One Nightstand with Sharon Horgan

In One Nightstand, celebrity readers and writers join us in the blond at 11 Howard to discuss four of their favorite books, allowing us to learn about their tastes and lives in the process.

“Thank God for Sally Rooney,” says Sharon Horgan, the BAFTA-winning Irish actress and writer. “My eldest girl wasn’t really a big reader, then she started reading Sally Rooney, and now she is.”

If Rooney is synonymous with Irish success in fiction, Horgan must surely now be synonymous with Irish success in TV. The actor is in New York to promote season two of Bad Sisters, the sublimely funny and often sad Apple TV+ production about five sisters who conspire to cover up their sister’s murder of her abusive husband. The black comedy is a critical success — the first season won a Peabody Award and the Best Drama BAFTA Award — though like Rooney, Horgan encounters the odd naysayer.

“We got one not very nice review this time round,” says Horgan, smiling. “Someone told me about it, and I read a small portion of it, and in my head was like, ‘Oh, it’s not very well written. That’s okay. You don’t need to worry about that.’ I think if someone writes about a review who’s not a good writer, then I just kind of let it go.”

Horgan’s love for good writing bears out in her four favorite books, which we’re discussing today. “I started out as a big reader, then when I was doing my degree, I think I read so much I just went off it,” she says, noting that she recently picked back up. “I don’t want my daughters to always see me reading on a laptop or off a phone, which is how I read scripts usually. So I just made a real concerted effort to make reading more of a thing, like always having books in the house and recommending stuff to them.”

Horgan solicits recommendations of her own — she writes down my suggestion she read Maggie Nelson’s Argonauts based on her love of Miranda July’s All Fours — and it was a referral that led to the first choice on her list: Love’s Executioner by Irvin D. Yalom.

“My boyfriend recommended it,” she says of the 1989 book, which recounts in haunting detail Yalom’s psychotherapy work with ten patients. The first story in the collection, from which the title is derived, tells the story of an older woman whose life has been wrecked by a 27-day situationship. “I don’t know if you’ve been in that situation where you’ve had a love affair that has ended badly and you just want that whole spotless mind,” she says, grinning. “Well — I did it. I went to see a hypnotherapist. It worked for about a week, but that’s all I needed. I needed some time off.”

Her second choice, I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy, trades in similar levels of radical vulnerability. “I was a fan [of McCurdy] because my girls were obsessed with iCarly,” she says. “It’s tricky with child actors and Nickelodeon things because it’s a very different way of performing — it’s very performative performing — [but] she was the opposite. She was just so dry and so naturally funny, just had this great timing and could be a clown.”

The pair are now friendly. “When I spoke to her about it I was just thanking her because she exposed so much of herself,” she says. “It felt so helpful to hear a public figure be that honest and that committed to telling her story and not worrying about her public image.”

Her third choice, Vladimir by Julia May Jonas, deals with the optics of public image in a smaller setting. The 2022 release tells the story of a college professor whose husband is embroiled in accusations of sexual misconduct, though she soon escapes into a torrid obsession of her own.

“This is a book that we are bringing to screen, hopefully,” she says. “I was making Bad Sisters and had no headspace whatsoever, and Julia hadn’t written a screenplay before... so it was sent to me as a sort of, ‘Is this something we could do together?’ And I was like, ‘No, no, no, I just don’t have time.’ Then they said, ‘Just read the first chapter.’ So I read the first chapter and then I just made time.”

Will Horgan herself star? “Maybe a little cameo. If you’re a single parent, you end up sort of always geographically choosing things that are closer to home,” she says. “It doesn’t always work out that way, but you really, really try. Also, I love making things that I’m not in and casting people.” (Her dream stars? “So many, but I can’t tell you.”)

Horgan’s final book, The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, is one she also tried to adapt — this time less successfully. “Myself and Jonathan Glatzer got the rights to adapt it and shopped it all over the place, but we couldn’t sell it,” she says. Nevertheless, Horgan returns to it as often as she can. “I love the Paris setting, I love Pamplona, I love the bull fighting,” she says. “And I hate and love all the toxic masculinity.”