Dawn O'Porter: 'I don't really care if everybody likes me'

Dawn O’Porter is reflecting on how female friendships have helped her through the most difficult of times.

"I couldn’t get through a day without the support of my girlfriends. We cheer each other up, take care of each other’s kids, look after each other," says the bestselling author, whose latest novel Honeybee is a love letter to female friendship.

It’s the third in a series featuring lifelong pals Flo and Renee, who meet as school friends in Guernsey and bond over the shared grief of the deaths of Flo’s father and Renee’s mother. Now 22, they both return home to Guernsey where their friendship is rekindled as they navigate love, life and growing up.

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Of course there are parallels to her own life, O’Porter, 45, who is married to Irish actor Chris O’Dowd, agrees.

She grew up in Guernsey after her parents divorced when she was a baby. Her mother died from breast cancer when Dawn was seven, and she and her sister were raised by her maternal grandparents and later by their maternal uncle and his wife.

Her mother’s death affected her greatly, although she didn’t have counselling after her mother died, she remembers. "Not back then, not in Guernsey in the Nineties."

She says she’s had moments of counselling over the course of her adult years but never really committed to it.

"If I’m honest, I’ve got such great friends in my life now that sometimes, if I’ve paid for a therapist, I’ve always just found (myself thinking), ‘Why am I paying for this when I could just have a drink with my girlfriends and talk it all through?’

"I’ve never really found the benefit of it for myself, and I’m sure there will be a lot of therapists reading this, going ‘Classic case of needing a therapist’, and I’m sure I am. But also, my trauma and the things that have been hard for me in my life, I’m OK with them.

"They are not impeding me in any way and in a strange way I feel like they make me who I am. When it comes to writing fiction I feel researched on so many things."

Her early grief may have also affected her ability to sustain deeper friendships as she was growing up.

"There wasn’t one best friend that lasted my whole childhood and I always wanted that. I had really close friends and I would have a best friend for a couple of years and then we’d move on. By the time I got to 18 I really wished I’d had that one person.

"I thought, ‘What is it about me that makes friendships fade?’ That was probably due to me craving excitement. I always thought, ‘What’s next?’

"I would be such a social butterfly and maybe there are elements of slight intimacy issues. I felt very broken and damaged as a young girl, so there can be a limit to the closeness that you could feel to somebody before you go off and start again with somebody else."

In the book, her characters are polar opposites – Flo is shy and reserved, Renee is lively and wild. She says the character of Renee is loosely based on herself.

"When I was in my early 20s I was just like her. I’d gone back to Guernsey after drama school and just wanted to move to London. I just wanted my name in lights. I wanted to be famous and successful and thought all it was going to take was to get off the island.

"I was relentlessly ambitious at that age and remained so for my entire 20s. My one goal was to work as much as possible, at the time in TV, always writing, but I wanted my TV career and I was going to get it.

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"I am wild and naughty by nature. I’ve never pretended not to be. I was flirtatious and wild and always taking risks, always trying to do the most bonkers thing, whatever it took to make life feel as exciting and thrilling as possible."

Her mother’s death also gave her an unbelievable drive, she maintains. "It gave me the feeling that time is precious and I’m running out of time, so always make the most of it, so I couldn’t sit idly. Something always had to be happening. There always had to be something to work towards."

The TV career didn’t quite go as planned. She presented documentaries on subjects such as polygamy, geisha girls and mail-order brides, moved to Los Angeles in the hope of furthering her career and met Bridesmaids star O’Dowd at her 30th birthday party, after he introduced himself to her on Facebook.

They lived in Los Angeles for 16 years, got married, had two sons, Art, nine and Valentine, seven, and her writing career overtook the TV one. Last year the family moved back to London.

"I feel like I’ve moved back to London and just stepped into my shoes," she enthuses. "I absolutely love it."

She is recognised more here than she was in the US, but readers are different types of fans, she observes.

"They will come up, touch your arm and say, ‘I loved your book’. There’s no hysteria or anything like that."

She would rather stay in London now, even if work takes her husband back to California from time to time.

"It’s hard to move a family. It was a big emotional move. We said our goodbyes and were done."

These days, she’s happy writing her novels, raising her family, meeting mums at the school gate, and looking after a menagerie of pets – two cats, two dogs and a rescue tortoise. She still enjoys fashion, most notably vintage.

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She also helps organise Flackstock, an annual festival held in memory of her good friend Caroline Flack, who died by suicide* in 2020. It’s held to celebrate the late TV presenter’s life, raise money for her favourite causes and promote mental health awareness.

"That was really sad," she recalls when she heard the news of her friend’s death. "When you lose someone by suicide, it all feels so dark that sometimes it’s difficult to find a space to celebrate the good times, because there would have been so many.

"It’s literally the worst thing imaginable and I miss her very much. She was my funniest friend. But we celebrate her every year at the festival and so we feel there’s a lot of joy now.

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"People make friends in the field. There’s a real feeling of togetherness, support and kindness. Even though it was started for a really sad reason, it’s such a joyful day."

O’Porter will continue to take from her own experiences with Flo and Renee and plans to write about them long into their senior years. In the meantime she’s half way through writing another standalone fiction, which should be out next year. For now, TV is taking a back seat.

"The lovely thing about writing books is that you have a real connection to your readers, this intimate relationship.

"When you go on TV it’s all just so massive. By the time the TV show is made, 100 people have edited me, told me what to say and it’s all so controlling. Then everyone’s got to like you or the TV show isn’t successful.

"All I used to care about was that everyone liked me. And now I don’t really care if everybody likes me. I really like where I’m at."

Honeybee by Dawn O’Porter is published by HarperCollins. Available now

*If you have been affected by issues raised in this story, please visit: www.rte.ie/helplines.