It’s tempting to call Annie Macmanus’ latest novel a piece of autofiction. Set on the cusp of the millennium, it follows would-be music producer Orla as she leaves behind Ireland to pursue her dream career in London. The comparisons between The Mess We’re In’s protagonist and the ex-radio DJ are difficult not to draw. ‘As a writer, you can’t help but write your own experiences,’ says Macmanus. ‘I did hold down a lot of jobs and live in a big, chaotic, disgusting house. It’s viscerally evocative when you’re writing, because it brings back those sensory memories.’ Yet, she insists, ‘it’s not my story’. 

The novel explores how music can save you, but the opposite is equally true. We witness the rise and plummet of Orla’s friends’ band, the music media’s brutality, and the struggles to get your music heard by sceptical executives. ‘An interesting question is whether Orla gets there or not,’ says Macmanus. ‘Ninety-nine per cent of artists who are signed do not make it. I don’t think enough is written about those people and the machine that sucks them in, builds them up and spits them out again.’ Leaving Radio 1 in 2021 gave Macmanus new perspective on her past life as a cog in that machine. ‘That was my role as a gatekeeper for a long time, making or breaking bands by playing them on the radio,’ she says. ‘Maybe part of me was trying to reconcile myself with all that.’
One thing Macmanus has kept from radio is her love for discovering people and places. Writing her first book, Mother Mother, took her back to Belfast, where she encountered the legacy of the Troubles among Protestant and Catholic gravestones, and met a mother who fell pregnant as a teenager. The Mess We’re In continues that journey home. ‘I wanted to write about being Irish in England, but I didn’t realise how much I needed to explore,’ says Macmanus. ‘I think, deep down, I needed to decide whether to go back or not.’ 
Ireland looms large in the book, with a lot of action taking place on Kilburn High Road (a hotbed of Irish immigration throughout the 20th century) and Orla mingling with barflies in the Irish pub where she works. ‘It was an interesting parallel, that Orla was running away from Ireland, but I was running back in my head,’ says Macmanus, who spent time exploring her own Irish local, eventually choosing it as the book’s launch venue. ‘It felt like a beautiful full-circle moment where I found my place to belong in London,’ she says. ‘Writing the book helped me come to the decision that being Irish in England is OK.’

Macmanus is reassessing a lot lately, a compulsion she shares with her twentysomething protagonist, who is flush with the possibility of youth. Yet, unlike Orla’s haphazard naivety, Macmanus treads carefully, rediscovering what fits now in her forties. ‘It feels like a weird rebirth,’ she says of swapping radio for writing. Gone are the days of restricting herself to the hottest music releases, replaced with the pleasures of digging for obscure tracks, podcasting and novel crafting. ‘It felt good to pull the rug and jump off the edge of something,’ she says. ‘I’d joke with my friends at the time: “what else is there to change?” I even changed my name.’
Two years on, has Macmanus successfully recalibrated her identity from DJ to author? ‘What I’ve accepted is there’s not going to be such a clean transition,’ she says. She still performs at Before Midnight, her early-doors club night tailored for older ravers and her dulcet tones float out occasionally over the airwaves; but now she works on her own terms with wiggle room for change. ‘I would love to have an adventure,’ she says. ‘I want to incorporate that into the next book; really let it take me on a journey, you know?’

Annie Macmanus, Edinburgh College Of Art, 26 August, 5pm.