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.
Early life and career
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]
Grand and later career
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]
