“I Realised That, Given That I Came In Quirky Packaging, It Was My Job To Disarm People And Appear Powerful”: Ryan O’Connell On Inspiration Porn

The author, screenwriter and actor details life as a disabled, gay man with scandalous wit in the essay collection.

Ryan O’Connell’s third book, Inspiration Porn, was never meant to be a book at all. “I was basically keeping a log of my sexual experiences,” he tells Man About Town. “Because I wanted to be a thoughtful THOT. And it took me about nine months to realise that there could be more here, beyond me just getting randomly railed.” 

His laugh-out-loud and often poignant ruminations on sex evolved into a collection of essays touching also on ableism, showbusiness triumphs, familial woes, the “prison” of heterosexuality and his sinuous road to body acceptance. 

He can speak on each with authority. O’Connell was born with cerebral palsy. He’s not only now a three-times published author (he released debut novel I’m Special: And Other Lies We Tell Ourselves in 2015, and debut memoir Just by Looking at Him in 2022), but an Emmy-winning screenwriter (The Baby-Sitters’ Club) who himself stepped into the frame by starring and penning lauded semi-autobiographical Netflix series Special in 2019. Growing up in California coastal town Ventura, which he describes as “Laguna Beach with meth”, his father was emotionally hard to reach, and his mother struggled with alcoholism. O’Connell would face his own similar challenges, alongside a painkiller addiction, in adulthood. 

When it came to dissecting the suffocating nature of heterosexuality – see raucous but riveting state-of-the-straights study, “Are Straight People Okay?” – he consulted his hetero best friend Clare extensively. His reflections on his path to bodily acceptance are backdropped by the ableist norms threaded through his life, his own body dysmorphia and the resentment he grappled with when external validation bolstered his confidence after weight loss. 

It all comes together in a collection of essays (nine to be exact) that mark him out as far beyond simply the voice of a community, but one deserving of the bedside tables of the gamut of society. Sitting down with Man About Town, he reflects on using humour to disarm, his kinship with the literary tone of Eve Babitz and the one thing he wishes his straight, white male colleagues would understand. 

Hi Ryan! Congratulations on Inspiration Porn. The book is rooted in your knack for detailing life’s challenges (whether related to disability, sexuality, or family) with humour. How did you develop this talent? 

You know, growing up gay and disabled, at an early age you realise, ‘Okay, we’re gonna need to build a bigger boat.’ I also just realised that, given that I came in quirky packaging, it was sort of my job to disarm people and appear powerful and win them over. I saw every experience like that, because I knew there were going to be a lot of preconceived notions about who I was, just based on the fact that I limped and drooled on people accidentally. So I just developed humour as a weapon, and it’s kind of all I know. It’s really gotten me everywhere I need to go. It’s a superpower. Now, of course, dancing for your dinner can give you blisters. And so, it is sort of a loaded thing where it’s given me so much, but it’s also made me be stuck in performance mode for a long time and then be resentful for that. So I’ve had to be very conscious of when the need to be funny is coming from an organic, true place and when it’s coming from the need to just be palatable to everyone around me. 

Can you tell us about your writing setup? What conditions are conducive to your creative juices flowing? 

I basically only write in bed. I have a detached office at my house, and every time I go in there, I feel intense performance anxiety. I truly need a Cialis for my brain in order to work. So I feel like when I’m in bed, it tricks me. I’m like, ‘Omg, you’re just in bed. You’re just relaxing. You’re in rest and relaxation.’ And then my brain just accidentally starts working. So, yeah, I’m a bed writer. I need to write in the morning. I can edit in the evening, but I can’t generate new stuff in the evening. 

The book feels gossipy but, of course, doesn’t shy away from life’s tougher topics. Is there a writer or voice you’ve loved who nailed that balance previously? 

Honestly, it’s kind of cliche at this point, because she kind of rules the Instagram literati, but Eve Babitz, man. She fucking gets it. I think writing that looks easy is incredibly difficult. Also, being funny is incredibly difficult – famously, no one is funny. And I think Eve is really good at writing prose that feels conversational and breezy but actually contains quite a bit of depth. And I feel like her rhythms are really interesting in that it feels like frothy, cotton candy, but then, like a sniper, she’ll hit you with the truth that leaves you stunned. I mean, I’ve been writing like this forever, before I even found out Eve existed, but when I found Eve’s writing, I really felt a kinship with her work. 

One theme is your own journey of navigating internalised ableism. Did the process of creating Inspiration Porn open your eyes to feelings you’d previously never second-guessed? 

Yes, I mean, I think that I had a lot of epiphanies when writing the essay “Body of Work”, which was about the relationship to my body. Because I went into each essay knowing that I wanted to talk about an area of my life, but not really having any thesis or conclusion as to how I felt about it. I wrote the essay to figure out how I felt about it; that’s usually how I work, that’s how [essay] “The Slut Diaries” came to be, and all the other subsequent essays. But I think “The Body of Work” was the biggest lightbulb moment for me, where I realised that I don’t really have my own relationship to my own body. So much of my relationship is predetermined based on how other people feel about my body. And that was this complete epiphany that I had when writing the essay. Realising that I had not created the space to have my own relationship with it. That I had just been defined by other people’s reactions. And so that was a pretty big one for me. 

You describe your hometown as “Laguna Beach with meth” – can you paint a picture for us of the way in which you slotted into that environment as a child? How has your relationship with your hometown changed as you’ve gotten older? 

Omg. Ventura. So interesting. So I remember growing up in Ventura and feeling a lot of shame about it, because it was very blue-collar. The nicknames for the town are “Bakersfield by the Sea” and “Ventucky”. So it’s a kind of anomaly in that it is a Southern California beach town, but it is in a lot of ways conservative. It is working-class. And I grew up with not a lot of money. Very Lady Bird-coded. And I would go to Santa Barbara, and I would go to Los Angeles, and I would be like, ‘This is where I’m meant to be’ [shouts]. Living my Nancy Meyers truth. And I felt very oppressed by Ventura, which is hilarious, because it is truly such a perfect town to grow up in. I love it now. I feel like when I moved to New York and was basically surrounded by rich people at art school, I had a lot of class anxiety for not being rich like them. The layers of wealth in New York were profound. And I remember just being really embarrassed when I was telling people I was from Ventura, because I was worried that my blue collar would be showing. And now I just say it with pride, I think it’s so amazing. And I’m so glad I grew up there as opposed to LA or Santa Barbara, because I feel like I got to have a true childhood and a true adolescence that wasn’t marked by the city, growing up too fast and all the cliches that come with it. So, I love Ventura. I stan. 

One of my favourite chapters is “Are Straight People Okay?” Have any of the straight people in your life read this? What were their thoughts? 

Here’s the deal: I consulted a lot of straight people while writing it. Clare, my best friend, who is featured heavily in the essay, she obviously signed off on it before I sent it to my editor. So I think they’re all grappling with living in hetero-hell. And this is something that I don’t think we had the language for even five years ago. This idea that heterosexuality could be sort of a prison. And my experience from talking to a lot of straight people right now is that they’re in this weird limbo period of knowing that the way they’ve surfed their lives can feel suffocating, but not really having the tools to figure out another way. So it’s interesting. I have never felt more happy to be gay. I’ll tell you that. 

You also touch on your experience of body dysmorphia, and the process of feeling able to dance shirtless in clubs, coupled with a resentment that you landed there after feeling the need to change yourself. Did that process alter your outlook on re-shaping parts of your identity for external approval? 

I think it’s very loaded. Changing my body was very loaded, because on one hand, it gave me a lot. I felt like I could just move better. My muscles are really, really tight, so any extra weight that I carry, I feel more intensely, and so I just felt very healthy, and I had confidence. I really did. I really liked the way that I looked, and then I felt shallow for liking it so much. But it was not a victory that was uncomplicated. But it’s hard to know. I had a lot more confidence in my new body, which brought me a lot of attention. But did my new body bring me attention, or did my confidence bring me attention? It’s really hard to tell. I think in my experience, the thing that people are attracted to most, beyond just a conventionally attractive body, is confidence. Like, you can be a hot person, and have really, really low self-esteem, and I think it would affect the amount of dick that you pull. So, yeah, it’s really hard to know where one ends and the other begins. I think anyone who can sit here after struggling with [their body] and say that they’ve figured it all out is sort of lying, because it’s a process. 

You’ve navigated Hollywood and public life as a disabled person – not least, since the success of Special. Is there something, in particular, that you would love your colleagues not in your position to understand? 

I think just the exhaustion of having to constantly prove yourself. The weight of expectation, the need to get it right because if you don’t get it right, that means no one will have opportunities, is pretty profound. I think straight white men are allowed to fuck up over and over again, and when a straight white guy fucks up, no one thinks, ‘Well, I told ya. Straight white guys just can’t do it.’ I think that because there is such precious, small real estate that goes into telling our stories, we get the representation sweats. And it has to be this big, profound thing that connects with everybody, and that’s just not the case. So I think the one thing that I would love is for people to allow us to fuck up, to actually make mistakes. 

Inspiration Porn: Essays is out now via St. Martin’s Press