Adulting - #62 How To Write In The Time Of Corona with Naoise Dolan

Episode Date: May 3, 2020

Hey Podulters, in this episode I was honoured to interview Naoise Dolan, author of the phenomenal Exciting Times. It is her debut novel and one of my favourites I have read this year. We speak about the book, Naoise's relationship with press interviews and what it takes to write a novel. I really hope you enjoy, I was a little nervous, so sorry for my fumbling words at times! Please do rate, review and subscribe! O x Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Fandu Casino Daily Jackpots. Guaranteed to hit by 11 p.m. with your chance at the number one feeling, winning. Which beats even the 27th best feeling, saying I do. Who wants this last parachute? I do. Daily Jackpots. A chance to win with every spin and a guaranteed winner by 11 p.m. every day. 19 plus and physically located in Ontario.

Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600. Or visit connectsontario.ca. Select games only. Guarantee void if platform or game outages occur. Guarantee requires play by at least one customer until jackpot is awarded. Or 11 p.m. Eastern. Restrictions apply. See full terms at canada.casino.'re all well as usual. I'm really excited about this episode. It is with Nisha Dolan, who is the author of Exciting Times, which is now a Sunday Times bestseller. It's a book that I reviewed recently on my Instagram. So if you haven't seen that, you can always go and have a look at that to get a little bit of a feel of what the book is about. I do have to outline that

I guess there are a couple of spoilers in this episode, not massively, and I still think you should read it. But if you wanted to wait and read the book first, which you 100% should do, then obviously go and do that. But I'm so excited to have spoken to Nisha. I wanted to wait and read the book first which you 100% should do then obviously go and do that but I'm so excited to have spoken to Nisha I wanted to talk to her about the process of writing a book and what it was like for her this is her debut novel and it's you know it's going to be one of the biggest books of the year it kind of already is and I really wanted to speak to someone who's had that sort of success and she's so down to earth about the writing process she's got a really interesting take on life and to be honest I was actually quite nervous interviewing her so there's

a few times when I fumble over my words and I wish I could do it again and do it better but actually I think the conversation that we have is really honest and really lovely and I just absolutely love speaking to her to be honest I was slightly starstruck because I just loved the book so much so I just thought it was such a treat to be able to pick her brain and find that how she feels about it and the idea behind this episode is that whilst we're in quarantine I know that this whole conversation around you know let's do something productive or let's start our dream project but maybe actually if there is something you want to do and if that isn't too intimidating maybe listening to someone speak about it in such

a down-to-earth way might encourage you to realize that you do have the tools to just take a step and start working towards something if you don't want to do that and you just want to nap and chill or get on with your work as usual that's also absolutely fine but I hope you enjoyed the episode and thank you so much for listening as always please do rate review and subscribe bye hello and welcome to adulting today i am joined by nisha dolan hello thank you so much coming on the podcast i can't tell you how excited i am to speak to you um it is a shame that we're having to do it over the internet but nevertheless so happy to speak to you. It is a shame that we're having to do it over the internet, but nevertheless, so happy to speak to you. So for people who don't know who you are and what you do, could you give us a little introduction? Sure. I'm a novelist and my first novel,

Exciting Times, is just recently out. It's about a young Irish woman who goes to teach English as a second language in Hong Kong and then finds herself in two slightly fraught love entanglements. The first of those is with a detached British banker named Julian and the second is with a Hong Konger called Edith who is a bit more earnest about everything. So you've literally as we're speaking just got into the Sunday Times bestseller list and before I even read the book there was lots of comparisons to Sally Rooney which must have felt like one big boots to fill but I wonder if that was kind of annoying to have that comparison thrust upon you how did you how did you feel about this this is your like first book and the reaction's been I imagine quite huge was that what you're

anticipating or was it a bit of a shock? I think it's easier to detach myself from all that in general because I'm not involved in any kind of literary circles I never know what the next big thing is meant to be the way I find my next read is usually just by browsing a bookshop so if there's a topic I want to read about I'll google it so I think it was easier for me in that sense I'd say if I had dreams of being launched as my own talent and then people kept comparing me to someone else I would be really annoyed but I just try not to set too much store by what other people think of me in general because I know you can't control what they write about you anyway so you might as well just not let it affect you really that is the best attitude to have and I do try to live by that but sometimes it is um harder than one might think yeah like to be

completely honest I can start with that approach but every time another journalist asks me the same question about it you feel a bit more disingenuous saying I don't think about it ever when they've just prompted you to think about it so there is that air of no one wanting to think that they are personally involved in doing it so they'll never do it directly they'll do it like how do you feel about this annoying thing that all the other journalists are doing and it's like you could simply not it's very possible to ask me many other things yeah you're so right I've just completely dipped my toe in that so I hold my hands up and I'm sorry for adding to that noise by any individual but it's just the cumulative effect is like but I'm sorry for adding to that noise. You understand by adding an individual it's just the cumulative effect

but I'm like that about all questions and I'm sure this is everyone when you're asked the same thing over and over but it's the other person's first time asking it you want to give them a proper answer because it's not their fault that someone else has already asked it but you're also like I already said this it's so hard to have the same

enthusiasm saying it again you know. Yeah I can completely imagine that. What's a question that is has anyone asked you a question yet about the book which really threw you because obviously you're going to know the characters and the story better than anyone else but has anyone read it in a way that you maybe I guess you can write sometimes and not necessarily know where that that feelings come from has anyone been really super insightful and said something and you're like shit how did they get that from it or has that not happened yet I think probably the questions I find hardest to answer are ones about my intentions but that's largely because I don't intend to have them when I write so when people phrase things like why was it important to you to do this and I'm like it wasn't important to me I

just wanted to get another hundred words down and it was the first answer that came to me but um in terms of insight i think a lot of the connections people are drawing between different things that happen in the novel are really interesting the parallels between the vignettes in the language school and then the relationships and i'm really interested as well in the responses to the textuality of it so the layers of Ava's messages and the messages from the other characters and then how that aligns with her narration because a lot of people have had very different takes on that so far and I just find it fascinating to observe and I mean I don't think I'm an especially good literary critic definitely not compared to people who do it professionally so there is that element of accepting that other people are probably going to

write better about my book than I ever could oh but I think you're an impeccable writer and not least it's for some of the things that you omit I think that's what I liked the the conversation sometimes felt quite jarring and stilted but I liked it it felt like it wasn't overly you weren't explaining what was going on. And I found that really like indulgent. I can't explain it. I really sank into it because you have to, it's not an easy book to write. You're like evidently very well written. So I think you're being really humble in saying that you couldn't, you know, critique literature of anyone else's because some of it honestly made me feel stupid. And I wrote, when I wrote about after reading the

book, I said, I loved that that there was something really enjoyable about having a really academic really kind of a bit spiteful a bit cynical but really a sassy such a shit word but a woman that made me feel inferior because she was so clever and because her witticisms and the way that she looked at life that I think that's that's kind of uplifting as opposed to this normal rhetoric we get about women who are like oh they had it all and she was beautiful and she was born into this family or whatever I found that to be a really lovely framing compared to what we normally get about young women growing up um the start the start of the book you talk about how Ava was kind of not enjoying sex in Dublin and

a lot of that was down to um the eighth amendment right so when did you when when did you start writing this book because obviously the laws the law was passed and it was changed was that last year um the referendum was in 2018 but it took a while for the changes to come into effect, obviously. But I started the book in 2017, and I wrote the first draft quite quickly. So obviously, that was all entirely under the ambience of it not only still being in place, but there being no concrete prospect of a referendum, although the momentum was building up to getting one but I think as well it's important to have fiction that's grounded in the experience of living under something even after it's changed I get this frustration around that and around the LGBT stuff in the book where people are like but wasn't there marriage in 2015

and it's like first of all a third of the country voted no. Second of all, I was born before 2015. Therefore, it is still possible to have an entire sense of yourself that cloaked in very different beliefs to the ones that we now hope are moving in a better direction. Yeah, and I would say that's a fairly lazy criticism because we can say that we've got feminism and we've come so far. But the real reality of the kind of the way that socially and culturally we feel about some of these issues, despite laws having changed, it doesn't meanronistic with today the book still that's all it's fiction so you can you can write whatever you want to write in whatever time frame but I do think it was a really important I actually found it really interesting because I didn't grow up in

Ireland and I've always grown up with the idea that if I did get pregnant and should I need to get an abortion that would be an option for me and to read I I was very aware of like the the referendum happening but I hadn't really read anything like this where it was from a really sort of um it is politicized but it was from an angle that was really interesting to read um and that the way that it transformed sex for the character I found actually much more fascinating angle rather than the angle of like oh I've got pregnant and how do I deal with it it was actually the the side of what we don't hear which is how does it actually impact our sexuality in the way that we live our lives um so I think that was a really important part to have in a book like this yeah and I think it's

not unlike what we were saying earlier about how when a big change happens, you need time to process. That's true of changes in any kind of direction. So especially for something like that, where you might have a necessarily limited view of what it's like to not have grown up under that law, to not have it affect everything in your life and the perspective that you can get even from realising that it's possible to be different and then from seeing it actually be different might forge the space that we need to see that treatment of it more in fiction so I think that's another reason like you were saying that direct correlation what's happening now isn't something we should always look for in books because if that's the case we're not going to get that layered consideration that often only comes after the fact yeah I completely agree and also you there you have so many themes within the book which is what I really really liked but it was done in a very natural way I didn't feel like the book was thematic or that you were trying to get across um like tick points for wokeness or

whatever it didn't feel like that at all it very much felt it felt very millennial which I hope you don't find insulting because I'm the most millennial person ever and I wear that with a badge of pride um and I felt like it was it was true true to what I feel reality is and I spoke to you about this previously before we started recording but Ava for me was such a grounded character she was so I felt you know people like I felt attacks I felt attacks at points because there was parts of her the most cynical and the most sardonic and I was like oh my god that's me when I'm like hormonal when I'm being a bit or the parts of me that I you know try to squirrel away in favor of trying to pretend that I'm this feminine goddess or whatever I'm supposed to be I found that character so important when you set out to write her, did you have any idea of who she

was going to be? Did you have an inclination to write a woman like that? Or was that just how she formed the minute that you started writing? Yeah, I think I mostly consulted my own tastes in writing her and was conscious as I went of what bits I find boring or tiresome or unnecessary in other narrators or just which bits I don't find fresh and new and even though I might enjoy reading them I don't see any need to recreate it so a lot of passages where narrators explain exactly how they're feeling or speculate at length about things that they couldn't possibly know about another character. I just didn't feel like writing that.

I wanted to recreate what I believe is the likely headspace of a 22-year-old abroad. And like you say, that does have a slightly solipsistic slant. But the nice thing about fiction is you don't need to be arguing for something to exist when you put it down on the page it's depiction can be a starting point for a discussion or it can just let people feel seen which is a wonderful and cathartic experience in what we keep calling these dark times I wanted to ask you because my biggest fear if I ever write a book especially fiction is that someone's going to say to me so how much of this is based on your own life is that a question that people have started putting to you because I feel like as women it's almost always the first question and I think it's really redundant question anyway because anything we write fiction or non-fiction has to come from some form of

experience or but but it doesn't have to be us is that something that you've faced like now that the book's out were you expecting those kind of questions are you getting those kind of questions and is it difficult to be like can you just judge my work rather than try and judge me alongside it too closely yeah like I sometimes have a habit of answering the question that I want to have been asked so I just sometimes when people ask me something like that I'm like well all my command of English language is necessarily experiential because you learn it through contact with other speakers be that written or spoken ergo the entire book can only

be experiential also but when I'm not feeling like just being really annoying um yeah my answer is just look obviously the only way that you can make a book out of stuff is by knowing what it's like. But that's as much from other books as it is from anything that's ever happened to me. And I feel like we just have so many different forms of failure to take women seriously. It's an especially annoying one, but it's also easier to shut down than other ones I think people who wouldn't ask me that question do devote whole paragraphs to why the characters were unlikable with the assumption that that's a female artist's intention to endear you to the people they choose to depict so it you know it's annoying but I think there's just such a spate of things that you know are going to happen if you're a woman making things and trying to weather it as best I can I guess. That's honestly the best answer I've ever heard I genuinely want to write it down it's so good when when you were saying you're coming from experiences had you been

to Hong Kong why Hong Kong I'm intrigued I don't know much about it at all so I actually found that another really interesting like Dublin versus Hong Kong isn't a match that I've necessarily come across before yeah I lived in Hong Kong for around a year but if I'm honest like pretty much any decision with my fiction it just starts with feeling like writing about one thing as opposed to another thing so the only places I'd lived long enough to use any idea of how to describe them were Dublin and Hong Kong so that was a fairly quick decision but then I do hope that the setting isn't superficial because the way that I write tends to be that the initial decision is flippant, but then what flows from it isn't or suddenly isn't trying to be. So looking back, I could reverse engineer it and say, well, Hong Kong

was a really good place to bring out those linguistic themes. Hong Kong was a really good place to interrogate the place of white Irish people in our simplistic narratives of imperialism or whatever. But any of that could only ever come after that initial quick decision which was just Hong Kong's great I want to write a book there I absolutely love the way and like the way you talk is still just as expert as the way that you write like the way that you unpick things and you unravel it's honestly I love it and what I want to ask you a bit more now is because I don't want to give too much away about the story of the book, and I'm sure everyone's going to go out and read it, but

for this to be your first book, and because we're in this weird quarantine time, I'm so bored of saying this weird time, but it is a time when we're getting a lot of messaging about, you know, let's be productive, start that project, do that thing, which I think on the one hand, it can be quite invigorating for some people. And then I think the other hand, it can feel like a ton of books coming down when we're already in, you know, really high stress situation. We often hear lots of fairy tales about people writing novels. And I think a lot of people imagine that you start at the beginning and you finish at the end and you hand it in and then it's published. I know that's not the case, but I wanted to ask you a bit more about, you know, how did you start this book? What was your

journey with it? And when did you decide that you wanted to write a novel? And what is the real gritty truth about starting a big project like this? So I think deciding that I wanted to write a novel was definitely the first thing. But that's been such a long term aspect of my approach to books, because novels are by far the art form that I enjoy the most out of literature. It's not that I don't appreciate poetry and plays and all the rest of it, but novels are what I've lost myself the most in, have read the most of. And therefore, when I sit down to write, it's the form that most immediately presents itself to me.

And I find myself actively saying why it shouldn't be a novel because it's so intuitive to make it one so that was always the goal really and I think as well if you're interested in something like that and you want to understand other people it's really good to try to do your own because then you'll see a lot more of what they were about and even if your own attempt doesn't turn out very good it means that any novels you read going forward will be a lot more obvious to you in their devices and then you can use that to hopefully learn to write a better one someday but then in terms of this specific novel I started with a scene in a rooftop bar in Hong Kong and I think that exact environment

interested me because it was somewhere that was different to ones I'd been in Ireland but in some subtle ways and then some blatant ones and I just went from there but I think this is one of those things about writing that's really individual the way I've heard Sadie Smith break it down is there are macro planners and micromanagers and once you've worked out which you are your life will be a lot easier so the macro managers sorry the microman managers are people like me who just start with something small and flesh it out and don't look much further ahead than they have to. And then the macro people do much better if they write out an outline. Unfortunately, I suspect the only way to find out which you are is to attempt to write a novel the other way and have a fail miserably so good luck but I think you

know you don't have to arrive at a final decision about that sort of thing but I think being alert as you try to what makes you more excited when you sit down to write is it having a big idea that you know you're going to write this slowly or is it just luxuriating in something small because I think the number one thing to keep in mind when writing a novel is literally just what will make me enjoy this process enough to finish it. So with that in mind how long did it take you start to finish? I wanted to ask you one of the questions I wanted to ask you was did you know what type of novel it was going to be but listening to that and I love Sadie Smith as well but listening to that it sounds as though it was as you said it was just

piece by piece so how long did it take you from start to finish and also did you write chapters which were then rejiggled around like did you write it in a linear fashion or when the edit happened was it all jumbled back around I always find that really interesting to think that you know bits don't ever come to you in a linear fashion I wonder if that's how it happened for you yeah um I think the way I'd describe it is because it's so based around the characters a lot of the time I just had different scenes in mind or different snippets of dialogue that I could see them exchanging and because I was writing around a full-time job and I didn't have much time I just tended to write whatever I thought I could get the most words out of in a given moment which

was usually those bits that I was looking forward to but then I'd arrange them in the manuscript so that it still looked linear if that makes sense so if I had a conversation between Ava and Edith her girlfriend but it came after Edith gets introduced and I hadn't written that bit yet then I'd write it but I'd like put an asterisk above it and then leave some spaces to just keep in my brain that there are meant to be loads and loads of scenes in between and that whole thing was pretty quick so it took about five months and the way I tend to work is my levels of energy just for everything in life tend to fluctuate a lot so on average I think that works out at like maybe 500 to a thousand words a day but it wasn't always like

that like I tried to get out a minimum but then there were some weeks where I did nothing and then other weeks where I did a lot so then once I had that draft I just kind of dipped in and out of it I think because if you've read the book this won't surprise you at all I'm the kind of person who can spend five hours stressing out over a comma give or take it's really really important for me not to get into stylistic edits until I have absolutely have to because otherwise I'll just never achieve anything so I tried to stay on that threshold level and just working out what the scenes were doing. Yeah I wanted to talk about this so one of the themes that runs through the book which I think you were saying people had some commentary on how it was sort of meta that there is this examination

of the complexities of the English language matched with kind of Ava's sometimes very short um very unemotional conversations with Julian and then her like draft text messages it definitely does have that feeling there's definitely a lot of layers and depth there but that part about unemotional conversations with Julian and then her like draft text messages it definitely does have that feeling there's definitely a lot of layers and depth there but that part about English language was what completely made me feel like an absolute idiot because I really don't think that first of all I think my grammar is probably one of my worst traits I'm really awful at it and there were so many things that I didn't understand I actually wanted to ask you if did you learn because I did English at uni and I hazard to say I'm evidently know, we know as much as an expert as you are of the

English language. Was this something that you learned more in Dublin or is this just something that you then went on to study more or have you just always had a really good grasp of it? Because there's so many things in there that I was like, oh my God, even I wouldn't know that. But maybe that's because as you talk about the duality of like British English English and then Irish English is that something that is common in Ireland to be aware of those differences? Well let's put it this way one piece of evidence that I furnish when people ask me do I think that girls are under diagnosed with autism is when I was 12 I became obsessed with punctuation and read books and books about semicolons and stuff so in my case

it was just this intense special interest that I've cultivated and taken part in ever since really but I don't think it would be a natural feature of just being an Irish person in Ireland to be aware of grammar and punctuation and all the rest of it so definitely a lot of what I studied has informed it but then there was a lot of freedom within my degree to choose to do modules on linguistics and stuff and I'm sure if I hadn't organically been interested in that information and hadn't also been interested in languages besides English I would have known a lot less but then you also don't want to imply that there's any kind of hierarchy to that information because my impression of Ava is that she's relatively quick on the uptake with that stuff so she doesn't know a lot when she goes to Hong Kong because she wasn't

like me this intensely focused autistic child who's obsessed with semicolons for some reason. But she takes that in pretty quickly because she seems to have the kind of mind that can cope easily with that input. But in direct language and reading between the lines seems to come a lot harder to her. And that's an area of communication that we're reluctant to openly discuss as difficult for some people. So I think she definitely has a skill lag in that respect that I think the intellectual capacity to sit down and go, okay, this is the subjunctive actually makes worse because then it's really hard to admit to yourself that you're just bad at understanding other people sometimes. FanDuel Casino Daily Jackpots. Guaranteed to hit by 11pm with your chance at the number one

feeling, winning. Which beats even the 27th best feeling, saying I do. Who wants this last parachute? I do. Daily Jackpots. A chance to win with every spin and a guaranteed winner by 11pm every day. 19 plus and physically located in Ontario. Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600 or visit connectsontario.ca. Select games only. Guarantee void if platform

or game outages occur. Guarantee requires play by at least one customer until jackpot is awarded or 11 p.m. Eastern. Restrictions apply. See full terms at canada.casino.fandu.com. Please play responsibly. I have to apologize for my naivety because I didn't realize that you were autistic. Is that the correct way of phrasing that I never really know um is this something that maybe that's my lack of research but is this something that you have spoken about and is it something that you ever would want to speak about more because I guess there's no that's there's so many topics that you cover in the book and I guess that's one of the things that isn't mentioned, but I don't know how

I'm trying to phrase this without sounding like a really naive person. How has that shaped your tackling of moving into writing? Is it something that has been a barrier or by all means, it sounds like, if anything, it's just made you an even better writer. But what was the response? Did you ever have any kind of negative experiences with people's preconceptions around that at all well it ableism exists so my life has undoubtedly been harder because of that but I'm completely here for neurodiversity and I never want to imply that there even is a possible version of myself who isn't autistic let alone that that version would be preferable so it's almost a different plane of thought to the ones that I'm on to think about whether it's helped

me writing if that makes sense because it's like asking has being Irish helped you write like it's just me and I you know and it goes even deeper than that because I can just about picture a version of me with the same kind of brain and thought processes who grew up in Italy and maybe had slightly different opinions on some things but was broadly similar in how they processed the world whereas in even trying to see a version of yourself outside how you understand the present version you just quickly get overwhelmed by that possibility because it is your whole brain and you can only have ideas with your brain so any ideas that I have about my autism are within my very autistic brain so it's

I think it's an interesting one that I'm still thinking a lot about and I'd love to see more autistic representation in literature obviously because it feels like such a burden and that's one of the reasons that maybe it isn't something that always comes to the fore to think of yourself as trying to define such a different experience from person to person you know. Yeah and it's interesting because you bring up ableism and obviously the first thing that comes to mind when we have these conversations is is like a physical disability and evidently what you just highlighted with your autism is if someone like people can see that as disabling but what you're doing and whether or not as you say it's a massive task you don't want to end up feeling like you're the

spokesperson for autism but it definitely seems like you would elevate hopefully in people's minds and understanding that I mean the rhetoric because we rhetoric, because we know Greta Thunberg's autistic and I think she's doing something great. I actually talked once, I was talking about how it was, well, I don't want this to be triggering, but with autism, like the only conversation we really used to hear around it was how, you know, people don't do immunizations because their children might be autistic as if it was this awful thing so I guess even if obviously you don't want to stand up and be a spokesperson for it maybe one really incredible byproduct of your writing will be that people will be able to see into a different mindset when it comes to things like autism which they don't understand as you say understanding neurodiversity outside people who are neurotypical so that I understand why that must be so tricky for you but you're right I don't know that many other writers or maybe if they are they wouldn't

have said because there is that stigma attached it's such a complex issue yeah definitely and you're wary at the same time of playing too much into inspiration narratives that imply maybe autism is okay sometimes if you can write books. I think the point of representation isn't to try to associate good qualities with any given group of people. It's just to show that they're everywhere. So people on the spectrum do all kinds of things and exist in all kinds of areas of life.

And what I'd really like to come from like you say the great increase in representation that we are seeing with figures like Greta is just a broader level of cutting people some slack like one thing that really gets to me is when people will just openly discuss and mock someone else's facial expressions or gestures or all the rest of it because that affects people well beyond those on the spectrum it It's just not a nice thing to fixate on because it's completely morally neutral what someone's face does when you talk to them. And yet, even at quite high levels of discourse,

we will openly scrutinise whether horrendous right-wing politicians who have objectively enacted policies that harm many people, whether they were doing the right face while they did that. It's just mad. And I think it would improve our understanding of pretty much everything to just cut all that irrelevant non-verbal stuff out of it because it's not useful for me and I don't think it's useful for anyone. Yeah I love what you said there about cutting people's slack because I think it's a huge theme of the book in that what you do deal with the topics that you do deal with you do do it with great um not kindness but real like there's no judgment in the whole book so there's obviously the themes of talking around you know what it would like to be gay in Ireland or the the stigmas

that might exist around certain ways of acting but it within the book and within the characters that you create there is so much space for people to do things which we could maybe conventionally see like you can't behave like this or how even I love Ava's relationship with money and the transactional relationship she has with that and the way that you look at how Julian looks at my like there's so many conversations in there whether it be about class or politics or sexuality, and that cutting people slack is exactly it. That is what you've allowed room for. I wonder if that was just your natural disposition coming forward. So you evidently are very open-minded is also really not the right thing, but I don't know what you mean. If that was, I imagine that your natural proclivity is towards

inclusivity and that that came out in the book or was that I know you said you don't like being asked about intentions so I'm trying not to ask you that um but have I said anything that makes sense there yeah so I think my approach to empathy in life and when I write fiction is perhaps more even-handed than if it were informed more by the non-verbal stuff so for me empathy and this is completely different from person to person but for me empathy is an extremely cognitive thing where I just think about the reasons that someone might be acting a certain way and whether that's something that I can sympathize with even if I don't agree and it's not affected very much by how their voice

sounds to me or by you know things like that that I just don't see as relevant to the question of whether on the facts of it they're acting correctly so I think that's interesting that you said that the book is fair because one way or another people's assessment of whether it's nice to the characters tends to be that they're treated in that same uniform way and then I think how nice or not nice you think that uniform treatment is will affect whether you think the book just hates everyone or likes everyone or is in between on it but I think for instance my treatment of Ava and Julian is pretty even and that might be that they're both not nice people or it might be that they're both doing the best that they can in difficult circumstances or whatever but perhaps especially the way that

books like this are often discussed what you're expecting is for one of them to be set out as the toxic partner when it's okay to just not have someone be the love of your life and to write about it in fairly clinical terms I think because it's not that I don't greatly enjoy fiction that explores different forms of empathy and of forming allegiances and stuff in fact that's been crucial to me to relate to people who aren't autistic and I think that's one of the reasons that I read books so much as a kid just to get people in a way where there wasn't any immediate pressure to get it right. But I think the fiction that I write is informed much more by that panoramic. Here's all of them. I'll try as best I can to not distort what they're doing, even though I inevitably still will.

And, you know, part of that's because of how I see the world but part of it I think is as well as just from my own influence it's like I love George Eliot I love the individual details of Middenwatch but also just that idea of having your little ant form and it's not that you can't zero in on a particular ant from time to time but it just trying as best you can to write a book where the characters, if they were real people, would look at it and say, yeah, I did do that. I think it comes exactly across as you meant it to. I think that the reason why I felt like, God, I really feel quite seen here, was that it felt real, the thoughts and feelings and also the play,

the kind of tussle that Ava has with Julian and the way that she kind of tries to make him she tries to provoke feeling in him even though she I've 100% done that like that that was I've never seen that played out and I always used to wonder if that was weird but I've 100% wanted someone to like me more than I like them and what I think what's interesting is I don't dislike Ava I think I think that she was a Raw's also I'm trying to use words that aren't so perfunctory but she was a character that was unadorned with kind of falsities and that's what I think my real friends are like and what women I know are like and we might present ourselves differently on Instagram or movies might make us a bit more shiny but for

the reality of it we are all just coping with life and whether that's you know you want to feel like you're being loved but it there was a definite there's such truth to it and that's what I thought the empathy came from in that we can't put people on a pedestal and expect them to behave a certain way and only like people when they fit into a really specific set of parameters and that's where I thought your your characters were given much more freedom and I liked that they were smart and and that there was an edge to them because people aren't inherently nice all the time and I think that to give your characters room to do things which we might see as a bit you know a bit cheeky or a bit rude that is fairness to me um and I found that so interesting and with the relationships and things did you started off with the scene in the bar with Julian and when did Edith come about was she kind of hanging around in your mind did you know that this was always going to be a part of

Ava's story going forwards so Edith came in relatively early in the original draft I think it was the fourth chapter or so just because I'd determined myself that Ava and Julian weren't falling deeply in love and maybe another writer would have gone how do I then intensify this heterosexual relationship but um the writer that I am I was like how do I give her a girlfriend that she does fall in love with so that's how Edith came in really um and what we did later then was when I looked at the finished manuscript there was just something awful about that that I couldn't put my finger on and then my agent Harriet who's an excellent editor in her own right just said why not push Edith back a bit and it might seem like you're marginalizing that relationship to you but actually what it's going to do is give it the space so send you a lean away let this one develop on its own terms

and I think that was absolutely the right call both for that book and because it's really important for relationships between women to be presented as possible without male input and obviously that's a tension in the book that's never fully resolved or weighed in on either way and even if they were both lesbians and had absolutely no contact with men in any kind of capacity romantically you know you're still shaped inextricably by heteronormativity and that's something that's going to affect my writing going forward for sure but it was definitely an interesting way not only to give that relationship space to be on its own but also to question everything about how I'd shown it because then I was rewriting all these

scenes where Julian had been much more of a presence and it's like do I just excise him from all this or do I have Ava think about him as dead and sometimes I did one sometimes the other but as that happened it made me rethink about all the ways that he was implicitly shaping their relationship even when not there. Yeah it's I also love which I just remembered now the other characters like all the Julian's friends at the parties I love them because they were so I can't tell you how many men that I know that are like that awful, privately educated white men that have those really archaic ideologies and ideas. And I think there was the other thing about the book, I mean, I've been talking about it quite seriously about the empathy and, you know, you cover loads of topics, but the real other thing that shines

through is it's really funny. Like it's very funny. I was laughing and there was so many snippets I was like oh my god I can picture myself in this scene this is just feels so true to me I'd be so interested interested to know like generationally how different people have read the book have you like have your parents read it or has anyone who's older because it does it feels to me so um of it's like I I can fit I could fit myself into that story and I could know who those people are like I've met them and I understand what they're thinking and I I wonder if that's something that doesn't always translate into someone who's maybe like 60 or 70 have you had any reception from from that I always find that so interesting especially when I talk about things with my mum and we have a really different idea about you know what life is like to be honest well I cannot

discuss it with my parents I don't know if they read it and I really don't want to because anything that I wrote going forward every time there was anything vaguely sexual and then I'd be like do I have to discuss this with my parents later so that's completely out you can tell I'm Ireland born Irish from that respect I guess or maybe other Irish families are different but more generally there's been a pretty good range of reception like I mean we got a quote from Hilary Mantel which was lovely and a lot of writers from other generations have responded really warmly to it. But I think it depends on what element of it, because liking a book is such an individual thing. And maybe for some people, the things that make them feel heard are the things that will make other people understand a group of people that they didn't previously but I also just feel really badly placed to say how much of anything in my novel is generational because I don't know what it's like to be in a

previous generation you know it's like my decision about which city to write in possibly I could change a number of things and have the book take place in another city but I haven't been so how would I know what to change and I do find it a little bit off when people discuss, especially queer stories through a lens of them being ones that could only happen now. Of course, with the apparatus of social acceptance and understanding, they could often only happen now. But one of the reasons Emma Donoghue is a writer I admire so much

is because a lot of her work focuses on going back to history and putting the lesbians in, and the same with Sarah Waters. And I think it's really important as we push Deservedly for more LGBT representation to always keep in mind that we're showing what has always happened, even though the form that it takes will obviously be informed by our history now yeah no you're completely right to point that out and it is so true that we have to rewrite and kind of reinstate those stories back into the past because as you say they would have been existed they just would have been doctored out by whoever the reigning people were that were kind of creating and writing or even you know changing narratives that exist so that's definitely a really pertinent point to to make I find it interesting that you said you want to wouldn't haven't let your parents read it or hope they haven't read it

um I feel the same way I do loads of episodes of my podcast about sex and like masturbation stuff and the other day I found out my dad was listening to my podcast and I almost died and this is one of the things that I always wonder about writing is it must be I wonder if you felt this like did you very much write with the intention that you would hope that you know your parents didn't read it because there is that awkwardness about sex which definitely I my mum's Irish I definitely know that it's something that probably exists largely in Irish households but I think it does exist kind of universally as well I think people do always find that a bit awkward did you have to really shed that fear of you know writing about these things which could feel quite exposing even though they're not about you but they are

sensitive topics for want of a better word did you was that something you contended with when you're writing or did you write and then think about it afterwards and think oh shit I hope they don't read it I suppose the way I'd put it is I was always aware of that as an area of thought that can stop you from writing if you indulge it so I just didn't I think I'm relatively good at that because if I do go down different rabbit holes I find it very all-consuming so just ignore basically and that's true for pretty much anything that I write it's always unpleasant to think of people talking about you behind your back and forming conclusions about it or people thinking about you differently for reasons beyond your control or any of that and that's just all part and parcel of being received as a writer and I think people have a right to engage with your work however they want

really even if it's your parents viewing it in a certain way and obviously that's not a particularly important instance of that but I think just the broader approach that once you put something out there it's out there and you don't have the right for it to be read at all let alone for it to be read in a different way that's really how I inform how I think about writing that when I'm making it it's in a very different space to any of that and I shouldn't see any link between that and how it's taken because you're invariably wrong when you try to predict how people will take it but even even if you were right I'd never want to feel that I was writing something so that other people would have a particular response to it yeah and I think I think if you did write like that again it would you would feel the clunkiness of it because it would be

controlled and you would feel that there was some element of something kind of interfering and and I I do think that I guess you have to let that go for you was the was the writing process I always find it interesting because I think writers are always inherently very interesting like that you you write a piece of work and then often you know that that's what you want to be people to be enjoying if they're going to read it as you say and and like how much do you do you like this side the interview side of things or do you really feel like oh god it's it's part and parcel of the job you do seem to have a really lovely pragmatism which I wish I possessed and able to kind of see a situation for what it is that kind of objectivity is something which I have not mastered um or do

you do you wish that you could exist outside of your work and kind of not have to be um not responsible for it but what part of it is it that you love the most is it the writing is it having finished the product and be able to look back on it or do you actually really like engaging with people I'm always interested to know this side of things I like engaging but I don't like the fact that it happens from any kind of elevated cultural position like whenever I say anything about what I think about the novel there's always that voice in the back of my head saying I really hope no one thinks that this is more important than what they think about the novel and that's not me being modest or particular to my own case it's because whenever I read anyone else's novel I view the author's thoughts as at most an interesting interpretation so JK Rowling can think Dumbledore's gay all she wants she didn't write it so I don't have to agree and I think it would be disingenuous of me to then protect my own work as the only form of

literature where the author's voice takes prominence and then I guess relatedly to that I feel differently about having conversations like we've just done where we swap ideas about the book and to the degree that I might know it slightly better from having seen it more times that I care to admit I might have different things to say but it's not that my opinion matters more but then the more you talk about your personal life and kind of accede to things that build you up as an important person in your own right separate from the writing of books that all just feels quite weird to me although like you say I do have that degree of detachment from it really because I think sometimes you just have to direct your mental energy towards what you find productive

which in my case is definitely writing books. And as we spoke about briefly before we started recording you couldn't celebrate because we're obviously in this bloody awful lockdown situation but thankfully I hope all your family is safe everyone else is safe but what will you carry on writing this time are you taking a nice relax I actually hate the what next question so I can't believe I just asked you that but it is kind of time to sit back and reflect if you want to or how is this environment changing your creativity like do you feel that being in this position is kind of stifling you or is it making you want to maybe try and write a bit more where's your headspace at right now with everything

that's going on yeah so it's difficult for me to filter out world events so that's definitely a factor in that obviously if I spend hours scrolling twitter finding out what's gone wrong next that's less time to write and also less inclination to do so and then the fact that it's happened to collide with book promo as well it's difficult for me for the reasons that it might be different for a non-autistic writer in that for me it's still a lot of social contact that I'm not used to and you're kind of learning in this that our culture's obsession with the idea of being an introvert is very different to being autistic because all sorts of people who've been professing themselves one

are now like, I miss going out several times a week and I'm like, who the hell has the energy to do that and also have a job, Jesus Christ. But in terms of my work, I'm finding it quite a solace actually. So I have a draft of my second novel,

but it's really sad. It's about two women who go insane and I don't feel like working on that. So I'm writing a third one now that's a bit more upbeat and I'm taking pretty much the approach that I described with the first one to it where if there's a scene that I wanted to write then I write it if I have a clear sense of where it fits into the narrative then well and good if I don't then I still just plonk it down and hope that something comes to me about where it goes but yeah I think having that space to do something that mightn't work out that nobody else might like is really important for being able to actually enjoy it. I was laughing I know it's on mute but

I was laughing when you're saying about who's got the time because I my job is I work from home and I'm freelance so I always I'm in my flat most of the time. And there's that meme going around, you know, and everyone's like, oh my God, we're in quarantine. And then someone's like, when you find out your normal life is quarantine. And that's me. I started self-isolating before they told us to. So I've been doing it for like six weeks.

And it's only like yesterday that I was like, oh, actually I haven't really been outside. I hadn't really, to be honest, it wasn't really impacting me. But I have to do the same as you. I'm sure that I don't get the same impact, but I can't go on Twitter and look at the news because otherwise it's just I can't sleep and it's too much. I'm so excited to read your next books. They sound absolutely incredible. I can't tell you how much of an honor it's been to speak to you.

I was really worried that I wasn't going to ask the right questions. You're such a delight to speak to. Is there anything that you'd want to point anyone towards, apart from obviously buying Exciting Times, which is out now, and I couldn't recommend it enough. Is there any other piece of work or anything? Obviously, there's no events going on, but anything you'd want to point anyone towards at this time? Yeah.

So Rainbow Milk by Paul Mendes was out just yesterday. I was able to speak to him on another podcast, if you want to get a flavour for how he talks about his book first and it's brilliant it's a gay coming of age story from a really exciting new voice so definitely recommend that coming up okay this one's a long time away but because her publication's just been delayed little scratch by Rebecca Watson so I was lucky enough to read this one in advance and I think the way I'd put it is so it's this isn't on a direct comparison level but what Bernadine Evaristo does in Girl,

Woman, Other with using your rhythms and broken sentences to recreate a thought process that doesn't always arrive in maybe the neat way that we're used to she she's very very good at that but it feels completely true to the story she's telling and it's also really absorbing it's not one of those books that you read to see someone be stylistically clever the style arises from telling the story for her and so look out for a little scratch in 2021 amazing thank you so much for these suggestions I've written those down um and thank you so much for speaking to me I'm sure that everyone will absolutely love this episode and yeah I'll speak to you all soon bye Fandu Casino Daily Jackpots Guaranteed to hit by 11pm

With your chance at the number one feeling Winning Which beats even the 27th best feeling Saying I do Who wants this last parachute i do daily jackpots a chance to win with every spin and a guaranteed winner by 11 p.m every day 19 plus and physically located in ontario gambling problem call 1-866-531-2600 or visit connectsontario.ca select games only guarantee void of platform or game outages occur guarantee

requires play by at least one customer until jackpot is awarded or 11 p.m eastern research and supply see full terms at canada.casino.fandu.com please play responsibly