Love Lives - Author Megan Nolan: ‘I want to avoid using trauma to excuse all bad behaviour of my characters’

Episode Date: August 17, 2023

This week, bestselling author Megan Nolan joins us to discuss her latest book, Ordinary Human Failings, which explores a family who become tabloid scapegoats after a toddler goes missing from a London estate.We talk about the exploitative tabloid culture and issues of addiction that lie at the heart of the book, as well as what drives people to commit violence, the impact of childhood neglect on adult relationships, and how trauma narratives are too often used to excuse bad behaviour.Catch Love Lives on Independent TV and YouTube, as well as all major social and podcast platforms.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/millenniallove. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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then sold that for money. So I was like, all right, maybe I'll just do that every time. Hello and welcome to Love Lives, a podcast from The Independent where I, Olivia Petter, will be speaking to different guests about the loves of their lives. Today I am so excited to be joined by one of my favourite writers, the brilliant Megan Nolan. Her debut novel, Acts of Desperation, was published to widespread critical acclaim. Now she's back with an excellent new novel, Ordinary Human Failings, and I am so excited to talk to her all about it as well as hearing about the loves of her life. So welcome Megan, how are you? Thank you, I'm very well thanks, thanks for having me. Thanks so much for coming. I'm honestly, like I said, I'm such a huge fan of your work and it was such a treat to read such a different book from you after absolutely falling in love with your first.

But it's still equally as compelling and just completely different and so absorbing. So could you start us off by just describing what Ordinary Human Failings is about? So the present of the novel is 1990 in London, and there is a child who's found dead on a council estate. And there is a reporter who's following this story is the sort of the top line where you enter the book. And then there's an Irish family who are immigrants who've arrived in England about 10 years before this. The child of whom is suspected of having something to do with this crime. with this crime. And then the tabloid reporter is following this story and then kind of goes back into the three family members lives in Ireland through previous decades, which is sort of an attempt to give wider context to the troubles in the family that exist in the present

and sort of how they've come to this point. And yeah, I suppose the tabloid journalist is sort of the centre point that they're sort of brought together by. Yeah, he's a great character. And you can really, there are so many people just reading in my mind, obviously as a journalist, like knowing so many people that he's like a proper hack in every single way. And I know that the plot from this book came from a single line in a book that you were reading about a serial killer. Tell us about that and how that kind of inspired the story. I've been reading, he's a Scottish, he writes novels as well but he writes amazing non-fiction called Gordon Byrne and he wrote this book called

Somebody's Husband Somebody's Son which is about Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper. It's a really incredible book like I don't know he's written he's written you know I read quite a lot of true crime quite a lot of it obviously is even if it's compelling it's quite trashy or like not substantial whereas Gordon Byrne's true crime is like really substantial and he goes and spends his time in these places and um anyway so yeah it's a really brilliant book and there's quite a throwaway line in it they He doesn't go into the details of what happened, but he mentions at one point that a journalist, or sorry, rather a newspaper, I don't know whether it was like a team of journalists or a single journalist, had approached family members of Peter Sutcliffe's, who would have

been by and large quite working classclass alcoholic people and approached them and basically offered them a situation in exchange for information from them which was that they would be put up in a hotel and kind of given free rein in terms of alcohol, given some pocket money and in exchange they agreed to be kind of sequestered, you know, so they're not allowed to give any info to other journalists. And you just mentioned that that was a setup. I don't know how long it went on in reality or anything like that. But it was just a very striking image, this hotel.

And so that was the kind of basis of Ordinary Human Failings was that was the kind of first single image was a hotel with this family being kept. And yeah, again, I don't know in reality how long that situation lasted um and obviously in my book that contemporary part is only actually I think three days or something but that kind of pressure cooker atmosphere of the hotel and them all being cooped up was very striking to me so I kind of took that and ran with it it's a really interesting concept it's so unique and I it's it's interesting what you said how in the book it was sort of just glazed over as like an insignificant detail. But then when,

of course, when you unpack it, there's so much that could happen within that context. And it's interesting what you said about true crime as well, because I'm not into true crime whatsoever. I know I have friends who are obsessed with it and it's all they read, it's all they watch, and all they want to do is listen to murderer stories and all that kind of thing but what you've done with this novel is as the title suggests it's a story about the human condition but it's just within the framework of this kind of true crime story and was that kind of also an intentional thing for you like you didn't want to kind of I guess stick to the typical version of the genre and I guess the more mainstream version that we're so used to digesting yeah yeah absolutely um because yeah

I've always like I remember being 14 or something and getting my first you know headbunty book and like it's not my main thing that I enjoy reading at all but but it's definitely something I've read fairly consistently over the years so I'm pretty familiar with both true crime and fiction um and yeah obviously I got the older I got and the more interested in journalism I became the more complex that whole thing began to seem to me um and then I think it was probably in 2017 I started writing a column for the New Statesman and my first ever column for them was about this book that I'd read called The Sleep of Reason a non-fiction book about the James Bulger trial and and media response afterwards and that was sort of a big shock to read I hadn't because I'm Irish

I hadn't been as familiar as probably a lot of people just kind of culturally would be here with that case and so all of the media response was actually really shocking to me and that they were named at all and and it's a really brilliant subtle book about about all those um nuances that happened after the fact and then also there's a there was this channel for um i think it was probably into that as an age or something like that there was a program called boy a which was adapted from a play by an Irish playwright called Marco Rowe and that was a kind of fictionalized imagining of it wasn't actually the James Bulger case but it was it was an imagining of a case similar to that of of the um the perpetrator once they're being released as an adult so there's a couple of

things like that that I over the years had absorbed and kind of become interested in how much more complex these things are than you tend to see them in headlines and yeah and so yeah I think that a couple of key kind of things like that came up over the years and then also I had I was never a staffer in in a newspaper but I spent time um usually just like covering a desk for a couple of weeks at a time but it meant that I I did spend time in quite a lot of different newspapers um and that that was you know intriguing and and and like for instance like did training days with I never worked for a tabloid but I did training days with people who were working for tabloids when I was in a certain building and I remember being very struck by like what we're talking about Tom like I met this met this kid, you know, he really was a kid.

He was like 20 on a placement or whatever. And he's like so green and enthusiastic and really sweet. And I was just going like, oh, I hope he's not going to go bad. I know, because it is a weird mentality, isn't it? To like, you know, hear about the murder of a child and be thrilled by it. Yeah, and be really excited. Yeah, because your first thought is, oh my God, I've got a scoop. And it's like, that's a very weird psychology to explore.

Totally, yeah. I know that you said in an interview that you kind of wanted to explore how ordinary people can become capable of doing extraordinary things in this book, which is such an interesting phrase because I think within this context, because normally we apply that to huge success and positive outcomes and, you know, kind of rags to riches stories, I guess. But within the framework of the book, it's about, you know, that extraordinary thing is an extraordinary act of violence. And what was it that led you to kind of want to I guess explore that and how how did you also go about I guess getting into the mindset of that because that's also a very dark

place to go to you've having read the book will know there's like a close close third on three of the family members where you really get to see things from their perspective from Carmel and Richie and John's perspectives. And, you know, initially I was like, should I try and do that with the child as well? But it just didn't feel right. And I think it's really, really hard to pull off portraying a child's perspective in fiction.

Like, I just think it can go so badly wrong if you get it even a little bit, like, sentimental or, like, corny or whatever. So I knew I didn't want to go really dark and like actually be in the moment with her when when this act of violence is happening it just felt like crude or something and also because a lot of the book is about the unknowability of these moments that she has in that time with the other child there's you know there's a lot of commonality between most children who are capable of committing violent acts there's like quite a lot of commonality between most children who are capable of committing violent acts there's

like quite a lot of um crossover and how their childhoods began and i had read um there's a really great couple of books by a writer called jesus serini um who again was a very good non-fiction writer about uh there's a girl who in the 60s was a child she was a child who killed two two kids called mary bell Bell and Jesus really covered that situation when it was happening but then also when she was an adult and it's really striking how much you how repetitive the childhood circumstances are with with children who do these things and and so I read quite a lot about about not just children who've killed but about children who behave in you know aggressive

confrontational ways and and so yeah I spent I spent a couple of months reading tabloid journalist memoirs and then reading about um the kind of psychology behind how children can can do this um so yeah there was and you don't want to get too prescriptive or like um prosaic about that and say okay this this this has to happen for a child to do this yeah obviously it differs in every situation but there are you know fairly basic core things that a child needs that a lot of children don't get unfortunately and then some of those children for a variety of circumstances tend to be be violent. And so, yeah, I was kind of interested in trying to, you know, without condemning the mother,

show how, like, some of that early childhood, not even abuse, but just neglect or benign neglect almost. Like, you know, removal from the situation can contribute to the ability to hurt others. Yeah. And that comes across really well because, like you said, you don't blame the mother and you don't blame any of the family members yeah that's because you see everything from their perspective as well but this goes back to another question I wanted to ask you about something that you said about how we're very quick to explain away bad behavior with one reason

or one kind of moment from someone's childhood or someone's past. And I think it's not just in terms of bad behavior in terms of crimes, but also just bad behavior within romantic relationships. I think that is so common now when we talk about attachment theory and all of this like so-called therapy speak that we're very quick to use when we talk about contemporary relationships. And it's like, oh, he's a narcissist and he's emotionally abusive. They're gaslighting me. And these terms are very useful when used correctly. But I think there's this kind of TikTokification of these terms where they're being so loosely applied. And we're just so quick to jump to something because I think it's really validating to feel like we have a singular explanation when there's something that we can't make sense of within the context

of a romantic relationship. Do you think that that is kind of similar to what you set out to do with this book in terms of trying not to, I guess, have that kind of reductive approach? And do you agree that that is something that we're doing in romantic relationships and how do we move away from that because I don't think it's that helpful? No I totally agree yeah and I've been like so guilty of that in the past and I feel like there's you know obviously so much has changed in how we talk about relationships in the last five years even and I think there was a point in this like weird cultural war era like maybe five or six years ago when I was a lot more guilty of like that sort of reductive

way of speaking it's very seductive not to get caught into that and I feel like yeah I feel like things have moved on in the culture a bit or like are starting to move on right now anyway and yeah I don't know it's like very easy to dehumanize people by speaking that way yeah definitely with the book because I think it would be so I think there was there was there was an article in the New Yorker not that long ago about like trauma narratives about like criticizing in fiction mostly but also I think in just in writing about like taking one trauma and using it to explain everything a person experiences and um I think it would have been I would I would have hated to just go okay Lucy the child had a bad

childhood that's why she did xyz which is why I wanted the the whole family story and also then yeah as we said a moment ago to not um to not go Lucy's mom was evil and that's why she's evil you know and that there's obviously so much so much cruelty in a way but a lot of it is is like I don't know if you call it unintentional in terms of the family's background but but a lot of pain which has just been kind of wrapped in silence for them all and and ends up hurting a lot of people without active cruelty um and yeah so i think it was important to not have like one explaining factor as you say um and yeah i think that would be also it's dangerous to explain anyone's like bad or or troubling behavior

because yeah then it's well you know a it's kind of an ability to excuse it in a way or for the person to excuse it and and also yeah it's just a bit yeah yeah dehumanizing because it's i don't know people are so complex like every single person is so has so much and like to a degree that's quite scary if you actually think about it and like that's why we're not really like why the internet isn't actually like our brains are not ready for it because it's it's impossible to like really grasp how how like subtle and complex every single person is and if you're revealed to that many people it's sort of impossible yeah well i was about to say like that is all i agree with you but you can't put that in like a 20 second tiktok video yeah people

are gonna share with their friends let's talk about Desperation. For those who haven't read your first novel, can you introduce it to us? So Acts of Desperation is a novel that came out in 2021, which is about, it's told, a story told in the first person by an unnamed narrator who's a young woman in Dublin, mostly in Dublin, kind of flits a little bit between locations then. And she, when we, when we come come to know her she's I think 22 at the beginning and she's very much adrift in her life she's dropped out of university working kind of menial jobs doesn't really have any center to her life she's drinking a lot going out a lot sort of flailing around her life and looking for some meaning and she finds it in this relationship she falls sort of obsessively in

love with this man called kieran who she meets um at a gallery opening and then becomes embroiled in this uh in this obsessive relationship where she she is very much the desire the the one pursuing him and he's you know interested but very cold um and won't give her any of the validation and and kind of reciprocity that's the word right um that she that she's seeking this kind of goes on like that for a while and then um there's a kind of shift in dynamics in the book then about maybe halfway through where where some things change and the dynamic is if not flipped is is then gradually changed in a way that um I think begins to reveal to her that this romantic love that she sort of based her entire worth and point of life around

is is not going to be the thing that saves her and that this man is not going to be the thing that gives her meaning yeah I mean it's a really like astonishing book to read and I'm actually I'm so pleased that something like that has been so well received and has been so widely read because I think it's it's not the first thing you think of when you think of a sort of commercially successful book because it's a story about a woman in an abusive relationship and I'm really pleased that that story has been so widely kind of shared were you surprised at its success yeah I was hugely surprised yeah um because I guess my background was well I obviously have a journalistic background but but my creative work was kind of separate from that and was always um you know in fairly

niche literary journals a lot of the time I was doing like performances in art contexts and so always in quite you know like and I was happy to do those things um but all of which is to say that when I was trying to sell the book I kind of thought to myself okay great we'll get it with like a really small press or like even an art gallery we might produce like a text or something like that yeah so I was not expecting it to be um sold in a commercial way so yeah it was it was completely a shock to me. Yeah. And because it was so successful, I mean, you were interviewed loads about it. And I, what I find so interesting, we know that it's no secret that, you know, female novelists are continually asked if their work is autobiographical, because people don't seem to understand that women

have an imagination. But I know one thing that you said that was interesting, is that the narrator's feelings and emotions were partially based on you, but the events in the book are fictional which I think is a very common experience for a lot of debut novelists yeah but I wonder what it was like for you talking about the book in that framework and being asked you know how much of it was based on your own experiences because it's a very dark book and I think what people maybe don't realize what they are essentially asking you by asking you that question is have you been in an abusive relationship which is a very messed up thing to ask someone um so what did you make of that how much did that happen how did you handle that

yeah it's a funny one because quite a lot of people kind of preempted it by saying that they weren't going to do that, but then sort of doing it anyway. You know, they're kind of like, so I bet you're getting a lot of that. But so, yeah, I've always obviously been quite upfront about it would be insane if I was to try and like conceal that. Obviously, the book is like personal to me and also the biographical details of the character mirror mine very closely in terms of like age and where she lives and things like that and partially that was to do with like me not really feeling the confidence to write um I don't mean this in a like self-derogatory way but like a proper novel like as in I didn't have a background in writing fiction so I think it felt a bit safer to like base some logistics on things that I felt authority over such as location and even like again with the new novel I think I'd

find it really hard to set a novel in a city I didn't once live in or spend time in things like that so that was partially why and then also just like I was interested in writing about these subjects that I had experienced myself um and you know the events while largely fictional of course there's like some things in the book that actually happened to me or like and by that I don't even mean like the really interesting stuff I mean you know like observations about people in Dublin or whatever um but then yeah when people would ask me about it I was like there's no real satisfying way to answer that question because literally unless I'd take you to the book and go that happened that didn't happen there's no real

way to answer it you know I'm not going to break it down to that extreme degree because that just makes the book so boring as well yeah but I just wonder where that question even comes from because is it a lack of understanding about a novelist's process as a writer and in terms of how they're able to fictionalize things or whatever or within the particular story of this book is it a lack of understanding around like female trauma in a way that they feel like that they can ask things like that because I think I think it's true with lots of female novelists when they write about difficult subjects and and then are kind of expected just to answer I answer questions about it.

And another example is my dark Vanessa. I don't know if you've read that. And I remember the author of that book. She had to issue a statement on her website saying, please stop asking me whether the story is based on me because it was a story about grooming. And it was, you know, it was very strange. And I found it really upsetting that she felt

that she had to write that statement. Yeah, and in a way it's like well you know I wrote a book to not have to exactly say these things um or to like specify certain things or use certain terms you know um like a lot of the time also people want you to well you know again like yeah use specific terminology that's well it might be accurate like factually accurate to call something that happened in the book x y and z like there's a reason why i wrote the book rather than an article and yeah you want to explore those things in a in a less like determined way um but yeah it was it was mostly fine like i would say more people than i expected to were respectful of

that um and yet occasionally people were really blunt about asking, like, have you been sexually assaulted? And like quite literally, like someone asked me that while on like live on a recording. And I was just like... Why do you think people aren't like... I don't know. And she didn't seem to think she was being rude at all as well. That's what I mean.

Clearly she doesn't. Otherwise she wouldn't ask you. And I'm like, why is it that we live in a world where people think they can ask you that? Particularly live. I mean, my God. Oh, that sends shivers down my spine so I'm writing I'm writing I said I wanted to ask you all this because I'm writing my own novel now and I'm like oh god are people gonna expect me to talk about that um both of your books um both of your books also explore alcoholism yeah and I know that

you've said that in a small community where you grew up you kind of really saw the effects of alcoholism and addiction is that what what was it about that that made you want to put that into your fiction because I think also alcoholism is another subject that is so widely misunderstood um I think you know when we picture an alcoholic we picture someone waking up and downing a bottle of vodka. But it's so far from the reality. And that's a problem because it stops people from recognizing their own alcoholic tendencies, I think. Definitely. Because they think they're so far removed.

So is that something that kind of made you want to write about it and explore the more kind of nuanced version of that? Yeah, I think it's really hard to i've i've often talked and written a little about this that like unless if you're still drinking if you're currently drinking it's basically impossible to talk about having a problem with alcohol like people really need you to have become sober to allow you to talk about it which i understand because it's so uncomfortable um but i do think is a really dangerous thing that people feel that they have to be sober and dry before they can even refer to the fact

that they struggle with these things sometimes. And yeah, I felt like when I dropped out of college, I had a really bad period of like, and again, it wasn't waking up in the morning and drinking, but just like going out every night and like, because I didn't have any structure to my life then you know if you have a job or you go to school or whatever you kind of have a natural inbuilt limit and when I didn't have that structure I got quite scared by how easy it was to get carried away with

drinking and and yeah as well if you're young it's like kind of feels like everyone's doing it even though they're not maybe doing it to the same degree that you are, it's kind of easy to cover it over. So I have the experience of being really frightened by that and like feeling like it might go really badly wrong, or you might, you know, not know where to stop. And I still struggle with like periods

of not feeling completely in control of not just drinking but with like lots of things in my life that I don't have a very good um inbuilt stop button with lots of things um and like sometimes that's work and that's not a bad thing but sometimes it's things that are bad you know um so yeah I just have a lot of sympathy for end time for people who suffer from um reliance on substances and and um and i think yeah like the character of richie in the new book again like starts with him just being a bit lost in his life and and not not i guess it's also easy to forget that like the reason people start to drink is because it is fun and like is a connector of people I kind of wanted to portray

that a little bit with like him you know him before he kind of has this disastrous thing that happens because of his drinking the night begins in a really nice lovely way and then you know for a lot of people that would have been fine and they would have had that good time and been able to stop at a certain point and then obviously a lot of people are not able to stop at that certain point um but yeah it's something I care a lot about and like feel very personally about and and yeah there's obviously people um that I've known in my life who suffered really horrendously with with that and and yeah I just I just would like people to to have a little bit you know I find it really gross when you'll see quite a lot on twitter if someone's like i don't know trying

to insult another person who they know to have a drinking problem with they're very easy to like use it as an insult and and like really be like disgusted by people who have these problems in a way that i find like really anti the generally progressive like vibe that they're trying to portray people are very strange about drinking i think think. They often, I think it's one of those things that is very hard for people not to project their own issues onto others with. So, like, you know, I think it's one of the reasons why when someone, you know, goes out for the night and doesn't want to drink because it makes them feel a certain way. And, you know, they'll be like, oh, why aren't you drinking tonight? And then it's a big deal because the other person is suddenly made to feel, like, feels like oh well do you think like i'm an alcoholic yeah it's a really weird thing acas powers the world's best podcasts Here's a show that we recommend.

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here that like uh I was okay so last night I was sometimes like when I get into um a stressy work mode which I kind of have been the last couple of weeks I can't concentrate on reading it very well at all except for like the most functional or you know usually like a magazine article but last night I read this book called Big Swiss have you come across that it's really good but yeah just like a really juicy novel and um and like read almost all of it in the bath in one sitting kind of thing and I was just thinking about like when I was a kid I was quite nervous not I wasn't like quite anti-social like I had friends but I was quite socially anxious even when I was a really little kid and I didn't know how to behave in certain situations and I just yeah I just found like being in the world quite tough and reading was like back then you

know as an adult you develop all these coping mechanisms some of which are healthy and some of which are not including drinking and all that stuff and uh but at the time like my only coping mechanism was reading so I just have this very like comfort comfort food relationship with with reading fiction where if I felt really freaked out as a kid I would just sort of hide and and that was the only thing that could completely take me out of it um and yeah then as an adult obviously like I kind of quite compulsively read fiction um and if I'm stressed uh if I can like bring myself to try and concentrate then reading fiction is the only like really wholesome stress buster that I have yeah um but yeah I think I was saying that like um I really love those like big kind of sprawling like birth

to death novels um like Somerset Maugham or like Dickens because they yeah I don't know it's like very satisfying to feel as like you do not actually feel in real life that you can kind of have an overarching view of life and have like some sense of narrative purpose, which really does not exist in life. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Order and control. Yeah. Yeah. I liked what you said when, and it's kind of touching what you said earlier about not having an internal stop button, which I think is something that a lot of people can relate to. But you said that it's, you know, probably one of the only healthy coping mechanisms that you have um but it does do some of what the unhealthy ones do by kind of letting you forget yourself but without the danger or guilt attached so I want to ask you why you think it's so important that we have that moment of respite where we can kind of like forget ourselves and step outside of ourselves

and why the majority of the things that help us do that are so unhealthy aside from reading fiction yeah what what else is there and like exercise or yeah like I mean again okay so partly partly what active desperation is about is like doing that with romance and and obviously in acts of desperation that's like portrayed as being a negative thing but but obviously it's not only a negative thing and I yeah I find like obviously if you're falling in love or are in love then that's like the ultimate feeling of being able to escape yourself in a healthy like joyous way but on my own yeah I feel like reading and being with my friends honestly is like the only thing that if I if I feel really overwhelmed I just need to be with another person whether that's

through fiction or being with my friend or my partner or whatever it is yeah it's just about getting out of your own head yeah and I'm not very good okay I'm like well I'm incredibly bad rather at like any sort of meditation or just sitting with yourself, like really bad. And I'm trying to get a little bit better, but. No, I'm so bad at it. I've started doing acupuncture recently. One of the worst things about it is that you have to literally lie there for 30 minutes in silence with needles in you.

Yes. And just lie there. And my mind is just going like into overdrive because I'm like, I should be relaxing. I should be relaxing. Yeah. Needles in me. Oh my God, is one moving. I can't. And you have to do that for 30 minutes and it's torture yeah

exactly just like last night trying to go to sleep you know just lying there for two hours being like I can't stop thinking you know yeah um so yeah I really struggle with that and and I just find like it's not something I'm happy about necessarily but yeah basically being with a person is the only way that I can really guarantee to to escape that feeling yeah um but yeah I think I obviously it's such like a sensorily overwhelming world to live in at the moment and and because we're not so great at being alone because you know our attention spans are shot from living the way we do it's really hard to find yeah to like not need need a bit of like time out from from being overwhelmed by the world but also not being able to like meditate necessarily yeah I know I wish I was one of

those kind of wholesome mellow people me too yeah I'm just gonna go meditate I'm really stressed right now and then come back and be like okay I'm floating like a butterfly if that's just not who I am no um to be honest I don't know many writers that are like that I was just thinking I was like that's why I'm good at my job yeah that's why we're good at what we do. Okay your second love is a family member tell us why you've chosen your dad. So my dad and I are very close I'm close with all my family but my dad and I kind of have a special bond because I've got two older brothers who belong to my mum but they've got a different dad to me so I'm my dad's only kid which just means that we spent a lot of time one-on-one when I was growing up and even though I love all my

family equally we just have a kind of special bond um that has to do with those kind of formative years spent just the two of us um because my mum and dad split up when I was quite young um so yeah me and my dad probably probably see each other um maybe like four times a year but it's like definitely the highlight of my year getting to spend actual substantial time with him a lot of the time it's just for a day or two but at christmas time for instance i always make sure to have like a full week where i can just like do nothing and walk around with him for a couple of days um we're really really close and like like painfully close where it's like a big source of sadness in my life just like worrying about him and like anticipating something bad happening to him you know

yeah I yeah I have that with oh god this is ridiculous I have that with my cat it's like an unhealthy an unhealthy like attachment yeah exactly but you do you like kind of catastrophize yeah like preemptively working through these things yeah yeah which is like obviously ridiculous because it's going to be awful no matter what happens like no matter how much you anticipate it yeah which i try to remember it's like this you're just wasting your time because it's going to be as bad no matter what you know yeah um but yeah so like it's painful as well but um he's definitely like you know i guess like a problem in my life has often been that I feel very like weightless and like insubstantial in the world or like I don't know where to.

I don't feel like attached to things in a way that I should maybe. And he's sort of the main foundational part of my life that I feel like if I'm really. And as well, because I've like moved around a lot in my adult life and I continue to move around a lot and you know I'm not a very settled person in that way which is obviously by choice more or less but um but that comes with a lot of downsides as well as positives and I feel like my relationship with him is is like really crucial to me not feeling completely lost in the world when I am sort of adrift in these ways. And you said that he's also a writer. Yeah, he writes plays and directs plays.

So yeah. Is that one of the main things that you think kind of bonds you together just from a kind of, I guess, intellectual point of view? Do you talk about writing? Yeah, we talk about our work. Mostly, like sometimes about functional things, as in like if one of us has a problem with a certain scene or whatever, we'll discuss it a little bit. But a lot of the time it's more about like you know he's very sensitive like me and and like suffers a lot with his work as I do and I don't mean that

in like a tortured artist way I just mean like I think it's awful and like struggle to be able to show it to anyone and that kind of thing and you know we both like suffer with confidence quite a lot um so it's sort of yeah like trying to bolster each other in that way more more so than anything functional um but yeah he's like I mean he was always very supportive of what I wanted to do but also was like you know you're never gonna make any money though so he was like trying to make me aware of the functional downsides but also like he was like very supportive as well yeah yeah in terms of the confidence with your writing how was that different between the first book and the second book did you feel like that was an improvement with the second book um

yes and no so with the first one because there were kind of no stakes because there was no book deal or whatever I just wrote in my spare time and then we didn't you know show it to any editors until I'd finished it oh I didn't know that yeah so there was like a bit of freedom in that because nobody was waiting for it so I could take I took like three years and just did it in my spare time so that was like it was scary still writing it and like I didn't feel like oh this is brilliant when I was writing it but it also kind of didn't really feel like it mattered hugely not that it didn't matter but like that if it went if it if we handed it in and it was bad it's like all right well I'll just keep on working then and whereas this one was was contracted um so it was a bit scarier in that

way because I had a deadline and also yeah I'd never written full-time before in that way and I you know and I still don't know this like for the next one for instance like is it you know you don't know if it's going to be possible to write a good novel in the time that you've allocated yeah and there's no way to promise somebody that you will have you know and your third love I'm so pleased you've chosen this um because as you said in your email I think this is something that is getting pretty bad press at the moment um tell me why you've chosen dating um I've always been a huge dating fan I mean I came to it quite late as in like I never did any online dating or anything

like that until I came to London in 2015 16 something like that um and I just found I love meeting new people and it's like I get a lot of pleasure and energy from random encounters so this was like oh wow it's like very very easy for me to experience that feeling, which in the past was like, I think that only happened to me rarely. I can now meet new people, you know, sometimes in hopes of finding a partner, but quite often just because it's like fun to meet new people. And yeah, obviously it does get quite a bad rap at the moment. And I do, to give a pre-show, I do understand that like,

if you're very, very seriously looking for a partner I can imagine it would be a lot more demoralizing than I've tended to experience it um but usually well like I met my last serious partner on on an app so you know it has happened for me in that way but quite often it's like more of a not that I'm opposed to meeting somebody seriously but it's it's a little bit more haphazard than that and it's a little bit more like frivolous than that for me um and yeah I don't know I think as well when I went in I spent quite a lot of time in New York over the last couple of years and it's like a really fun way to see the city basically and like meet people there and um and people there are like really casual about dating in a way that I really like

I was about to say I imagine it's a very different environment. Yeah, it's just like really spontaneous and a little bit more fun. And I just find it really, I mean, there have been times when I've like, when I've regretted going into situations like, like say if you leave a serious relationship and then go straight into dating. like say if you leave a serious relationship and then go straight into dating I found that quite painful because you have to like go into these like online situations with the basic understanding that most people don't you're basically being not being seen as a full person on you know you're going into it with both of you not really perceiving the other as a full-rounded human being so if you're leaving like a loving relationship and going into that whole scenario

it can be a bit jarring to be like wait why aren't you being really really nice to me you know yeah I think that it's so interesting because it's that gap isn't it between when you come out of a serious relationship when you come out of any kind of meaningful partnership and then you think right I'm just gonna go and meet someone I'm gonna get on an app and and you it's not that like you know what you're doing you know you're on a dating app and you know that it's sort of like a game and whatever. But I think then the reality of, like you said, sitting down to meet someone and it's so flippant and it's so casual. And then you might never hear from them again. Yeah, exactly.

It's quite hard to get used to. It's really hard. And it's like the kind of the fall from grace, so to speak, is so dramatic. How do you, if you have like a bad or disappointing date now, how do you handle that? Do you kind of just write it off as a funny story or do you just try and move on as quickly as you can and like compartmentalize it?

Yeah, the last like bad date I went on, I just immediately wrote a short story about it and then sold that for money. So I was like, all right, maybe I'll just do that every time. Well, it's great being a producer. Like this is my life in New York. This is how it's going to go. I'll just go on a lot of Well, it's great being a writer. Like, this is my life in New York. This is how it's going to go. I'll just go on a lot of bad dates

and then write short stories about them. Okay, genius. I'm going to do that as well. Okay, that's great. For people that aren't writers, how do you handle it? Because how do you not, I guess because it is such a demoralizing experience.

Yeah. You've had so many disappointing dates or, you know know you can yeah someone on an app and have such great yeah yeah great conversation then you meet them in real life and it's it's just zero it's just there's no spark there's nothing yeah how how do you pick yourself back up from that or like just motivate yourself to to keep trying whether it's on an app yeah but just how do you stop yourself from spiraling into that place where you think this is pointless I'm just going to be alone forever which is yeah

unfortunately the dark traumatic places that your brain goes to um I had some really good advice I mean it's very simple advice but kind of needed to hear it from a good friend of mine um after he's in New York and then I'd gone there in 2020 just out of a relationship and long-term very you know loving happy relationship and we had an amicable breakup but obviously it was upsetting and then I was going on these dates many of which were really fun and like I'm still actually really close friends with several of the guys that I went on a couple of dates with back then but then obviously yeah like went on a bunch of shitty ones as well and then I went around to my friend Orlando who's like my oldest friend he's old friend one from Ireland but he lives in New York now and has been there a long time and um

kind of went to his house and was like complaining about these feelings and like how bad it felt to go on some date or other and he was like well yeah again like what we were just talking about basically he was like well of course you feel bad because you're like going from being around the person who loved you to being around this person who doesn't and actually you should just be with people who love you right now like me you know like like you and actually that was the only thing that made me feel better after those things was like oh I'll just go and be with people who love me like my friends and and I know that sounds like very very trite and like your friends are all you need which is like not actually how I feel but that's also not what you're saying but that's a really that's a really good point I think just generally yeah like if

you're in need of a bit of care that's totally fair and like you should access that in a different way and like save the dating for just like some frivolous fun when you're ready for that you know I think you just have to accept that if you're looking for kind of instant care and love and like warmth you're just not gonna get no no it's not gonna be very attractive if you are either that's it for today thank you so much for listening you can listen to all episodes of love lives on all podcast platforms you can also watch us on independent tv and all social media platforms and all connected devices i will see you soon. Bye. ACAST powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend.

I'm Jessi Kirkshank, and on my podcast, Phone a Friend, I break down the biggest stories in pop culture, but when I have questions, I get to phone a friend. I phone my old friend, Dan Levy. You will not die hosting the Hills after show. I get thirsty for the hot wiggle. I didn't even know a thirsty man until there was all these headlines.

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