“Good luck with the engagement, man!” WWE star Becky Lynch excitedly said before ending our phone call about her new memoir, The Man: Not Your Average Average Girl.
Unbeknownst to my then-girlfriend, now fiancée, I was going to propose in the city Lynch hails from: Dublin. It was going to be perfect before I ultimately settled on a different idea. Proposing is a nerve-racking moment in everyone's life, but I took the same advice Lynch's mom gave her: I had to “get on with it.”
Nonetheless, Lynch gave me a few helpful tips for visiting Dublin for the first time during our phone call. Even as someone who grew up there, Lynch appreciates the quieter areas not in the inner city.
“I like to get out of Dublin,” Lynch said. “Dublin is so great, you know, obviously you'll do the Temple Bar and Grafton Street and all those mid-city things, but outside, Powerscourt, which is maybe like an hour, maybe less from Dublin, and [there's] a beautiful waterfall and there's a gorgeous hike and a cute little cafe called Avoca.
“Look, everything changes in Dublin every time I go back,” she continued. “The food is better, the coffee is better. So I can't give you those specific recommendations, because it's all continuing to improve. But just the scenery up in Howth, that's right beside where I grew up. If you go up to the summit, it's just beautiful. It's picturesque. You feel like you're on the set of Lord of the Rings or something.”
Travel talk wasn't the reason I was speaking with Lynch, though. As much as I could have continued talking about the city that also raised U2, we were talking to discuss her memoir.
Becky Lynch talks her new memoir
The Man is a very intimate look at Lynch's career. She discusses everything from her rough journey to the WWE, her eating disorder, and a huge breakup.
But there was no other way than to be honest, Lynch believes.
“I felt like I had to be honest,” Lynch said. “If I'm writing it in character, I'm not writing it, a character is writing it. And that's not interesting. You have to tell the truth because that can help people.”
Maybe the struggles that Lynch went through in her career can inspire others to keep a strong grip on their dreams.
“If there [are] things that I've gone through and people can see that in themselves and be honest about when either they're an asshole or when they feel vulnerable, maybe that can help people not feel so alone.”
At the end of the day, The Man: Not Your Average Average Girl is a human experience, Becky Lynch's human experience.
“It's one of getting into a male-dominated sport, being a female in Ireland who failed PE, and rising through the ranks of said sport,” Lynch promised. “Look, if I can do it, anybody can do it. I want people to take that from the book.”
Writing promos vs. her memoir
WWE stars write and deliver promos on a weekly basis. Promos can make or break a storyline. However, Lynch is a master of the trade. Filled with impassioned delivery, Lynch can sell a rivalry vs. a rock (not The Rock, whom her husband, Seth Rollins, is facing at WrestleMania 40).
Having that experience benefitted Lynch. She said that the deadlines in place for writing a promo helped her stay the course with her memoir.
“I think writing promos was so beneficial to writing a book,” she claimed. “Because when you're writing, you have deadlines. And the deadline really did help me at the end.
“But the precursor to that, you just get the freedom to put things down on paper and you'll either use them or you won't. When you're writing a promo, it's crunch time — you're gonna go live in a few hours. You've got to get something down and it's gonna come out of your mouth and it has to be good,” she continued with a laugh.
While her memoir has been worked on for years, it still came down to the wire. However, as she has shown in her time with the WWE, The Man works best with her back against the wall.
“When it came down to the last few weeks, I think I worked way better than the whole process before because I was like, It has to get down on a page and it has to be good.
Being a mom and an author
You'd think that being a WWE star, who is likely on the road nearly every week of the year, it'd be nearly impossible to write a memoir. However, Lynch's biggest struggle was “writing this and having a little baby.”
Lynch began writing The Man at some point in 2020. However, motivation was low at times, and she would hit writer's block.
“I'd get to a point and be like, Oh, I'm tapped out, like either it was something hard that I didn't want to write about [or] I didn't know how to write about it,” Lynch revealed. “So I would leave it, and then I'd come back, and then I would just work on the first few chapters, and then I'd get to the same point and be like, Ah, okay, I'll just come back to it.”
These breaks ranged from months at a time to even a year, Lynch said. But eventually, she was given a deadline. Maybe all she needed was a good editor. After her first two didn't work for one reason or another, she met Rebecca, who was “amazing.”
Her revisions resulted in Lynch seeing her memoir in a whole new light. So much so, that she felt the need to rewrite it. However, this was at the time she began her stint in NXT in 2023.
“She wrote back a few comments and then I read the book again for the first time in a long time because I'd just been writing,” Lynch said. “They sent it [and] I was like, Oh no, I need to change the whole thing. And within like five weeks, this was when I just started my NXT run, and I was on red eyes and in hotels just writing as much as I could.”
That was how Lynch finished the bulk of the book. It took a fresh set of eyes and a cramped schedule to get it to the place it is.
Becky Lynch's WWE schedule and making time for Roux
Becky Lynch chuckled when telling me that her family handles their hectic WWE schedule “quite well,” though, in the same breath, she joked that “If I look at my calendar [for the next nine months], I'll get anxiety.”
The former WWE Royal Rumble winner is just taking it one day at a time. It surely helps that her husband, Seth Rollins, is also a top star in the company. They have a bus for their tours, which is “huge.” Their driver's wife is also Roux's nanny for when Mom and Dad are laying the smackdown.
“They're her family and they're our family,” Lynch said of her bus driver and his wife. “They feel like our families, they help us. And then when we are home, we have a great support system. We have Colby's mom, who looks after Roux, and then we just keep it going, man.
“We usually leave on a Friday, or, if we have to do the dark match on SmackDown, we'll leave on a Thursday. And then we're on the road Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, obviously for Raw, [and] we fly home on Tuesday. And then either we have little bits of media here and there, or, for the next few weeks, it's here and here.”
But while on the road, Lynch and Rollins still try to create some sense of normalcy for their child.
“When we're on the road, we just try to keep Roux as occupied as possible, take her to kids museums and zoos and parks and go for coffee and keep it like a nice family life, even though it's wacky and strange and different,” Lynch said.
Being only three years old, Roux “doesn't know any different,” so the wild life is a normal life.
Her family
Speaking of family, Lynch's memoir heavily revolves around her relationship with her mother. She wasn't a big fan of Lynch's aspirations to become a wrestler. Her mom, an acclaimed flight attendant, secured Lynch a job when wrestling wasn't working out. As a result, her mom likes to take credit for Lynch's traveling mentality.
In her memoir, Lynch recalled her time as a flight attendant. She called it a “nomadic” lifestyle in the book, which you'd think helped her adjust to the rigorous WWE schedule.
“My mom says it [did], I'm not so sure,” Lynch said. “Maybe it's the finding yourself in a new city all the time and how you manage that. I love that. I loved any time we'd go to a new city. The first thing I would do was run around the city, get the lay of the land, and see where I wanted to go [and] get breakfast or coffee or any of those things.
“I kind of adopted a lot of those practices on the road when I came to WWE. But it's different because when I was a flight attendant, we weren't landing in a city and having to drive to another city,” she explained. “Really, it was just navigating airports, checking into hotels, and just being in different cities.
“I suppose I'm a little bit more judgemental of flight attendants when I'm on airplanes. Does that count as preparing me?” she concluded.
“Get on with it”
Perhaps following in her mom's career footsteps didn't help prepare Lynch for the big time. One specific piece of advice given to her in her younger years, which Lynch “hated at the time,” was to “Get on with it.”
“In my teenage years or even my early 20s, [I'd] be wallowing over some woes, you know? Just get on with it. Just get on with it. You have to get on with it. You couldn't take the time to indulge in those things, [so] you just have to get on with it,” Lynch said. “And sometimes there [are] times where you need to indulge, and there [are] other times where it will benefit you to just get on with it. So that's what I've done.
“No matter what's going on in your emotional world or whatever you're feeling, sometimes you just have to get on with it because there's a job that needs to be done, there's a child that needs to be taken care of, and you can't wallow in your feelings as much as you'd like to, as much as I'd like to,” she continued with a chuckle.
It's not always easy to get on with it and it requires discipline, but per Lynch, “there's a reward at the end of that.”
Finding the right support system
Mothers are there to tell you the things you may not want to hear, but you need to hear. Partners have a similar role, though they also should encourage you. While some of Lynch's past love interests are discussed in the early part of her memoir, it sounds like Becky Lynch found the one in Seth Rollins.
“Being with the right person helps immensely,” Lynch said of following your dreams. “When you're in a relationship that feels supportive and [you] feel encouraged to follow your dreams, I think that's so important. Being with the right person, and then having a support system is huge.
“And I know a lot of people don't have that, but trying to seek that out, whether that be a great daycare or a nanny or grandparents or aunts or uncles, knowing when you can rely on people, knowing when to fall [on] people, feeling like you don't have to do it all,” Lynch elaborated.
That's just her nature. “I think that's something that I do fall into the trap of — I find it hard to ask people for help, but I think that you have to,” she confessed. “And then also understanding that it's going to be hard, that it's not going to be like a walk in the park. It's going to be hard and you're going to question things [chuckles] and you're going to question yourself.”
But as her mom would say, Get on with it.
That NSFW photo
Sometimes, your support system has to be silly, too. Well before The Man hit shelves, a photo from Lynch's memoir went viral. It saw Lynch and Rollins donning nothing but their WWE title belts. At the time Lynch was “Becky Two Belts,” holding the SmackDown and Raw Women's Championships. Rollins was the WWE Universal Champion at the time.
The two posed in front of a mirror, covering their private parts with their belts, and took the photo. Upon bringing it up, Lynch began cracking up. She mentioned that she was afraid that her fellow WWE stars would roast her for certain content in the book. One of them was that photo, though she acknowledged that it had to get out.
“That's one of them! It's just funny. It had to get out in the world at some point — it's just too silly and fun not to,” she said. joyously. “It was one of those things that [happened because] Colby and I are at the worst at taking photos. We just never take photos together. And so that was the day before I was going to lose one of those titles and I was like, We gotta get this done otherwise I'm not going to have it.
“We'd just gotten back from Europe on a two-week tour. We were both exhausted and it was just like, Alright, let's go. It was just so funny and silly,” she concluded, laughing the whole way through.
The Man goes Hollywood
Former WWE star Paige, who now goes by Saraya in AEW, got a biopic in 2019. Stephen Merchant wrote and directed Fighting with My Family, which featured Florence Pugh as Paige and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in the ensemble. The film grossed over $40 million at the box office as well.
Inevitably, Lynch will probably get a biopic as well. She is too big of a star not to. Putting her on the spot, I asked Lynch to fan-cast herself, Rollins, and give a title for the film.
“Oh gosh, you're putting me on the spot,” Lynch acknowledged. “I mean, the first thought is like, Let's have an Irish actress, so let's go with Saoirse Ronan.
“But we're the same age. So, yeah, no, she can play me now! Let's go with Saoirse Ronan,” she continued.
Casting someone to play Rollins was tougher, mostly because “What actors do you got that are that handsome?”
Flattery aside, Lynch initially landed on Chris Hemsworth.
“He doesn't have that Armenian blood, though,” she said. “You need that darkness. Who would play him?”
She then asked who played Jon Snow in Game of Thrones. That would be Kit Harington, whom Lynch ultimately settled on.
As for the biopic's title, I suggested The Man. It's short and simple, but Lynch had another idea: Welcome to the Big Time.
The book tour
Before any biopics are made, Lynch has to release her memoir. In the build-up to the release, Lynch will embark on a seven-stop book tour. It will commence on March 26 with an appearance at the Barnes and Noble on Fifth Avenue. From there, she will visit Ridgewood, New Jersey; Washington, D.C.; Boston, Massachusetts; Madison, Connecticut; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Los Angeles, California.
As for what fans can expect, Lynch promised the stops will be a “good time.” And don't worry, she will take the time to meet you and get to know you.
“And then we can talk about the book if they want to, whatever people bring up,” she said.
“It's so important to me [that] when I meet somebody they never feel like I'm just rushing through,” Lynch said. “I like to stop, I like to chat, I like to have a conversation. So they can expect that.”
The commitment to the people comes from Lynch's appreciation of her fans waiting in line to meet her.
“There might be other people trying to rush them through, but I always feel like if somebody waited in line for me and [is] taking the time to come see me, they [should] get an experience that they'll go away smiling about or [that] they'll remember. That's important.”
Looking ahead to WrestleMania 40
Right after her memoir comes out, Becky Lynch has a huge test in front of her. She faces Rhea Ripley for the Women's World Championship. Ripley won that title from Charlotte Flair at last year's WrestleMania in an epic match. After winning the women's Elimination Chamber match, Lynch earned a shot at Ripley's belt.
WrestleMania is the biggest show of the year for WWE. All of the stars come out and the show features the biggest and grandest entrances and outfits of the year.
Becky Lynch is no exception. Her WrestleMania 38 entrance included a limousine and a dope Titantron video.
WrestleMania 40 will be different, though. When asked for a hint as to what's to come, Lynch gave a cryptic tease: “It'll tie in with the book. That's the hint I will give you.”
Card order
Everyone has their thoughts on Roman Reigns and The Rock vs. Seth Rollins and Cody Rhodes being the main event of Night 1 of WrestleMania 40. Since Reigns vs. Rhodes will surely close out the second night, the tag team match takes a spot away from Iyo Sky vs. Bayley or Becky Lynch vs. Rhea Ripley.
This doesn't bother Lynch, a former WrestleMania main event star. She has already been there and done that — now, she's looking to do the opposite.
“Nah, man, I'm not worried about card order,” Lynch quickly told me, shutting down any speculation that she may feel slighted. “I would love to open the show. I would love that. I've never opened WrestleMania before.
“And to open this one, as big as it is in Philadelphia, I'm just putting that out there,” she manifested with a laugh. “It would be pretty cool because if it's not the main event, I always want to be the opening spot — it's always a great place on the card because people are so excited.”
To be clear, Lynch wants to open night one, not the second night.
“Ooh, night one. I would love to open the whole of WrestleMania, you know what I'm saying? Just [to] be that first match for that whole event,” Lynch clarified.
Plus, opening WrestleMania gives her time to decompress before her husband main events the first night of the show.
“[Opening the show will] give me enough time that I can relax and really enjoy Colby main eventing WrestleMania and getting to watch him do that because that will be so special,” she said.
Becky Lynch opening WrestleMania 40 would be fitting given that her husband got to open WrestleMania 35 but has never mainevented the show.
Becky Lynch: The Man: Not Your Average Average Girl will be released on March 26.
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