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A Bigger Life

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What to expect

'Eat Pray Love for the Hinge era' – The Sunday Times Style

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?

Readers can't resist falling in love with this extraordinary book:

'A groundbreaking shift in how we talk about women, love and relationships’ – Marian Keyes

'Beautifully written with generosity, candour, intelligence and wit. A Bigger Life reminds us all that hope exists, if we are brave enough to open our hearts to finding it' – Elizabeth Day

'[This book is] so fierce, and so tender! There's so much compassion there, it's utterly captivating, profound and it's very, very funny' – Daisy Buchanan

Critics Review

'A groundbreaking shift in how we talk about women, love and relationships’ – Marian Keyes
'Beautifully written with generosity, candour, intelligence and wit. A Bigger Life reminds us all that hope exists, if we are brave enough to open our hearts to finding it' – Elizabeth Day
'[This book is] so fierce, and so tender! There's so much compassion there, it's utterly captivating, profound and it's very, very funny' – Daisy Buchanan
‘I barely came up for breath. The honesty, the vulnerability…I inhaled it. This memoir has transformed my thoughts on love, sex and my own self-worth’ – Joanne McNally
‘So heartbreaking and uplifting. Thought-provoking and beautiful. It’s perfection’ – Cecelia Ahern
‘A memoir that cracks your heart open but somehow still leaves you laughing. It’s fearless and gloriously human, and a reminder that our messiest chapters are often where the real magic lives’ – Angela Scanlon
‘A beautiful, hilarious, riot of a read. This book is a rallying cry to women everywhere’ – Salma El-Wardany
‘Raw, relatable and revolutionary, Louise O’Neill had me laughing and crying in the space of a page. A Bigger Life felt like more than a memoir, it is a call to action' – Jennie Godfrey
‘A brilliant, bold book which will give so many women the courage to rewrite their stories when they don’t go to plan’ – Bryony Gordon
‘A brand-new memoir that’s shaping up to be All Fours for millennial women’ – Sam Baker, The Shift
'A Bigger Life isn’t really a book about men. O’Neill turns her famously sharp eye on herself, interrogating the expectations that shape women’s lives — from ageing and beauty to ambition, motherhood, masculinity and the fear of ending up alone' – Marie Claire
‘Bold and beautiful’ – HEAT
Author Louise O'Neill
Narrator Louise O’Neill
Duration 9 hours and 24 minutes
Release Date
ISBN 9780008762483
Format Audiobook
Publisher HarperCollins Publishers
Genre Assertiveness, motivation, self-esteem and positive mental attitude, Biography: adventurers and explorers, Coping with loneliness / solitude, Dating, relationships, living together and marriage: advice and issues, Feminism and feminist theory, Memoirs, Sex and sexuality, social aspects, Solo lifestyles: advice and issues
Availability AU, GB, IE

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