Introducing our 10 best debut novelists of 2021
Acts of Desperation by Megan Nolan
"I had exited a string of unhealthy romantic dynamics in my mid-20s and felt totally traumatised and blindsided by the way that both my partners and I had behaved,” Megan Nolan says about the time leading up to the writing of Acts of Desperation.
"Because I was so hurt by them it was easy for me to cast myself as the victim, but when I calmed down and really thought about them it was almost as though neither party had acted with any considered agency; it was more like this perfect storm of circumstances and defensive reaction that led to the hurt, rather than one person being the aggressor and one the receiver.
"I wanted to work through that, and I began to think about portraying a fictional unhealthy romance in unsparing detail to try to capture what those mysterious malign circumstances might be.”Writing Acts of Desperation, which follows the narrator’s relationship with a man called Ciaran, Nolan she was "utterly convinced that every part of [the book] was appalling”.
"I was filled with intense shame almost all the time I was working on it, not because of the intimate subject matter but because I believed it to be worthless,” she says. "I had to learn to disbelieve that part of my brain every day and just get on with it.”
Thank goodness that Nolan did overcome that to produce Acts of Desperation, which works both as a brilliant story and a thought-provoking book about the nature of happiness.
"I wasn’t raised in any kind of conservative family environment at all and yet I still managed to grow up thinking that I needed to be loved by a man to be of any use to the world,” says Nolan. "As I slowly shed that assumption the world seemed much friendlier and more inviting.”
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