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| Naoise Dolan |
All off script... Meet Naoise Dolan, the funniest writer you will read this year
'If you tend to have weird reactions to normal things, it's a lot of pressure off when weird things are happening to you.' As her first novel is published (and raved about), Naoise Dolan talks to Emily Hourican about autism, empathy, and being called 'the next Sally Rooney'
Brown Thomas
April 12, 2020
'Not the new Sally Rooney." What a terrible way to begin writing about author Naoise Dolan, whose first book, Exciting Times, is about to be published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson following a seven-way bidding war. Dolan is young - 27 - Irish, a Trinity graduate, and writes about characters who are equally young, educated, smart and self-aware, while frequently emotionally bewildered. Early accolades for Exciting Times started as far back as December in the UK, using terms like "fiercely smart" and "remarkably self-assured". A first chapter of the book was published in literary journal The Stinging Fly, edited by Sally Rooney; clearly, the comparisons were always going to happen.
And Dolan gets that. "Minding about it would be giving it too much power," she says, "because people are going to compare you to someone. It's not coming from you, it's coming from what they've decided to make out of the things they know about you. I think having a casual relationship to all that is the best approach. Because then if it stops, or takes a more negative direction, I've still got my sense of who I am."
Dolan's sense of who she is, is remarkably evident on the page - Exciting Times is, loosely, the story of a love triangle set in modern-day Hong Kong, with Ava, a young Irish woman, at the centre. It's a story that takes in class, colonialism, sex, power, language, female sexuality. Every page crackles with arresting ideas and images - "Julian often reminded me to eat. It made him feel better about liking that I was thin" - and her sentences are short and deceptively simple, layered together to create complex ideas. Often the sentences themselves are very funny, yet the broader observations they build into are just as likely to be quite heartbreaking. Up close, there is a touch of hard-boiled nihilism that stems from Ava's approach to her own life, but that too disintegrates within the wider context of what is ultimately a very moving story, one that occupies a small sliver of time and space, but manages a lasting emotional tinnitus.
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