Noelle McCarthy

Noelle Maria McCarthy (born 1978 or 1979) is an Irish-New Zealand writer and broadcaster. Having moved to New Zealand as a young woman, McCarthy became a radio broadcaster on Radio New Zealand and since 2017 has produced podcasts. Her memoir of her relationship with her mother, Grand: Becoming my mother's daughter, was published in 2022 and won the first book prize for general non-fiction at the 2023 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.

McCarthy was born and grew up in Cork, Ireland,^[3] where she attended St Angela's College and graduated from University College Cork with a degree in English and history.^[4] She moved to New Zealand in 2003 in her early twenties after a year of travelling in Asia and Australia.^[4][5]

From August 2004 to November 2006, McCarthy worked as news and editorial director at Auckland student radio station 95bFM,^[4] and in January 2007 began hosting talkback segments on Newstalk ZB.^[4] She spent eight years as a producer and presenter at Radio New Zealand, including running her own show, Summer Noelle, for several years on RNZ National.^[3][6][7] In 2008, before starting Summer Noelle, she apologised for plagiarising the work of British journalists while working as a presenter on another Radio New Zealand programme.^[1] In 2009 she quit drinking after identifying that she had become an alcoholic.^[8]

McCarthy and her husband, John Daniell, had a daughter in 2017 and were married the following year.^[9] Since 2017 they have made podcasts together as Birds of Paradise Productions.^[10] Their podcast, Getting Better, produced by McCarthy and Emma Espiner, won an award at the 2021 Voyager Media Awards.^[3]

In 2018 McCarthy began writing a memoir of her relationship with her mother, after moving with her family from Auckland to Featherston and after her mother was diagnosed with cancer.^[9] In 2020, she won the Short Memoir section of the Fish Publishing International Writing competition for "Buck Rabbit", a story in part based on her memoir writings.^[5][11] Following the award, she wrote a first draft of the full-length book in a memoir course led by Renée.^[12]

Grand: Becoming my mother's daughter was published in 2022, a year after the death of McCarthy's mother.^[13] The book's focus is McCarthy's relationship with her mother while growing up, including the latter's alcoholism and the influence that this had on McCarthy.^[14] It was selected as the best non-fiction of 2022 by Newsroom; reviewer Linda Burgess described McCarthy's writing as similar to her radio persona: "impulsive, fast, fluent and frighteningly bright".^[15][16] Steve Braunias called the work a "howl of anguish and love".^[12]

Grand received the E H McCormick Best First Book Award for General Non-Fiction at the 2023 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.^[17] The award citation called it an "exquisite debut", with McCarthy's relationship with her mother "at times brutally detailed"; the book itself was termed "an uplifting memoir, delicate and self-aware, and a credit to McCarthy’s generosity and literary deftness".^[18]

In 2023, McCarthy was the writer-in-residence at the International Institute of Modern Letters.^[2][6] In the same year, Grand was published in the United Kingdom and Ireland. The Irish Independent described it as "remarkably funny, honest and often sad",^[19] and The Irish Times called McCarthy "a natural storyteller and an observant writer with a Sedaris-like eye for black humour".^[20]

• "'Take another one': Noelle McCarthy on the photos behind her memoir, Grand", in The Spinoff, 30 December 2022.
• "Mammy, Eve, and Jesus", essay by McCarthy; won the Fish Publishing Short Memoir prize under the title "Buck Rabbit" in 2020.