The Personals. Brian O’Connell
era of PR handlers and press releases, of government advertising camouflaged as journalism, and carefully chosen interviewees who are sometimes over-coached and underwhelming, the world of classified ads, both online and in print, offers an unfiltered window into society.
I’ve spent almost two decades in journalism, and something interesting has happened in that time. People have never put as much of themselves out there as they do today, whether through social or digital media, or by sharing their stories or ‘opening up’ in more traditional media. There have never been so many filters or gatekeepers trying to shape those narratives. Sometimes an interviewee may have shared their story online, had a media training workshop, or may already possess a ‘them and us’ mentality about journalists and the media in general before I even get to speak to them. Some of that mistrust is warranted, and very healthy of course, but there’s also cynicism in a lot of encounters, and many more competing agendas than previously when I sit across from someone and press record.
When using Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook live, video and audio messaging we are all much more aware of how we project ourselves than ever before. As a result, people often display a caginess and deep self-awareness of how they conduct themselves during an interview. One contradiction I’ve come across is that the more people are willing to expose of their lives online, the less personal and intimate they may want to be in one-to-one encounters. Authenticity can become a casualty, chance encounters become less likely and conversations without agendas are at a premium.
Hopefully, because of all that, you can see why personal ads – and the people and lives and secrets and stories and heartbreak and quirkiness that sometimes lie behind them – are so appealing to this fortysomething and somewhat sentimental hack, and why I thought they would work well collected in a book. The ads allow me to move away from the managed world of spin doctors and carefully planned media campaigns to a less self-conscious world – one that I think is at times more authentic.
Of course, part of this book is about items for sale, but that section is also about the off-piste moments when an ad for a ring turns into a discussion about dementia, or a poster for sale reveals the struggles of independent shops in rural Ireland. These ads also show how letting go of an item becomes a lesson in how to own your grief, or how living with and then discarding addiction can paradoxically set you free. Classified ads brought me into people’s lives for no other reason than the fact that they let me in. There were no PR agencies, no communication strategies, no media advisers and no campaigns wrapped tightly around case studies. As they say on Judge Judy, the stories are real, the people are real!
On a basic level, I’m also drawn to these ads because they throw up some humdingers of stories. The excitement for me, and I hope for you reading this, is going from a few lines of text to the trenches of the First World War, or getting an insight into the complexities of a relationship break-up, or the obsessive mind of a fixated collector – or simply capturing a time or a story or an experience that would otherwise not be documented.
When I was about halfway through researching this book, my wife peered into my office and saw me sitting with my feet on the desk, steaming cup of tea in hand, scrolling through a list of ‘never worn’ wedding dresses for sale. The slightly worrying thing is that she didn’t bat an eyelid. My obsession with classified ads is really an obsession with people’s lives and stories – the ads are just a doorway through which I stick my head.
There was a time not long ago when I sourced most of these stories solely from ads in print media – places such as the Irish Farmer’s Journal, Ireland’s Own, The Echo and many broadsheets had extensive classified sections, as well as personal pages. The majority of these ads have migrated online, as sites such as Craigslist and later Adverts, Gumtree and DoneDeal made it much easier to buy and sell in the digital era. And so I have followed suit.
By collating a selection of recent adverts and some I have captured over the last few years, I want to take you down lanes and into homes, into hearts and cluttered minds and tell stories that would not otherwise be told. In all except maybe half a dozen of these stories, I have met the people behind the ads in person, usually travelling to their homes or meeting them in a car or cafe nearby. When that wasn’t possible, or the poster did not want to meet, we spoke at length on the phone or through email.
What draws me into these ads are the personal stories – the reasons for a break-up, how a child collector became an adult one or why someone feels the need to sell a treasured ring that has come to represent something tainted or tragic.
Through the years there have been some important ads that have signalled significant societal change. These were the ads in the early part of the twentieth century looking for ‘good Catholic homes’ for the children of ‘fallen women’ for example, or the aged bachelor farmers looking for girls in their late teens to become ‘life partners’, or those looking for domestic servants, or the emigrants in Australia trying to reconnect with family many decades later. You could write a whole social history on the classified ads of past decades.
Two books worth reading on this are Strange Red Cow, Sarah Bader’s fascinating trawl through the vintage classified ads of US publications, and Classified by H. G. Cocks, an interesting take on how sexuality and society evolved in Britain, again through the prism of the small ads. In his book, Cocks traces the rise of personal ads to respectability, from one of the first ecclesiastical style ads in the fifteenth century through the invention of modern newspapers in the mid-seventeenth century right up to today. One of his central points is that the internet today ‘merely accelerates processes which, when people had to rely on print and the postal service, just took longer to achieve.’ Cocks makes a compelling argument that the small ad was a ‘symbol of everything that was both exciting and dangerous about modern sexuality’ and that the classifieds have been a gateway to all sorts of delights and dangers ever since their invention, showing how ordinary people grappled with love, sex, marriage, friendship and commerce through recent centuries.
All the stories in this book are quite recent and attempt to document snapshots of life in Ireland today. There are also stories and ads which I hope bring history to life – such as the military medals and memorabilia for sale, the nineteenth-century hearse, the impact of mother and baby homes or the frayed match programme for a long forgotten All-Ireland final.
I’ve divided the book into parts and the timeline roughly spans the period from 2012 to the present. In several of the stories, you’ll notice that I haven’t given the name of the person posting the ad and don’t identify where they’re located, or I’ve used a pseudonym. This is at their request and I was happy to proceed on the basis that no one was identified, especially with some of the more sensitive ads. I don’t think this detracts from the account of their experiences.
The way I sourced the material was simple. Most weeks I scoured the small ads in places such as the Evening Echo (since renamed The Echo) or online on DoneDeal. I was looking for hints that there was a story or a life experience worth hearing hidden behind the few lines of text on page or screen.
When I thought an ad had potential I would text the poster, explain that I was interested in the story behind it and ask whether they would take a call. Some thought I was part of an elaborate scam to fiddle them out of their item for sale, while others, particularly those recently bereaved, were very happy to sit and talk about their life experiences.
I’m very grateful to everyone who shared their stories and let me into their homes, or met me in hotels, cafes or parked cars, or took a phone call and spilled their heart out and shared with me intimate details of their life. There was really nothing in it for them; by the time this book is published most of their ads will have long since expired, so it was hugely refreshing to be able to talk to people simply because they wanted to share some of their story with me.
While the ad is a signpost, it’s ultimately the people who drew me in, and the adage that everyone has a story. The privilege for me is in contacting a stranger and shortly afterwards sharing some of the more intimate moments of their life, with no agenda or preconditions. Throughout this process the joy was in finding unexpected twists and turns, lessons learned and the life experiences gained,