Few writers are as honest about their own obsessions and foibles as the Irish author and journalist Megan Nolan. From revealing the role that alcohol has played in her romantic relationships to describing how the pandemic has stripped away the pleasures of being single, Nolan’s writing is both self-lacerating and deeply assured.
At 30, Nolan’s intense, confessional style has helped propel her into the upper echelons of British and US journalism, with her essays, criticism and feature pieces appearing in publications such as the Guardian, the New York Times, and most recently, the New Statesman, where she has a bi-monthly column.
Now comes her debut novel, Acts of Desperation, which was written in London and Athens, and picked up in 2019 by Jonathan Cape as part of a two-book deal. A searing and deeply uncompromising look at love and one person’s capacity to suffer in the pursuit of it, the novel has already received high praise in early reviews.
“Megan Nolan is a huge literary talent, and her first novel, Acts of Desperation, is a love story like no other,” said the author Karl Ove Knausgaard, adding his endorsement to a slew of positive notices.
And yet, despite all of this, when I catch up with Nolan for the purposes of this interview, she seems a little surprised by just how well she is doing in her career as a journalist and author.
“I didn’t expect the book to be published by a mainstream publisher,” Nolan says, over the phone from her apartment in London. “Until we sold the book, really, I thought that the kind of ways I write and the kind of things that I write about weren’t publishable in a serious sense, would be like more for the internet, mainly. Just not polished enough within the mainstream literary world.”
Anchored by an unnamed female narrator, the novel, which takes place in Dublin, details the character’s toxic relationship with Ciaran, her Danish-Irish boyfriend. The plot unravels between 2012 and 2014, and is interspersed with short, almost meta-fictional reflections which take place in Greece, in 2019, where the narrator reflects, with the benefit of emotional distance, on their relationship.
Nolan was born in Waterford, but she has spent most of the past half-decade living in London. Because of the book, she is doing lots of press at the moment, she tells me, and feels “adrenaline-filled”.
In just two weeks, she has gone from having never been interviewed, to doing several each week. She is slightly nervous about how she is being perceived – she feels more control over this in writing than in speaking – and I get the feeling that she is much more comfortable with being the interviewer rather than the interviewed.
I first encountered Nolan’s writing in 2013, on a blog she used to host, which featured short, essayistic pieces that were intensely confessional in tone. At that time, Irish literature was on the cusp of undergoing a resurgence, and I hadn’t encountered anything by a writer in their early 20s, writing about an Ireland that I could immediately recognise – a distinctly post-Celtic Tiger-era Dublin – that was quite as visceral or as lucid as Nolan’s early essays.
Some of that writing made it onto Medium, a platform for self-publishing. Medium also features curated, themed sections – one of which is Human Parts, in which Nolan’s early essays often featured. Nolan is quick to point that she didn’t consider herself a writer back then and that, until she moved to London, she hadn’t thought of her writing as “something serious”.
After being commissioned to write an op-ed for the London Independent she began to feel as though journalism, and writing more generally, could be a viable career path.
Her writing has drawn attention for the honesty with which she approaches her subjects. Take, for example, her essay, ‘Aborted?’, from 2014, which chronicles a trip she made, aged 18, to England to get an abortion; or a piece from 2016 in the Guardian backing mandatory sexual consent classes for undergraduates, in which she discusses her experiences of being sexually assaulted and subsequently dropping out of Trinity College, where she had been undertaking a degree in French and film studies.
A little over two years ago, the New York Times published an opinion piece by Nolan entitled “I Didn’t Hate The English. Until Now,” in which she described the microaggressions and general ignorance towards Irish people she has experienced while living and working in Britain.
“What kills you is the ignorance,” Nolan wrote in the piece. “What grinds you down is how much they don’t know about the past and, if they do know, how little they care. It’s a strange and maddening thing to discover about the people who shaped your country’s fate and who are poised to do so again. [. . .] England keeps on making itself matter to Ireland, against our will.”
The article caused a stir (the headline, it should be noted, was not her decision).
Nolan’s transition to fiction makes sense because she has always been interested in wider forms of creativity.
Prior to her debut novel, she had written poetry, performed in a band (indie group You’re Only Massive) and, as a younger person, had been involved in Little Red Kettle, a youth theatre company in Waterford. An early inspiration in regard of the latter may have been Nolan’s father, the playwright and theatre director Jim Nolan.
When she moved to London, she began crafting fictional pieces in tandem with writing journalism, and she would read them out at performances at galleries and reading series. First begun in 2016, Acts of Desperation was originally conceived as a “collection of related essays” dealing with trauma and mental health; body dysmorphia; and intense, all-consuming relationships.
I ask her how she found the process of writing something fictional and book-length. “It was really hard,” she says, but adds that receiving feedback and advice from her agent, Harriet Moore, meant the process was a rewarding one.
Already, comparisons have been drawn between Acts of Desperation and the novels of Sally Rooney and Naoise Dolan. Reading it put me in mind more, though, of Eimear McBride’s stunning debut, A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing, or even perhaps the early works of Edna O’Brien.
Nolan says that she sees Acts of Desperation as a book that’s more in conversation with works like Chris Kraus’s genre-bending I Love Dick (which she loved for its “portrayal of female debasement and desire”), Karl Ove Knaussgaard’s A Death In The Family, and Gwendoline Riley’s First Love. In an essay for the Guardian, Nolan wrote that reading Knausgaard gave her permission to write about the “emotional minutiae” of relationships, which, in a sense, is what Acts of Desperation is a masterclass in.
One of the most remarkable aspects of Acts of Desperation is how little pity the narrator has for herself and for the grim situation in which she finds herself. She seems entirely unconcerned with presenting herself as likeable, either to the people in her life, or to her readers.
“If you distill that need into one person,” Nolan points out of her protagonist and her uneasy relationship with her boyfriend, “then you don’t need validation from everyone else as well.”
Since writing the book, Nolan has begun work on her second novel and, along with Amanda Feery, has written a libretto, A Thing I Cannot Name, for the Irish National Opera. The opera, which is to be directed by Aoife Spillane-Hinks is due to take place in June 2021, though Nolan is unsure in what capacity, due to further possible restrictions.
In her New Statesman column, Nolan has been bracingly honest about how she has managed in terms of dealing with the ongoing restrictions brought about by the pandemic, and particularly what it means in the context of living alone.
I ask whether the column has been harder to write during lockdown. It’s become more about the “minutiae of what we’re all going through right now,” she says, which, she points out, “is not the most exciting thing to write about, but people do want to read about it, I think, because everyone is so bored and they want that validated.”
Whatever happens next, at just 30, Nolan has amassed an impressive body of work. To trace her writing from the novel back to those early essays, one gets the impression of someone who has already lived many lives – and is still only getting started.
This article was originally published in the Business Post Magazine (March 7, 2021; Paywall)