From the popular but controversial ‘It Galz’ to the true crime-focused ‘Red Room’, podcaster and content creator Jenny Claffey is steadily expanding her sphere of influence
Podcaster and content creator Jenny Claffey wears cardigan, €175, American Vintage, arnotts.ie. Skirt, €275, Ríon Hannora, omdivaboutique.com. Photo: Evan Doherty
In his 2018 memoir, Room to Dream, the visionary American filmmaker David Lynch recalled an idyllic time in his life. While attempting to regain normality after living on the set of his first feature film, Eraserhead, Lynch took a job delivering The Wall Street Journal to keep money coming in. While perusing the street, he became taken with collecting pieces of wood left in and around people’s homes for waste collection. From these, over several weeks and months, he built a shed in his back garden, “with found wood, found windows, found everything. It was a beautiful world,” he wrote. Fans will already know: there in this innocent story lies Lynch’s true essence, one of an endearing genius obsessed with creating a new world while still in another, with the hopes of leaving something beautiful behind in the process.
In January of this year, when Lynch, a life-long smoker, passed from emphysema, podcaster Jenny Claffey, a known Lynch devotee, was about to escape into a new world of her own. “I was at a preview for this film called Bring Them Down with Barry Keoghan, and my friend Ross texted me ‘David Lynch,’ with a broken heart emoji,” she says. “At that exact moment, the film began. So I just kind of gasped, switched my phone off, and took it in in silence.”