Jan 8, 2026 | A Rosie Moment, Book Updates
If you missed our first FMC (Fabulous Midlife Crisis) Club Zoom of the year last Sunday about my retreats, don’t worry here’s what you need to know:
Over the past five years, I’ve had the privilege of sitting in circles of women in Italy who arrived tired, curious, hopeful, a bit wobbly… and left lighter, braver, clearer, and often with new lifelong friends and a notebook full of words they didn’t know they had in them.
This year I am hosting two retreats in Tuscany. One from 17th to 22nd May called Rosie’s Fabulous Midlife Crisis Retreat and my Women’s Writing Retreat from 6th to 12th September.
Watch my 20 minute video for all the info:
CLICK HERE TO APPLY
My retreats are for you if:
If either of these retreats call to you, I’d love to have you along! However, places are very limited, so do apply soon to avoid disappointment:
CLICK HERE TO APPLY
I hope to see you in Italy!
x
Rosie
Jul 2, 2025 | Book Updates
It’s been nearly a month since my mam passed, and in a moment of what can only be described as emotional insanity (or maybe divine guidance?), I found myself opening an old Italian language course I bought twenty years ago.
One of those audio-visual binder sets that came in a folder the size of a phonebook with actual CDs, back when learning a language meant flipping through plastic sleeves and inhaling the scent of false hope. Don’t laugh, I’ve been trying to learn a second language since Lingaphone was a box set of cassettes and cost several months of your salary.
And yet, two decades later and thousands spent on Italian courses…
I still struggle to speak an Italian sentence confidently.
But this week, I started again.
I’ve lived in Italy for years now—long enough to know my Prosecco from my Spumante, and to shout at my dogs ‘Die’ with the Italian meaning, not the English. But full sentences? Grammar? Telling the pharmacist that I need something for a sore throat and not an over-the-counter colonoscopy prep kit? Still a work in progress.
But now, I want to do it properly.
After losing my Dad and brother in the last three years, Mam was the last member of my childhood family still living in Ireland. And now that she’s gone, I’ve finally admitted: I won’t be going back to live there.
I live here. In Italy. I need this place—hot and beautiful—to be home. And not being able to speak the language is my major road block to having that feeling.
It’s a beautiful relic of the late ’90s, divided into cheerful, practical categories like:
Il Contadino nel Campo
Some phrases have stayed with me from when I first did the course.
“Il contadino nel campo,” I announced proudly to a friend the other day.
“The peasant is in the field.”
“When are you ever going to use that?”
Fair question.
However I have now learnt a few new sentences.
Actual example sentences from the course:
“The fat girl’s radiator is broken.”
Followed by:
“I see the spark plugs.”
Radiators, spark plugs, and 1990s body-shaming.
Honestly, if I ever find myself in a field beside a voluptuous woman with a steaming Fiat Panda, I’m ready.
As much as I adore Italy, they’re not exactly pioneers when it comes to body positivity. In 2020, the Association of Substitute Gondoliers (yes, it’s a real thing) reduced the number of people allowed in a gondola from six to five—for weight reasons.
The president of the association explained:
“Advancing with over half a tonne of meat on board is dangerous.”
Half. A. Tonne. Of. Meat.
And I thought “la ragazza grassa” in my audio course was bad.
Italians may have mastered art, fashion, and pasta, but when it comes to body image, let’s just say they’re still rowing upstream.
They say lutto, which feels too formal. Too obituary column.
Tristezza is closer, but it sounds like someone forgot to order dessert.
In English, we say “I’m heartbroken.”
In Italian, there’s spezzato il cuore—a broken heart.
Still, none of them feel big enough to hold the absence that sit in my chest when I pick up my phone to call my Mam, Dad or my brother, hold it for a moment and put it back down, ten times a day. I’ve been through this before; it took me eight and a half years to stop thinking of calling my sister every day, so I know it’s not going to stop any day soon, so I distract myself; I’m writing again, reading a lot. And every time I pick up the phone to call them, instead of putting it down, I switch on to Duolingo and do a lesson — Retraining my brain as to why I picked up the phone.
Perhaps finding the joy in the small things of learning Italian—like remembering a word, forming a sentence, or getting through a conversation with the pharmacist without panic-texting Lucia, will help me learn how to be in this world without speaking to my Mam everyday for the last 53 years. A new way of speaking to replace the old way.
And maybe one day, I’ll be able to tell someone, perfectly, in Italian:
“My mother used to live with me in Italy, but she went back to Ireland because she liked pineapple on her pizza.”
Until next week,
From your favourite Contadina Carina,
Rosie xxx
Mar 4, 2025 | A House In Italy, A Rosie Moment, Book Updates, RE# Your Life
If you have read my book ‘A Rosie Life In Italy’ you may remember that back in 2013, I was living in the cheapest house in Ireland with a colander for a roof, rats scrabbling above my bedroom ceiling, and not enough money to pay for my kids’ school bus fare. Life was, to put it bluntly, a bit of a shit show.
I was 40 years old, and the previous ten years had felt like a relentless game of emotional Whac-A-Mole; Miscarriages. Losing my big sister. My partner battling and then rehabbing from chronic alcoholism. The collapse of my business and income. Our dream of moving to Spain—gone. Every time I thought things might turn a corner, life threw another curveball, and I was exhausted. The chaos in my life was attracting more chaos.
I needed something to shift the trajectory of my life. I wanted to step away from the chaos. I wanted an instruction manual, a step-by-step guide to get out of the rut, to stop spinning in the same downward cycle. But I couldn’t find one.
So, I decided I would create my own.
I knew I wanted to follow my dreams and live life to the full. More importantly, I wanted other women who were feeling the same—trapped, stuck, waiting—to rise with me and grab life by the goolies. Because let’s be honest, we know by now there is no knight in shining armour coming to rescue us. If we want to shake things up, we have to do it ourselves.
Grab It By the Goolies Academy
I knew how to build a website, so I started Life Is Short Magazine. It was an online magazine filled with interviews of inspirational women who had followed their dreams, despite life’s challenges. I wanted their stories to give me and others hope and inspiration and to be proof that it was possible to change course, no matter what life had thrown at you.
I wanted to develop a community of women so we could encourage and learn from each other so alongside it I launched—Grab It By the Goolies Academy—an online space to encourage people to take tangible steps toward their dreams. And, because I don’t do things in halves and I believe in the power of a good book, I decided to write a non-fiction book to kick off the academy and website, called; How To Have A Fabulous Midlife Crisis: A User’s Guide to Dusting Off Your Dreams and Making Them Happen.
Then something I always wanted to happen happened.
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Sep 26, 2023 | Book Updates
I’m not going to lie… putting book 5 out into the world is scaring the hell out of me.
I write what I call ‘living memoir’. I write ‘humour’ for the most part. Someone, and I wish I could remember who, said the ‘Rosie Life’ series is like ‘reality TV in book form’. I also read a writer say: ‘When you write you are very vulnerable. You stand on a stage and say this is how I feel does anyone else feel the same?’ … Book 5 is making me feel very vulnerable.
I knew what was going to be in Book 1 and 2 of ‘A Rosie Life In Italy’ as I already lived it before the books were published. I wrote Book 3 while it happened and I had book 4 up for pre-order at the end of Book 3. I had no idea what was going to happen in Book 4. It turned into a book about my mother’s experience of Italy.
Book 5 was the same. I put it up for pre-order at the end of Book 4 knowing certain things: I was grieving for my Dad and someone I loved dearly had been told they had incurable cancer.
But incurable is a very general word. After all life is incurable! We are all going to die and none of us know if we have 40 years, 5 years or a bus could run us over tomorrow.
When I put Book 5 up for pre-order I knew I was going to be going through emotional unchartered territory and to have to write about it scared me. I knew this book had to have an ending and I didn’t know what it was going to be… I knew the ending I didn’t want it to have.
Putting Book 5 out into the world of my lovely readers scares me. Some of my beta readers have said it is the best book I have written yet, but that does not give me comfort. I am scared it will go against my readers’ expectations. Book 5 includes lots about Italy as I got to know it more, and lots about its bureaucracy and navigating the Italian health system. There is some renovation but not as much as the other books, so that is why it might disappoint and that is why it scares me—Book 5 includes more of my personal life than the other books.
These books are my living memoirs. I don’t know what is going to happen. And I didn’t know what was going to happen in Book 5. It is a little different than the rest but I do hope you will enjoy Book 5 as much as the rest of the series. I will be anxiously waiting on your review to hear what you think of it.
Three days to go!
