An ‘exhilarating’ debut from a young Irish author depicting a young woman reliving past toxic relationships could be set to follow in the footsteps of the widely-successful Normal People.
Acts of Desperation, by Megan Nolan, 30, who lives in London, echoes the hit novel by Sally Rooney in its dark depiction of a destructive and desperate relationship between a young female and a cold, beautiful man.
The ‘anti-romance’ follows the obsession the unnamed narrator has with the cruel lover and interrogates what it means to be a woman addicted to love.
‘Even now, even after all that took place between us, I can still feel how moved I am by him,’ she writes. ‘Ciaran was that downy, darkening blond of a baby just leaving its infancy. He was the most beautiful man I had ever seen. None of it mattered in the end; what he looked like, who he was, the things he would do to me.
‘To make a beautiful man love and live with me had seemed – obviously, intuitively – the entire point of life. My need was greater than reality, stronger than the truth, more savage than either of us would eventually bear. How could it be true that a woman like me could need a man’s love to feel like a person, to feel that I was worthy of life? And what would happen when I finally wore him down and took it?’
It has been widely praised by critics ahead of its release next month, with journalist and author Pandora Sykes writing on Instagram that the novel is ‘poignant, poetic, raw and utterly unique – I couldn’t stop reading.’
Acts of Desperation, by Megan Nolan, 30, who lives in London, has been hailed as ‘richly dark’, ‘honest’ and ‘exhilarating’ by critics
Megan grew up in Waterford before moving to Dublin and then London in 2015, where she worked as a freelance journalist.
She has since contributed to the New York Times and has a column in the New Statesmen.
Her debut novel began life as a narrative non-fiction exploring the relationships she had had in her younger years.
She was recently hailed one of The Guardian‘s 10 best debut novelists of 2021, and explained the novel had been painful to write.
The novel echoes Normal People in its dark depiction of a destructive and desperate relationship between a young female and a cold beautiful man
Megan explained: ‘I was trying to understand myself and why I had done those things, when I knew it was so degrading to behave that way.
‘I had given up an enormous amount in order to be the sort of person these men might like to be with.’
She started working on the project in 2016, but ended up throwing away 15,000 words before starting again.
The author said while the narrator has ‘a lot of me in her’ and the ‘feelings are all real’ but added that the events in the novel are ‘fictional’.
The young Irish author, who lives in London, confessed the experience of writing was painful and said she spent a lot of the writing period crying
She confessed the experience of writing was painful and said she spent a lot of the period crying.
Meanwhile she revealed she writes in the dark with white noise playing loudly, adding: ‘ Complete sensory overload, or deprivation. I find it really difficult to write – so I just need to have complete concentration.’
According to the Penguin website, the novel has been praised by authors across the country, with Marian Keyes calling it ‘incredibly honest and visceral.’
She wrote: ‘Such brilliant writing about female desire, co-dependant love, the ownership that’s taken of female bodies and how it corrupts our relationship to them. I identified hugely. Incredibly honest and visceral.’
She started working on the project as a non-fiction narrative in 2016 but ended up throwing away 15,000 words before starting again
Meanwhile author Jessica Andrews penned: ‘A darkly rich and heady exploration of hunger and unraveling, Acts of Desperation is unashamed and honest.
‘It questions the truest way to inhabit a body and shows us the horror and the beauty in learning to be alone.’
Upon acquiring the rights to Megan’s debut novel in 2019, Michal Shavit, publishing director at Jonathan Cape, told the Bookseller: ‘Exhilarating, painful, thrilling and devastating, it portrays an extraordinary confrontation with the self and a love story that will at once make you wince in recognition and keep you spellbound as you read.’
Dolan, like Normal People’s author Sally Rooney, was in her twenties while writing the novel and from Dublin.
Sally Rooney was dubbed the voice of a generation after she became the youngest ever author to win the prestigious Costa prize at just 27 for her novel Normal People
Sally was dubbed the voice of a generation after she became the youngest ever author to win the prestigious Costa prize at just 27.
Normal People follows Connell and Marianne from their school days in County Sligo to university at Trinity College Dublin.
At school, he’s well-liked and popular, while she’s lonely, proud and intimidating. But when Connell comes to pick up his mother from her cleaning job at Marianne’s house, a strange and indelible connection grows between the two teenagers – one they are determined to conceal.
A year later, they’re both studying in Dublin and Marianne has found her feet in a new social world but Connell hangs at the side lines, shy and uncertain.