This is a stunning debut and Nolan is an excellent addition to the current crop of Irish female writers such as Sally Rooney, Naoise Dolan and Eimear McBride. It recounts several years in the life of an unnamed narrator as she navigates her relationship with Ciaran, a cold and unfeeling man fleeing a break-up in Copenhagen and whom she is doing her best to will into loving her despite and then because of his limited interest in doing so. This is one of the most accurate depictions of early twenties aimlessness I’ve ever read and as a result it’s a fairly intense read (I binged it over one weekend and it might bear spacing out a little more). It’s ultimately hopeful though, with well-drawn characters and some delicious turns of phrase. Without wishing to compare them, this novel deserves the hype that Luster has had recently and I highly recommend it. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

Nolan’s protagonist - who, if I’ve remembered correctly, isn’t ever named - takes the reader through an entire troubled relationship, from start to finish, and analyses what she and her partner both did wrong. It’s exciting to have allowed a female character to explore feelings in such depth, with such personal insight, but some of that self-knowledge didn’t ring true to me because really who knows that much about themselves? Equally, I liked the premise that it was the protagonist writing the story herself, with a few scenes set years later that speak directly to the reader about her process, but I do think more could have been made of this, and the fact that she had ambitions to be a writer. I liked a lot of this debut, and identified with lots of it too, but there were bits I’d have liked softened or fleshed out. I’ll be interested to read what Nolan does next.

Acts of Desperation is the heartbreaking story of a twenty-something woman and her controlling relationship. She is a love addict trying to find self-worth in the gaze of others, which makes for a gut-wrenching novel. It’s a poignant debut: brutal, poetic, and impossible to put down. Also described by others as ‘anti-romance’. I can’t wait to see what the author writes next.

A painful, accurate and wonderfully written insight into the torturous nature of unreciprocated love.

At times I found myself physically shouting “no!!!!” at the pages, because it’s evidently much easier to see the mistakes of others from the outside.

But, in reality, I loved this book because it was hugely relatable - there have been many times in past relationships where I have become so obsessed with pleasing my partner, with feeling more pride in ‘winning’ in comparison to their former conquests in some way, that you lose sight of who you really are. Of course resentment soon grows when these obsessive efforts are not reciprocated, and you lose friends and family when you become a different person. A lesson much easier to learn as an outsider looking in - and, luckily, this is a satisfying experience Nolan gives us too, when she reflects back at this past relationship.

Before choosing this book, I read a review from a father of three girls and he described how painful it was to imagine his daughters feeling and behaving this way. There’s a scene that I found particularly haunting when imagining this father reading the same story, where the main character succumbs to a friend pushing intercourse on her simply because it’s easier that way.

Every page is so raw, so honest, so heartbreaking and so real. And I have a lot of respect for this author, because nobody really talks about these things. It was equally wonderful to not feel like such an outsider.

Favourite quote:

I was happy to be nothing if nothing was what pleased him best. If nothing was the least trouble, then I would be it, and gladly. I would be completely blank and still if that was what worked, or as loud as he needed me to be to take up his silences. I would be energetic and lively if he was bored, and when he tired of that, I would become as prosaic and dully useful as cutlery.

Thank you to Random House UK and NetGalley for the arc. Acts of Desperation will be released on March 4th, 2021.

I've been following Megan Nolan for a while on Twitter and decided to read this advanced copy because I like her personality online and was intrigued by the book.

Reading it brought me right back to my early twenties... dating a guy who mistreated me but going back for more, because of 'Love' and because surely if a guy treats you badly, it must be your fault right? I used to always go for the guys who were quiet, lonely, dismissive, didn't always give news... because they were so mysterious. A friend helpfully pointed out that "maybe they don't say much because they have nothing interesting to say".

The narrator keeps going back to Ciaran, a Danish-Irish man who only recently moved to Ireland, an art critic who lives a simple, monastic life. All of her friends dislike him - and they don't know the half of it. She keeps questioning herself - is she mad, is she a terrible boyfriend, will she ever be good enough - and drinking, mostly alone. I kept reading,, horrified, but also recognising many small cruelties I have either lived or seen inflicted upon my friends. The book goes back and forth between 2012-2014, and 2019 - a summer in Greece - as the narrator reflects on the relationship.

Reading it made me feel incredibly sad, for the narrator, for myself, for all the girls and women who put up with abuse (psychological, physical or both). It made me remember the things we forget when we enter a normal, healthy relationship - that these men exist and that they live among us, oblivious to the damage they cause, feeling entitled to women's suffering and devotion. It also made me feel grateful that there are more and more women who write and create art about it - when I was the narrator's age, I don't recall it being ever discussed - it was "boys being boys". That was ten years ago.

Beautifully written and insightful overall - even funny at times. The secondary characters are interesting as well. Really liked reading this.

I'm afraid I find this kind of dynamic boring. It has a vague Normal People vibe but here the relationship blurs the line between victim and abuser. She's needy and obsessive, he is cold and remote. They are toxic, yadda yadda. And the narrator sounded too self-dramatising : "Oh, don't laugh at me for this, for being a woman who says this to you. I hear myself speak. Even now, even after all that took place between us, I can still feel how moved I am by him". Who even talks like that? And then we have the classic mean ex-girlfriend who writes the most unbelievable to our MC's guy (things on the lines of "how can you be with her (the mc), you remember how beautiful we were together? People used to say that to us. Your new girl is fat/ugly'). The prose is trying really hard and it shows.

My, this is intense. Nolan has written a book about lives which are messed up and complex, and has done it with empathy, smartness and no judgement. Reading this makes me realise how one-dimensional if, nonetheless, important so many single-issue books are whether dealing with abusive relationships, self-harm, alcoholism, body image or addiction. Nolan's narrator suffers from them all, rolling them up into a single needy character who is, yet, seemingly functioning not unsuccessfully in her social world.

This is a beautifully nuanced book which avoids the obvious in lots of ways: abusive relationships might be about neither straightforward physical nor emotional abuse, and the lines between abused and abuser more wavery and involving more complicity than we might realise. Both Ciaran and the narrator are troubled in their own ways and their relationship is as much one of co-dependency as it is of asymmetrical power hierarchies.

Along the way, there are moments of acute analysis on, for example, the extent to which the cover of 'art' may enable and legitimate misogynistic cruelty; or how concepts of 'female desire' might still be contaminated by, and be responses to, centuries of patriarchal authorship on 'what women want'; or how victimhood may be mobilised in varying ways.

But this kind of acute intellectual underpinning never swamps the story which is compulsively gripping throughout. Not a book for anyone unprepared to be dealt disturbing and emotionally vexed material - but I found it bold, courageous and fluent.

"I do not understand what I do; for I don’t do what I would like to do, but instead do what I hate. What an unhappy man I am. Who will rescue me from this body that is taking me to death?

–Romans 7:15–25

That night after meeting Ciaran I drank until I vomited and blood vessels beneath and above my eyes burst, and I traced them gently in the mirror, knowing they would be markers of a beginning.

Events that were objectively worse than what was to follow with Ciaran had taken place in my earlier adulthood, sordid checkpoints of the wounded woman. I cannot speak about these things too soon because their names alone summon like a charm the disinterest of an enlightened reader."

As well as reading literary fiction I am also a weekly reader of the UK political weekly “New Statesman”. Until recently I also read “The Spectator” for balance – but a paper which employs as columnists Toby Young and James Delingpole and published Mary Wakefield’s infamous article on her husband’s apparently London based illness is currently unreadable.

One of the columnists in the New Statesman is Megan Nolan – who writes very engaging but also forthrightly honest fortnightly articles on her life, sex, relationships and (more recently) the impact of lockdown on a single person.

I was therefore intrigued to read this her first novel – one that is perhaps unflinching rather than just forthrightly honest, in its portrayal of a toxic relationship and what drives a young woman to stay in it.

The author has written in the Guardian that she was inspired by reading the works of Karl Ove Knausgård – which she first came across in 2015 in an article by him that “Writing is a way of getting rid of shame” – which addressed her own struggles (pun intended)

"I had at that time begun to write essays, which I hoped were literary in style but which felt cripplingly, humiliatingly feminine in their subject matter – unlovely accounts of abortion and sexual jealousy, and the abjection of being a woman who desires men. I was struggling towards something, an avoidance of villains and heroes, victors and losers, and a rejection of the idea that female pain was pretty or somehow inherently virtuous. I had the feeling that there was something there worth striving toward, but the embarrassment and, yes, the shame, was holding me back."

She goes on to say how she read almost exclusively his “My Struggle” sextet when writing this novel, writing she started when living for a period in Greece “alone and in heartbreak, reflecting on the affairs of the last few years that had left me so totally ravaged.” and how

"The grandiosity of his project, its completism, provided me with much-needed permission to go into the emotional minutiae I find most interesting and yet have feared all my writing life is trivial, unintellectual and altogether too feminine. It turned out I needed this great chronicler of masculinity to set me free."

The author I was most reminded of when reading this novel was actually Gwendoline Riley – although the narrator here (unlike I think in Riley’s books) is someone who genuinely loves the emotional affirmative properties and clear rules of love, and the physical affirmation of sex.

The book is narrated in an intense first person voice by a young woman living in Ireland. At the time single and outwardly hedonistic, she is inwardly and privately tortured – excessive drinking is the one thing that ties her life together. The book starts in 2012 when she meets, and is immediately struck by, and quickly forms a volatile relationship with Ciaran (half Irish and half Danish). Ciaran is an art critic in Denmark, but during a spell in Ireland visiting his sick father, he writes reviews for a magazine while trying to compose his own essays.

Ciaran is a distant person – he has lost his sense of taste and smell (in a childhood car accident – not COVID) and his resulting concentration om food as fuel seems to match his unengaged and detached attitude to much of his life, his emotional disengagement with the narrator (their relationship is very one-sided in this respect) and his disinterest in her friends – something which together with their clear distrust of his treatment of her, drives her apart from them.

From there we are part of the narrator’s intense examination of the relationship – the ways in which she often abases herself (sometimes emotionally and sometimes literally and physically) to Ciaran when he either disapproves of her (her neediness, her past relationships, her drinking and general lack of looking after herself physically) or perhaps equally impactfully distances himself from her (again sometimes emotionally and sometimes physically during relationship breaks). We also get the story of her pre-Ciaran history – her vulnerability, other seemingly exploitative relationships, her drinking and self-harming.

The book is at times a very painful and draining read – like her friends the reader despairs of her not walking away from the repeating toxicity of the relationship – especially as Ciaran, for all his jealousy of the narrator, makes no pretence of the intensity of his relationship with a previous long term girlfriend Freja with whom he remains in almost constant contact.

Some of the sections are written a number of years later, by the narrator in Greece, reflecting on the relationship with some distance – and these both provide real deep insight but also I found respite for the reader from the intensity of the main narrative.

Overall I found it a difficult and painful read – perhaps even more so as the father of three near-teenage or teenage daughters. Perhaps it was no surprise that the character that I identified with was the narrator’s Father (‘Everything’s OK,’ he said. ‘And if it’s not, we’ll take care of it and then it will be.’) with perhaps the hope that my daughters will always be able to say

"I had so missed listening to him say this thing, this thing he had always said to me throughout my life, in a million different ways. He had always said it, and I had always listened, always believed it, no matter how terrible the thing I was enduring."