Megan Nolan: On Sadness, Writing About Suffering, Labels, and Her Debut Novel, "Acts of Desperation"
Living in our twenties is messy, complicated, confusing and fill with complex and problematic choices. In Megan Nolan’s debut novel, Acts of Desperation, the female narrator is going through all these things and more as she navigates through a toxic relationship with Ciaran a magnetic yet aloof writer who she feels compelled to please, compelled to be a part of his life. As she searches for her own identity in the midst of trying to be everything he wants, the narrator feels herself splitting between desperation, rebellion, degradation and infatuation. Nolan’s gripping prose pull you into the story and make it hard for you to let go.
I spoke with Megan over the phone where we discussed the complication with labels, why we want to call her story autofiction, the complexity of sadness in our youth and her stunning debut novel, Acts of Desperation.
Kailey Brennan: I read that you described your novel as autofiction and I’d love to know how you decided to write in this genre and how this story started for you.
Megan Nolan: I haven't actually used that phrase about it myself. It's definitely drawn on by some autobiographical feelings. The way I've been describing it is that the relationship is fiction. It's not about a particular relationship that I've had, but that the feelings of the narrator are based on feelings I've had in various relationships. I guess for me because I wanted it to be a psychological portrait of this woman, it just seemed easier for me to write places and timeframes that I was already familiar, and that it was easy to slip into, because they're based on my own life. I didn't set out for it to be me as the narrator, but it was always based on feelings that I had had myself or observed in others.
KB: That's interesting that I saw that autofiction label a few times. I think that people really want to put everything into a category.
MN: Totally. I'm not upset when people call it that. I don't think it's completely accurate but I'm not the most knowledgeable person about literary terms, so I don't know what the accepted definition of autofiction is. But I had read Knausgård’s novels and autofiction and he is using the real people’s names so I guess because mine is not like that, I wouldn’t have put it in that category. I think people want to know exactly what's true and exactly what's not true but I'm not interested in making a sort of timeline for people to compare to. I just don't think it's the most interesting way to approach a book, but at the same time, I do understand obviously why people want to know.
KB: Right. I'd love to know about the choice for not giving the narrator a name.
MN: It wasn't really much of a choice. I just started writing and then at a certain point I realized I hadn't given her a name. And I sort of liked that and I thought it might be an interesting way to solidify the sort of suggestion in the novel of her not having an identity or often looking for an identity in another person. And I thought that would be one way to express that idea.
KB: I’d love to talk about this idea of women romanticizing pain. This idea of merging beauty and pain as the female experience. It’s so difficult not to with the way this is portrayed in movies and literature. I read somewhere that you love The Virgin Suicides, for example. Was this something you were looking to explore in Acts of Desperation?
MN: Yeah, definitely. I can't speak for women in general, but definitely when I was a teenager, especially 13 and 14, one of the first dramatic emotions that I was ever feeling was to be just really sad. Before I had had romantic relationships or before I had much of a social life even, being sad was the dominant feeling that I had in the world. And so it's hard not to treasure that or make it a characteristic of yourself because it was so formative then. For me, it was hard to shake that off, even when I was actually happier when I grew up a bit. All those emotions that you feel when you're young are intense in a different way than you never really feel again.
So there's this like history of mine, of feeling these dramatic, sad feelings and they did seem to feel romantic to me in a way, even though it was so unpleasant at the time. When I think back to being that age, and 15 and 16 when I was starting to have boyfriends and sort of being sad about them, those feelings are so real to me still. And they're so vivid in a way that things I felt in my twenties don't. I definitely have the conflicted feeling that you're talking about when I started writing where it's embarrassing to sort of fetishize your own feelings all the time. Some people find it really disgusting to pour over your pain and sadness and they find it self-indulgent but also sort of offensive almost. If you haven't suffered a very concrete trauma or something that people considered bad enough, then they find it distasteful to think about pain like that.
In the few months before I started writing the book, I had read Leslie Jamison's book, The Empathy Exams in which she talks about the idea of people being disgusted by self-harm, for instance, or what they consider to be attention seeking ploys. I definitely had that in mind when I was writing the book - this idea that I knew I wanted to write about these things, which were basically about suffering, but also I was aware when writing that it would alienate some people and make people feel grossed out by me. So I think that's definitely present in the book. That awareness that while you're doing it, you're being sort of a bit icky.
KB: Did you feel any fear or vulnerability while writing this?
MN: Well to be honest with you, like all that stuff is only happening now. (Laughs) I didn't have a book deal when I started writing the book. I did assume it would at one point it would be published, but I thought maybe it will be published by a pretty small press or like a gallery press or something. I never foresaw it being a mass publication for whatever reason. I just didn't consider it.
So I think to get anything written that is sort of vulnerable like this subject matter, it will be really hard to do that if you did sit around thinking like, Oh, who's going to read this? How embarrassed am I going to be, in advance of having finished the work.
I definitely had that in mind. That I shouldn't think like, Oh my God, my parents are going to read this and that kind of thing. But now that [the book] is coming out and I'm doing interviews about it and stuff, it now definitely feels vulnerable. It’s a bit scary at the moment. I'm not necessarily embarrassed of the book, but it's difficult to speak about it sometimes.
KB: Definitely. Especially when it’s being assumed that it’s autofiction.
MN: Yes. And I won’t ever actually do this, but it definitely leads me to have the impulse to sit people down and say, Oh, this really horrifying bit is actually totally fiction. That's never happened to me. But of course, you can't do that and you can't make people understand exactly what you intended with the book, because everyone has their own relationship with it. But the last couple of weeks have made me antsy with the autofiction thing where I want to say, oh no, my mom is nothing like the mother in the book and I actually have a great relationship with her. And there's certain things that just on a personal level, it sort of makes me uncomfortable to think that people are reading it all as the truth.
KB: Alcohol plays a huge role in the narrator’s life and I thought you did a brilliant job of showing us her dependency in a very realistic and relatable way. I didn't view this book like, this is a book about alcohol and drinking. Although she struggles with drinking, this isn't a story about that, if that makes sense. Can you speak a little more about that?
MN: It’s funny because, in my early twenties and late teens, it just wasn't even something you would notice about yourself in my social circles- that you were drinking this insane amount- until afterward.
When I think back on the way that I drank when I was that age especially and it seems really crazy to me and inordinate and something that is worrying and not typical. But at the time it just felt totally normal because everyone was going out and everyone that I knew was drinking a lot. So I think the reason that the narrator doesn’t try to delve into her alcohol dependency so overtly, is that I don't think that people of that age do realize that they have a problem, long-lasting or not. I think that if you've gone from a teenager into university or early adulthood, and you never left that bubble of partying all the time, then it doesn't feel that remarkable. Some people tolerate it better than others.
I think the narrator of my book probably didn't start out drinking in a very different way to her friends, but then entwined with it in a different way than her friends who might be drinking similar amounts of alcohol. I wanted to have that as a backdrop to the main narration. Her intimate relationship with alcohol as a secondary big dependence that she has in this book.
People read things like this and then they need to put a name on it. They need to say, Oh, she's an alcoholic and she's got depression. I don't like that. Obviously the way that she drinks is not healthy. I'm not suggesting it's a normal way to drink or anything like that. But I just think that it's a bit unrealistic to think that every young woman, of that age, would be seriously concerned about her drinking because in the context that she's lived within, it hasn't been particularly remarkable that she drinks a lot.
KB: Right. I think that just goes back to what we have been saying. That everything needs to fit into a category.
MN: Yeah. Maybe not even a conscious aim, but I think looking back on the book as a whole, now that it's finished, I think that was something I was trying to do with a lot of the different issues that come up in the book. I didn't want it to be an issues novel where it's like, okay, this girl has an eating disorder, she’s an alcoholic and she's got this terrible relationship. And we have to deal with all these problems as issues. I think we should be able to situate those things in a broader spectrum than maybe we tend to do.
KB: I think you do a great job at that. It was just this girl's experience. That's what drew me in and made her feel like a real character.
MN: Thank you.
KB: This novel reads, to me, almost as if you wrote it in one fluid take. I know that’s not the case. (Laughs) What did your routine look like and how long did it take you to write this novel?
MN: So I started in 2016 and we sold it to the UK publisher in 2019. I would go in bursts with it. There were quite a few stints, months and months, where I didn't do any work on it at all. I was subletting a lot and not really settled anywhere. So I would tend to take off and go somewhere a bit quieter than my normal life and rent or sublet a place for a couple of weeks to get bursts of it done.
I think that was the only way I could have done it because the sort of style and tone of it is so intense. I don't think I would've been able to produce it all if I was working full-time in six months on it- which I couldn't have done anyway for many reasons, because I had to work at the same time. But yeah, I think it ended up working out well that it did come in increments.
Like what you're talking about, the sort of propulsive quality of it, a lot of people have said they've read it in bursts of a day or two all at once. I think that came through very good editing from my agent Harriet. She was editing it all the time that I was writing it. Then my editors at Jonathan Cape and Little Brown helped me to concentrate the story a bit more.
Actually -I haven't even talked about this in about a year, but I just remembered- we cut out a big chunk of time within the book. So when I first submitted a draft, when we sold the book, the story took place over two or three years, and then it got reduced to what it is now, which is the main narrative relationship with Ciaran takes palace in over just two years instead. I think that helped with making it more compulsive to read.
KB: As a debut novelist, do you have any advice you can share with those who are working on their first novel?
MN: I think the main thing for me was to have someone reading it as I went along. Not even necessarily to be reading the actual book, but to talk about it. I was so convinced that it was bad when I was writing it and I really needed Harriet to step in and to tell me that it was worth continuing with. I don’t know how badly other people suffer with this, but my view of the book was so diluted in retrospect, if I was left alone with it, I don't think I ever would have pursued it. My main advice would be to try and identify someone in your life that you can have a relationship with about the book as you're trying to do it.
KB: That makes sense. It’s such a lonely and solitary process that even just being able to talk to someone and be like, Hey, I'm writing a book, and them being understanding of that. Nevermind if you're getting that advice and you're having those deep conversations throughout.
MN: Exactly. It's like an embarrassing thing to talk about when you haven't got a book deal, if you're like, Oh, I'm working on my novel. It’s a bit of a cliche thing that people hate to say to each other. I had to almost go the opposite way to that because I know from my personal experience with anything that I find difficult, if I don't tell someone for accountability purposes, I just won't finish it. So I could never have secretly written a novel and then just handed it out one day. I definitely needed to talk about it and to make sure that other people knew that it was going to come at some point. I'm really, really bad for if I had my way, I would never have shown Harriet anything until I was completely finished with this, so it was good to be sort of forced out of that privacy.
