiracy in a pulp novel. It’s all connected! I had stumbled, or so it felt, upon a closed and coded world: the world of the children of the rich. It was, in its way, an erotic discovery. By which I mean to say that my curiosity was aroused in both senses of the word. The revelation of the hidden structures of social class (if I may strike a Marxist note) often evokes in us a feeling of erotic submission, though it is surely transgressing a taboo to say so. Not coincidentally—it may, in fact, be the same feeling—the discovery of social class also often evokes in us a desire for erotic conquest. Think of Julien Sorel in Stendhal’s great novel Le Rouge et le Noir: the archetypal striver from the provinces, who determines that the swiftest way to advance in life is simply to sleep his way to the top; or of Becky Sharp, his female counterpart, in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair.
And then there was the world of the rich themselves, which it turned out was more or less coterminous with “the world,” i.e. the public and professional world that presented itself to your attention when you read the newspapers or listened to the radio. Judges, barristers, academics, architects, property developers (lots of these), businessmen, bankers, TDs, GPs, consultants, writers, editors, journalists… And then there were the houses. Georgian, or Edwardian, or simply bespoke McMansion, with pianos, pool tables, conservatories, plum-coloured carpets, imported rugs, Eames chairs, wood-burning stoves, Sabatier knives in the kitchen, framed art on the walls…
Operating (so I felt) as an interloper or spy, I attended parties in houses with built-in steam rooms, or landscaped gardens, or libraries. At these parties, people frowned when I told them the name of the village in south-west Dublin where I’d grown up. “Rathcoole,” one girl said. “Oh, yeah. I think we drive past there on the way to the stables.” One of my college girlfriends (Loreto Foxrock) referred casually to growing up in “a normal six-bedroom family house.” A Gonzaga grad I knew referred casually to his school’s tennis courts and theatre. A female friend (Muckross) once complained: “Our school had no money. We had to fix our hockey sticks with gaffer tape.” We betray our class by the things we say.
To another college girlfriend (Holy Child), I explained that hanging out with all these private-school kids had afforded me the stupidest, and also the most indispensable, of political epiphanies: These people are rich and they’ll grow up to run the country. “I have to write about this,” I said. “Oh,” she said. “You should read Ross O’Carroll-Kelly.”
2.
Because someone was already writing about it: the Sunday Tribune sports journalist Paul Howard. By his own account (in a preface to the reissued and rewritten 2004 O’Brien Press edition of the first Ross book, The Miseducation Years), Howard first encountered the world of South Dublin fee-paying schools when the Irish Independent asked him to cover a schools rugby match in Skerries in 1989. Howard grew up in Ballybrack and describes his own background as working class. He didn’t even know the rules of rugby at the time. “I must have done okay,” he writes, “because shortly afterwards I was asked to cover a match involving Blackrock College […] My first Rock match was when my eyes were truly opened to the extraordinary social phenomenon that was schools rugby.”
Howard notes that Ross O’Carroll-Kelly, the Senior Cup Team goon whose initials ostensibly encode the name of his fictional school, Castlerock, but which actually, as everyone knows, encode the name of Blackrock College, cohered in his imagination when he watched “a young buck with the confident bearing of a five-star general” stride off the pitch and say to his father, “I don’t give a fock how you think I played—just crack open the wallet.” We betray our class by the things we say.
The Ross O’Carroll-Kelly column—“The Diary of a Schools Rugby Player”—began running in the now-defunct Sunday Tribune in 1998. The first book, The Miseducation of Ross O’Carroll-Kelly, was turned down by mainstream publishers and printed by Howard himself under the Tribune banner in 2000. In interviews, Howard has recalled having to pulp half of the first print run. A sequel, Roysh Here, Roysh Now: Ross O’Carroll-Kelly—The Teenage Dirtbag Years, in which Ross goes to UCD, appeared, again under the Tribune aegis, in 2001. These first two books were successful enough to be picked up and repackaged by the O’Brien Press between 2004 and 2005; since 2007, Ross has been published by Penguin Ireland (now Sandycove), at the rate of at least a book a year. According to the Irish Independent, Ross hit one million sales in 2014. There have been four successful plays, most recently Postcards from the Ledge (2017). A plaque commemorating RO’CK adorns (or adorned, at one point—I have not been able to check if it is still there) the bathroom wall of Kiely’s in Donnybrook: Ross’s favourite pub. We might also mention the statue of Ross erected in Eason’s on O’Connell Street. Normal Sheeple, the 23rd Ross book, debuted at number one on the Irish Times bestseller list in August of this year.
We love Ross O’Carroll-Kelly!
Should we?
3.
Then again, this raises another question: who do I mean when I say we? Who reads Ross O’Carroll-Kelly? His subjects—the targets of his satire? Partly, yes. Here’s Howard, talking to The Journal in 2017:
“Oddly with Ross, people tended to recognise their friends rather than themselves,” he says. Friends in bookshops would tell him about sailing jacket-wearing teens reading the book and exclaiming “that is SO loike Tiernan.”
On the other hand, Tiernan’s mates, chortling in bookshops, simply aren’t numerous enough to make up a readership that buys a million copies. Who else reads Ross? Statistics on the actual readership of a given book are impossible to come by. We can only speculate. My own guess: the majority of Ross’s readership is made up of people who are not themselves members of the South Dublin ruling class, but who have nonetheless found themselves professionally adjacent to it, via the various routes of class mobility available to Irish people in the 21st century (chiefly free university education, which was introduced by the Rainbow Coalition government in 1996).
In other words, Ross’s fans tend to be members of the Professional Managerial Class: university educated, corporate but not C-suite (you find them in HR), working for NGOs, or in tech, or in academia, or in journalism, or in medicine (though not as consultants)… Well-paid but financially insecure—vulnerable, that is, to large-scale economic shocks. Socially liberal (voted Yes in 2015 and 2018). Anxious about manners (crusaders for the “appropriate”). Anxious about status (to be in the middle is to sit in the Status Hot Seat). Most of Ross’s fans, I would hazard, grew up somewhere that is not South Dublin. But they know South Dublin well. Most likely, they went to college there. These are the people who love RO’CK. These are the people I mean when I say we.
4.
Here’s a quick and dirty theory. Up until the mid-90s, Ireland had a well-demarcated class system: small elite, small lower-middle class, big underclass. Then neoliberal policies of global deregulation sparked a boom in foreign direct investment, leading to various social transformations: free university education, net immigration, more and better jobs, cheap air travel… If the history of Ireland over the last thirty years tells a story not so much of increasing liberalisation as of large-scale class mobility, then one of the lessons of this story is that the demarcations of our class system have become during this time simultaneously more permeable and more visible.
As the tide of neoliberalism waxed and waned (and waxed again), people who had grown up working-class looked around to find themselves occupying a spot somewhere in the lower-middle class. People who had grown up lower-middle class now found themselves hanging out with the really rich—or at least watching them from unwontedly close quarters. As of the mid-2000s, you have something new in Ireland: a large Professional Managerial Class, underwritten by cheap credit and deeply anxious about its status, colliding socially with the established ruling class. This is the context in which Paul Howard begins to write the first RO’CK columns. And it’s still, I would argue, the context in which the Ross books are written and read.
When class barriers become visible, you get a crisis of manners. How should the Professional Managerial Class comport itself, when, in this unstable new order, it encounters its rulers, or its subalterns? What constitutes rudeness, in a given interaction? What constitutes politeness? Can you express your envy and fear aloud, or should you sublimate them? Make anxious jokes? In The Politics of Magic, his 1987 study of the work of Tom Murphy, Fintan O’Toole writes about manners in an industrial society: “Discipline, self-control, deferring to others, keeping one’s impulses in check—these are the things which the lower orders had to be taught for them to be useful in industry.” As our PMC learned new manners, becoming useful in the new neoliberal industries, what happened to their impulses—all that envy, all that ambition, all that ressentiment?
5.
One answer: we began to use Ross O’Carroll-Kelly as a kind of psychological safety-valve. The Professional Managerial Class is the sole constituent Irish social group who do not appear in Howard’s pages. Still unformed, and still unstable, they (we) are not yet fully valid subjects for sharp-eyed social satire. But we are interested—as who is not?—in seeing ourselves on the page. In our project of collective self-fashioning, we seek encouragement and help. Works of nonfiction that describe us using the blunt instruments of pop-sociology have prospered: for instance, The Pope’s Children: Ireland’s New Elite (2005) and Renaissance Nation: How the Pope’s Children Rewrote the Rules for Ireland (2018), both by David McWilliams. In the latter of these books, the PMC is described as “Ireland’s radical centre”— “the common people who, through their tolerance, respect those around them. They can be found in the background, beavering away, and are driven by the expectation that tomorrow will be a little bit better than today”. They are therefore the real, if unacknowledged, “heroes of the great Irish economic transformation”. Isn’t it pretty to think so?
If McWilliams flatters the Irish PMC directly, the Ross books perform the same service obliquely. The Ross books tell us that our social betters are venal, idiotic, boorish—objects of mockery. They also tell us that those below us are endearing chancers, or operators, or gangsters—objects of a more nervous kind of mockery. In Normal Sheeple, Ross’s granddaughter, Rihanna-Brogan, takes part in a “jiddum kada” (gymkhana) in “the cor pork of The Broken Orms Pub in Finglas”. Like Rihanna-Brogan, the other working-class girls who compete in the car park gymkhana own horses: “The first rider out ends up being eight-year-old Shania Madden from Con Colbert Terrace in Coolock, on her albino pony, Henrik Lorsson,” et cetera. This is funny. But if it wasn’t so obviously a caricature, and if Howard had not lavished substantial care and attention on making his characters feel likeable and real, it might read uncomfortably like a satirist punching down.
As it is, the gymkhana scene offers food for cogitation. Halfway through the event, Ross observes Kennet, Rihanna-Brogan’s grandfather, injecting Rihanna-Brogan’s pony, Moxy, with a stimulant, at the direction of Hennessy Coghlan-O’Hara (the unstoppable Charles O’Carroll-Kelly’s equally unstoppable partner in evil). The upper classes and the lower classes, working together for nefarious ends: isn’t this the political eventuality that, in its darkest moments, the PMC most fears? An unholy alliance of rich and poor was the very conjunction decried by the larger Western Professional Managerial Class in the aftermath of Donald J. Trump’s victory in the US Presidential election of 2016 (all those rednecks, voting Republican) and in the aftermath of the 2016 UK Brexit vote (all those shopkeepers, voting Tory). There is a sense in which Ross uncovering a doping scandal at the “jiddum kada” channels the deepest terrors of the Irish PMC and, in the same moment, flatters them implicitly: after all, the jiddum kada in the cor pork of The Broken Arms is for the corrupt rich and the vulgar poor. It’s certainly not for members of the PMC: custodians of the appropriate, hardworking backbone of “the radical centre”. Beneath its surface comedy, the scene at once awakens our fears and flatters our self-conceptions: we are neither vulgar nor corrupt; we are the people of the decent middle.
Heavy stuff to tease out of a jokey scene in a popular novel, perhaps. Grant me a point worth making. Beneath their explicit satirical focus on the South Dublin ruling elite, the Ross books have an implicit subject, and this implicit subject is, I would suggest, identical with the implied readership of the books. The books are in this sense “really” about the new Irish Professional Managerial Class: its fears, its ambitions, its uncertainty about manners. The one social class whom Howard does not satirise—how can the PMC be anything other than the great absent presence of his books? The satirist—the comedian of manners—holds up bad behaviour to ridicule: so goes the cliché. But the question must always be asked: to whom is the satirist showing this bad behaviour? And to what end? We members of the PMC love Ross, in part, because he behaves so badly, and thus teaches us, in our uncertainty and self-regard, to behave well. By being “inappropriate”, Ross affirms the rightness of our own “appropriate” behaviour, about which we live in constant doubt.
Aiding in the self-definition of Ireland’s new PMC: this is one function that the Ross books serve. Another is this: they offer us a means of articulating our ambivalence about the ruling class—our covetousness, our envy, and our hatred (emotions that often derive from a sublimated eroticism). The books tell us, repeatedly, that our elites will always act to protect their own material interests, and that we should not be charmed by them, no matter how sexy or funny or morally inconsequential we find them. In Normal Sheeple, a late aside reveals that J.P. and Christian have been working with Charles O’Carroll-Kelly all along to sell Ireland to the Russians for profit. The effect is shocking, because for the previous four hundred pages, we’ve watched J.P. and Christian take part in trivial sex-farce subplots. Our rulers serve themselves: the books remind us of this fact repeatedly. They gratify overtly our secret contempt for the powerful. On the other hand, Ross is a “beloved character”. There he sits, at the heart of our popular culture, reminding us that our society is unjust; that our elites are shallow and self-serving; and that materialist greed is a hollow pursuit. We love him. We think he’s great. And his family and friends, that nest of vipers: we love them, too. Should we? Of course we should. That’s how class works. The Ross books enable us safely both to love and to fear our rulers; to envy their wealth and to disapprove of their behaviour; to experience naked capitalist ambition and sheer class hatred at one and the same time and without contradiction; to map the shifting landscapes of an increasingly unstable world.
6.
This is to make a socio-psychological claim for the value of the Ross books. What about literary value? Are the books any good as books? Paul Howard’s name doesn’t appear on the cover of any of them; only on the title page: “As told to Paul Howard.” This is a conceit, of course. Howard, we are invited to assume, is simply transcribing what Ross, a real person, tells him. (The conceit was made explicit, not entirely successfully, in one of the more peculiar Ross books, We Need to Talk About Ross [2009], in which Paul Howard, appearing as himself, interviews his own creations.) But those words—as told to—have, I’ve always thought, another meaning, having to do with language, accent, and class, and with the places, literary and otherwise, where these things intersect. State it plainly: Paul Howard’s great literary gift is his ear; and the central aesthetic assumption underlying the Ross books is, We betray our class by the things we say.
Think, for a moment, about how little visual imagery there is in the Ross books—how utterly dependent they are on voice. Not just Ross’s voice: a Babel of other voices. Ronan, Ross’s working-class son, who says, “Ine Arthur fookin’ it up, Rosser. Enda bleedin’ stordee.” The Northern Irish guy Ross meets at a wedding, who asks him: “Did yeh drave op?” The Nigerian woman who calls Ross “Rosockeral Kelly”. We don’t really read these books. We hear them. And we hear them because Howard hears them first. His books are heard. In fact, they’re overheard.
In the acknowledgements of The Miseducation of Ross O’Carroll-Kelly. Howard offers, “MAJOR gratitude to Dublin Bus. Thank you for the 46a, a rich source of material.” In 2001, as now, the 46a was the bus that went from the city centre to Dun Laoghaire, stopping at or near Trinity College, Leeson Street, Donnybrook, UCD, Stillorgan, Foxrock, and Monkstown. To travel on the 46a was therefore to travel through the heart, not just of South Dublin (the geographical location) but of “South Dublin” (a place located both in the mind and in the bank account).
Taking notes on the 46A: a local version of the sort of reportorial work praised in Tom Wolfe’s perennially unpopular 1989 essay “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast”. Here Wolfe argued that novelists should eschew postmodernist involution and stare reality (the Billion-Footed Beast) in the face; that they should operate in emulation of Zola, with his “documenting expeditions to the slums, the coal mines, the races, the folies, department stores, wholesale food markets, newspaper offices, barnyards, railroad yards, and engine decks, notebook and pen in hand”. For those of us who feel that a novelist’s job is to speak to his or her contemporaries, and not to some notional literary or academic posterity, and to those of us who think that social satire is and always has been the heart of the novel, Wolfe’s essentially populist argument still carries a furtive appeal. And it seems safe to suggest that people who feel this way are often also people who, beginning somewhere on the lower end of the social scale, have been forcibly struck at some point in their lives by the reality of class, and have been thereby aroused to outrage, skeptical curiosity, and erotic desire: the Holy Trinity, if you ask me, of writerly impulsions.
In any event, the 46A clearly did Paul Howard a lot of good. His dialogue is sublime, and it has been sublime since the first chapter of the first Ross book (“Don’t get too drunk now, Ross,” says Ross’s father in The Miseducation of Ross O’Carroll-Kelly, to which Ross replies, “Yeh roysh! I’m HORDLY likely to on forty focking quid now, am I?”). As of Normal Sheeple, this dialogic sublimity remains unadulterated. Examples: “Vanessa Orlean? She did German and Neuroscience in UCD. She pulled me off around the back of the Wicked Wolf the night Ireland lost to Scotland in the Foot and Mouth Six Nations”—Ross speaking. “Would anyone be interested in sponsoring my cleaner, who’s doing a ten-day virtual walk of either the Pennines or the Apennines in aid of fibrodysplasia?”—Ross joins a Mount Anville mums’ Whatsapp group. “Thank you. Even though the priority for me isn’t to win TV debates, Mallorie—it’s a net-zero corbon emission rate in the medium term.”—Sorcha O’C-K becomes Minister for Climate in Charles O’C-K’s new government.
Language is where the considerable literary worth of the Ross books lives. Take Ross’s narrative voice, which, after twenty-three books, remains tuned to an exquisite pitch of comic surprise. “Yeah, no, the old pair invited us around to the Áras for, like, an intimate family dinner—we’re talking me and Sorcha, we’re talking Ronan and Shadden, and we’re talking Hennessy and a prostitute named Davina, who comes from Russia and looks like Emmy Rossum.” Or this:
Sorcha is wearing her famous Stella McCortney trouser suit—the one that says she is not a woman to be focked with. I once saw her reduce a clamper to tears while wearing it, after she porked her Nissan Leaf in a bus lane to run into Donnybrook Fair for a tub of sweet pea saffron hummus and possibly pitta pockets.
That possibly: superb. Or take the virtuoso run of pages, in the middle of the book, in which Ross accompanies his daughter Honor to the Gaeltacht, where he meets a teacher named Marianne, who is, naturally, a Sally Rooney character (although she’s less Marianne from the novel Normal People and more Daisy Edgar-Jones as Marianne in the TV version); at the same time, Ross is invited to join the local over-50s Gaelic football team. In these pages, Howard’s comic ear is operating with maximum brilliance across a range of registers. The Kerry footballers all talk like characters from J.M. Synge (a running joke, whenever Ross visits rural Ireland, and perhaps an intimation that the Ross books and their readers half-share Ross’s Dublin-centric sense of things): “And isn’t it my blood that shivers whenever I think of that cursed town! You see, there is great spite between our two peoples. ‘Tis a bitterness as old as Brandon itself!” When Ross and Marianne flirt, it sounds like this:
“So how are you?”
“Grand.”
“Good to hear.”
“And you?”
“Cracking form.”
“I’m sorry I—”
“It’s cool.”
“—just forgot something.”
“It happens.”
“The man had already started putting my messages through—”
“Hey, it’s not my first time in a supermorket.”
“And I remembered I didn’t get—”
“Toilet roll.”
“Yes.”
“So I see.”
Meanwhile, Ross’s father—now head of the New Republic party and Taoiseach—is tweeting Trumpishly: “For too long, farmers have had it all their own way with their EU grants and their FFG friends bending over backwards to please them!” (CO’CK is never without his exclamation marks—as in, never.) And mediating, as always, is Ross’s narration: “I literally haven’t set eyes on the woman since that scene on the beach in Ballydavid a week ago and it’s as awks for me as it is for obviously her?” Howard’s prose, like the world, is polyphonic. He vanishes into the way his characters speak. What do you call this, if not art?
Closely allied with Howard’s ear for language is his eye for the markers of social class. Sorcha’s Nissan Leaf (electric, of course). The sweet pea saffron hummus. The Stella McCartney trouser suit. “Do you know where my Molton Brown is?” Sorcha asks, in Should Have Got Off at Sydney Parade (2006). “Just grab my Skinfresh Facial Wash, my Skinfresh Toning Lotion, my Active Defence City-Day Hydrator, my Skinboost…” In fact, Sorcha—the emptily liberal fashion victim—is a fount of material specificity. “You even agreed it’d go amazing with my Thierry Mugler white chiffon dress,” she says, in Rhino What You Did Last Summer (2009). We betray our class by the things we buy.
Among their other virtues, the Ross books are masterpieces of denotative realism. A century from now, an interested cultural historian will be able to reconstruct a near-total catalogue of contemporary upper-middle-class lifestyle accoutrements from Howard’s pages: the clothes, drinks, food, make-up, coffee machines, music, movies, actors and actresses… Denotative realism is out of fashion in the academy and in the upper-echelon mainstream literary journals, and has been for a long time. Mere denotation, the argument goes, is de-universalising, hence unaesthetic. Following Barthes, we are meant to dismiss itemised catalogues of stuff in fiction as mere “reality effects”, evoking a specious verisimilitude. Following David Foster Wallace, we are meant to observe that brand-names date fiction unacceptably. The hell with this. So what if fiction dates? The Ross books are ours, not posterity’s. We can use them however we like.
7.
So how do we use them? As mirrors, partly. Pace Stendhal, who said that a novel must be like “a mirror carried down the high street”, reflecting impartially what it sees, mirrors are not neutral messengers. We bring to them our moods, our pasts, our immediate contexts, and we interpret carefully what we behold (some days you hate how you look; some days you like what you see). When I read Ross O’Carroll-Kelly, I can see Ireland in the mirror. I don’t always see the same thing, of course. The country I tend to see most often, however, closely resembles the England described by George Orwell in 1941: “a family with the wrong members in control”. How do they rule, these people who shouldn’t rule at all? Can we unseat them? Should we? Don’t we admire them, sneakily, in our darkest moments? Don’t we fancy them, hate them, covet their expensive lives? Ross allows us to think these things with a clear conscience, even if we aren’t quite ready to utter them aloud.
It follows that we should also use Ross as a kind of counsellor. In his company we find ourselves auditioning our hidden impulses, fashioning ourselves in the image of our various taboo desires. Our rulers might see themselves clearly in Howard’s pages, should they choose to look. The rest of us can see ourselves indirectly. Thus we examine ourselves in Paul Howard’s ambiguous light. The popularity of Ross O’Carroll-Kelly, as a cultural phenomenon, occupies a highly unstable fault-line: the place where the self-interest of our ruling elite meets the sublimated ressentiment of everyone else. Ross began as a joke. Now he’s something like our therapist: a place to put all of the vertigo, panic, and horror that attends any genuine confrontation with the realities of class in the 21st century.
As a bonus—as more than a bonus—there’s the language. We betray our class by the things we say. On every page of every book, Paul Howard betrays his membership of the highest class of popular writer. In Normal Sheeple, Christian winds up dating the much younger Lychee Greenhalgh, daughter of one of CO’CK’s ministers and (in Ross’s words) a “gorgeous idiot”. In Kiely’s:
Christian’s like, “Drink, Lychee?”
And she goes, “I’m going to have a Cab Sav, but I’ll get it because I want to film myself pouring it!”
Ross comments: “That’s, like, word for word.”
But then, it always is.