Love Lives - Naoise Dolan: 'It’s rare that fiction doesn’t problematise queer relationships'

Episode Date: June 8, 2023

“It’s rare that fiction doesn’t problematise queer relationships”...Bestselling author Naoise Dolan joins us this week to discuss her latest novel, The Happy Couple, which follows two people as they approach their wedding day, and the three friends who threaten to draw them apart.Following her hit debut novel, Exciting Times, the Irish author was earmarked by many as the “next Sally Rooney”. We chat with her about how she navigates labels like these, writing queer love stories into the modern literary landscape, and her lifelong love affair with coffee.Check out Love Lives on Independent TV and all major podcast platforms, and follow us on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/millenniallove. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Acast powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend. 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. And I get schooled by a tween. Facebook is like, and now that's what my grandma's on. Thank God phone a friend with Jesse Crookshank is not available on Facebook. It's out now wherever you get your podcasts. Acast helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com. I think it implies the existence of formerly bisexual literature and I want to find the literature where we fucking get to go to the Met. Business class bisexuals. Hello and welcome to Love Lives, a podcast from The Independent where I, Olivia Petter,

will be speaking to different guests every fortnight about the loves of their life. This week I am so excited to be joined by the brilliant author Nisha Dolan. Nisha is the best-selling author of one of my favourite books, Exciting Times. I'm so excited to speak to her today about her new novel, The Happy Couple, as well as hearing all about the loves of her life. Hi, Nisha. Hi, thanks so much for having me. Thank you so much for joining us. As I said, I'm a huge fan of your work and I'm going to get on to talking about The Happy Couple but I want to start off by asking you a bit about Exciting Times because obviously that came out in the pandemic

and to such success so quickly and you know as a debut author I can imagine that is quite an overwhelming feeling but particularly when you can't go anywhere and you're in lockdown and you're doing all of these interviews from behind a screen what did you make of the response to that book and the subsequent attention that that brought you well like you say there was an almost dot-com air to the whole thing where conceptually I'm aware that people are reading it but there's no tactile node to attach that to. I'm not seeing any faces when I speak. I'm not going into shops and seeing it on shelves. So there was definitely then a lag between what I intellectually understood and what I had embodied and felt. And I'm also not an absolute pro at feeling my feelings anyway.

So if I had had a conventional launch and experience, I might well also have had an experience of zoning out a bit initially and only catching up with it later when I had a bit of space to. But I think in other ways, it was probably a softer landing than it would have been if I'd had to cope with a lot of different things at once. I wasn't a particularly seasoned public speaker in my capacity as me I had done a lot of university debating but you can really hide behind whatever argument you're advocating then there's not the same pressure that a week from now people will ask you if you still think this thing that you espoused on a stage so getting used to conversing publicly as me, but without as much of an audience, I think I landed

a bit more softly in that way. And for those who haven't read Exciting Times, could you tell us what it's about, Ruthie? It's a novel where the first person narrator is a young Irish woman who goes to Hong Kong and gets a job teaching English to young children and has two love affairs, one with a male British banker and another with a female lawyer who's locally from Hong Kong but was educated abroad. I would say the main crux of the action isn't so much choosing between these two people as the character's own uncertainty about her place in life and so that's really where the tension lies for her but over the book she comes away towards resolving it even if there isn't a pat ending and it resonated so much with readers I think for so many reasons but I

think one in particular that struck me was that it was one of the first depictions in fiction of that very modern type of relationship that people call a situation ship where there's no kind of definable label to it um I know that you know like I said because it was such a huge hit you had so much press coverage and then I read an interview recently where someone described you as a literary it girl. I want to know what you think of that label and that term and it being applied to you. It's quite a pronoun, it, isn't it? I think it's curious in that to get to the point where anyone would plausibly call you any such thing, you need to have a very self-contained understanding of yourself and what you do you will never write a good book if you pay too much attention to external praise or recognition

but then suddenly there are these terms that really exclusively define how other people are reacting to you that to me it girl connotates that people could not necessarily have made any encounter with your work and still know who you are yeah and that really doesn't feel like anything that I ever set out to do or know how to respond to I sometimes feel like there's a separate character which is the composite of all my interviews and the mosaic that maybe forms if someone sits down and reads all of them I don't know why someone would do such a thing to themselves, but if they were to. And so then increasingly when I meet people, they do have an idea of me that mightn't necessarily have corresponded to me at the time that I did the interview, because that's usually about the journalist more than about me. But

even if it did correspond at the time, it might have been from two or three years ago. But I think I just roll with it to the best of my ability that is generally my approach to yeah roll I think that's the best thing to do I mean because it's funny it's kind of literary it girl I think is kind of an oxymoron in and of itself because like there was all this coverage about it girls recently in that New York magazine piece and they described the it girl as you know someone who doesn't really have a job like that's kind of the definition of it is sort of their mystique and the fact that you don't really know what they do or how they spend their lives so to have like a literary

it girl it seems very strange it's sort of in a way it's almost like I'm sure it's meant as a compliment but I can imagine it feels like almost slightly reductive in a way well also the literary kind of implies a certain um scale here that isn't necessarily reminiscent of the scale associated with it, girls. To be famous in the literary world might mean that you have a few Instagram followers as opposed to a truly interesting number that would make people send you free moisturizer. That is what I long for. Free moisturizer. Yeah. Free anything, to be honest. Now let's move on to talk about your new book, The Happy Couple. So it also focuses on relationships, as the title suggests, but can

you tell us what that's about? It's about a young couple who, at the start of the novel, decide to get married, and then we follow them, I guess, the best man and the bridesmaid who take turns narrating the action as we tick down to this wedding. I would say it's a bit more playful with perspectives than Exciting Times could be because that was through the head of a first person narrator. I still try to sneak other perspectives into the novel but you're always working a little bit against the form when you do that whereas with this one I've really embraced this possibility of showing different people's take on the same incident and playing them off each other and having everyone be the villain in someone else's eyes which is what I love doing yeah I think that really works so well with this story because

it's such a complicated sort of relationship from so many angles so to have all those different perspectives where, like you said, everyone has their own villain and their own kind of narrative, which is so reflective of contemporary relationships. You know, no one is really going to be the own villain in their own story, but you're probably someone's, you're probably always going to be someone else's villain. Yes, it's the dark underside of main character syndrome. Yeah, exactly. Someone else's villain syndrome. Yeah. The book features this quote that I just love.

I think it really captures so many of the kind of anxieties about modern relationships and the way that we talk about them today. Particularly, you know, we're very quick to kind of therapize people and therapize ourselves, regardless of whether or not we've actually had the therapy to give us that kind of understanding. We've seen the Instagram pictures which is essentially the same thing. Exactly yeah so one of the things you write you write that love is letting someone hurt you. Archie who's one of the characters must have learned it from someone too. We all learn it from somewhere but some of us get over it and some of us terrorize the general population well into our 20s and beyond. It's so good and so accurate. I want to ask how true you think that is and where you think we learn that conditioning from? Like, do we learn it from our childhood? Do we learn it

from previous relationships? Do we learn it from pop culture? Why are so many of us going around terrorizing people? Nietzsche would have a take on this. Personally, I think it's probably not any one thing. It's a composite of all the influences you cited and more. And probably a lot of the time it stems from an adaptive response to our childhoods because it's terrifying to believe that you're not being competently cared for or supported as a child and actually it gives you at least an illusion of control if you think that the problem is you and that you can make the environment work for you by just trying to need

less or by just trying to tolerate more and that's often very convenient for others and so nobody's ever going to make you stop doing that and so if it's immediately adaptive and if no one's prompting you to change it, you and rationalizing that as acceptable behavior, that region of your brain that you're building that thinks that's okay doesn't go away when you're then dealing with someone who might put you in the opposite position. And so that's how I think we end up repeating these cycles. And the nice thing about being a novelist

is you just need to observe and you've done something by depicting something that exists. You've done done your bit you don't need to fully understand it no I never need to give any counsel in sessions thank god I would be glad to god so would I can barely counsel myself um I also want to ask you about the ways um one of the characters Vivian kind of dismantles the concept of the one, which is obviously so relevant to this story and is so often applied to heterosexual marriage situations. You know, it's like, you're my one, this is my fate, you're my soulmate and whatever. It's obviously a very kind of archaic idea, but we still really cling on to it, I think, so, so tightly to our own detriment, I think. Why do you think we do? Is it a comforting idea? Does it kind of relinquish responsibility in a way?

Yes, I think you're on the money about that. I think it's very easy to then outsource the work that we should be doing continuously in our lives, in our daily interactions to this imaginary person who is meant to one day materialize. And even when one has an actual partner and is trying to make them fit that mode, it still doesn't always come about. I think it's a way to feel victimized by circumstance when actually there are many things that you can do to make human interaction work for you like take an interest in people who aren't your partner and so it's comforting in that it excuses a lack of curiosity about life in general in favor of a mold that probably never substantially really existed but that maybe stops us from exploring

the possibility of real connection in a more diluted diverse way. And looking for someone to save us as opposed to saving ourselves so to speak. This novel is obviously you know another examination of millennial relationships as was your first what is it that draws you to kind of exploring that in your work is it is it intentional or is it sort of just accidental that this book just happened to be another book about you know kind of young young people in a relationship well I think if I know about something in real life that I've read relatively little fiction about that will always seem like a natural thing to write fiction about because the bar is so much lower to say something new.

That's not to say that if I thought I had something truly novel to weigh in on with a very dumb thing, I wouldn't write it. But it's a lot less likely that my thoughts will be novel if I try to write about people my parents' age because they've already written plenty of their own novels about that. But at the same time, I think there is a goldfish memory symptom in literature where we forget how many things are just true of being young and because a given generation

are seen as the present day young people even when now like millennials are 40 but I guess so many of the traditional markers of adulthood aren't as attainable now. And so that probably stretches out the timeline. But for instance, I think Exciting Times has parallels in some ways with The Catcher in the Rye. There's the same element of the voice that's in some ways knowing and in other ways naive, almost in its attempts to seem knowing. And that's probably always what slightly bratty narrators of a certain age bracket are like. Yeah totally I think every I mean yeah every young person thinks they know it all and is going to be completely unaware of their own kind of shortcomings and misgivings and you know the worst thing you can say to a young person as an older person is to condescend them and I think that's really

interesting as a narrator to have just that voice because it's like as the reader you have to bring your own self-awareness to that perspective in order to grasp that. Yeah yeah and I think when older people label novels about young people specifically millennial literature there's an amnesia the opposite way sometimes sometimes people of a sudden age will ask me why does the heroine of the first one make such bad decisions and I'm just thinking do you forget what it's like to be 22 it's bad decision city also if they were making good decisions what's the novel yeah it's the drama precisely um one uh label that has been applied to your work um which I think says a lot about our culture is it's been called casually bisexual um to me that label kind of just highlights how

unaccustomed people still are to seeing queer relationships in fiction um what do you make of that label being applied to your work and and you know is it something that you feel comfortable with or do you kind of just like let it roll like like you said earlier well I think it implies the existence of formerly bisexual literature and I think it implies the existence of formally bisexual literature and I want to find the literature where we fucking get to go to the Met business class bisexual please but um yeah but I think what it's getting at is that it's seen as rare for literature to not problematise the fact that someone is gay and make it the source of conflict in the novel. There's a grain of truth there in terms of what art, mainstream culture has traditionally upheld and celebrated.

But I also think for decades at least least there have been books that have obviously done that and for centuries there have been books where we all know the characters are gay even though it's not stated in some ways that's the original casual like the picture of Dorian Gray is way more casual than my book in that it doesn't a single time have overt allusions to homosexuality so there's a grain of truth in terms of the need for it to be as easy for a random person walking into a shop to pick up books where the characters are gay and it's not a problem but there's also an element of is this really that new yeah it's interesting i it was it just really struck me that it was described like that it

felt very kind of like myopic in a way um you recently wrote a piece for the guardian about attending your first ever wedding at the start of this year and by that point you'd written the happy couple which obviously revolves around an upcoming wedding between the two main characters but i really liked what you said in the piece about how the fact that we celebrate marriage so much in our culture because I know that you know you were kind of asked by your publishers like what would you mean you've never been to a wedding and you've written a book about a wedding and you're like well no because marriage is so celebrated and so kind of normalized in our culture it's very easy to write about a wedding without ever having been

to one so having now attended your first wedding I'm curious how that affected your view on weddings and marriage generally, if it did. I think because the two experiences were so different, it was hard for one to colour the other in that the book bears no relation to anything that I've ever tangibly seen or experienced, whereas the wedding was so specific to the two people doing it although maybe that's telling in that day and age that young people now can create a truly special experience for them and have it at every stage reflect what they want not what their parents want or not what a given tradition has dictated so for instance my friends got a bunch of us to give short speeches about the stage of our lives where we met the bride or the groom and it really made it personalized but for that reason to compare it with the rather abstract treatment I give it in my novel I'm glad that I wrote the novel before I had attended this one wedding because it was so vivid and fun that it would have really colored what I wrote

but you can't write a novel about a nice fun wedding where you're glad that the people are getting married and it all goes well yeah ACAST powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend. I'm Jessie 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 what thirsty man until there was all these headlines. And I get schooled by a tween. Facebook is like a no, that's what my grandma's on. Thank God Phone a Friend with Jesse Crookshank is not available on Facebook. It's out now wherever you get your podcasts. Acast helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast helps creators launch, grow and monetize their podcasts everywhere.

Acast.com Let's move on to the loves of your life. So the first one is a drink. But I think the reason that you've chose it seems to be a lot more than just about the flavour of why you like it. So tell us why you've chosen coffee. Right, because I would say the source of any ambient anxiety in me as I go about my day is usually the sense that my problems are far bigger than me and I can do nothing but gesture towards solving them. And so when there's an immediate urge or pain that I can fix, and I know exactly why it's there and how to get rid of it,

it feels like a therapeutic, soft way of rehearsing what it would look like to fix the bigger problems, even when I still can't fix them. So another example of this would be the maths training website that I go on every day. And I do these very short mental arithmetic puzzles. I think it's called mathtrainer.io or something. I am now the fifth best in Berlin at this.

Wow. I'm sure the rest of my competition is teenagers. However. Still something. Yeah. So taking an immediate problem, having to work a bit to fix the problem, but then it for something. Yeah. So taking an immediate problem, having to work a bit to fix the problem, but then it's fixed.

Yeah. Not an overwhelmingly modern experience and not the general vibe when you check the news. And so it can be nice. And that's what coffee does. I feel it coursing through me and my day has improved. I love that. I think it's such an interesting way to look at

the kind of daily rituals that we have in our life. Because, you know, like you said, we don't have control over so many of the kind of anxieties and things that we experience on a day-to-day basis. And there are actually very few things we can do that immediately rectify a problem. And I was trying to think of other examples of this. And the only ones I could think of you know I mean the maths thing is probably a very very healthy example but mine were all like smoking taking drugs like it was all like quite toxic behaviors of like getting that quick fix because it kind of makes you think of addiction and I know people can be addicted to caffeine but it just made me think like we need more of these kind of quick fix solutions that aren't going to have a negative impact on our body and mind, because actually, it just helps give us a degree of control, I guess.

Yeah, well, not to be Mary Poppins about it, but I think you can do it with any small, annoying tasks. Like, I find, if I just submit to the fact that I'm going to be fully present in what I'm doing, I can usually end up enjoying enjoying it it's only if I'm half doing it and half worrying about something else that I then find the thing unpleasant because if you're worrying about something that's way more important than the dishes then it becomes tedious to do the dishes but if I do the dishes while only thinking about the dishes you get a nice cheap little dopamine hit and you don't even need to check your notifications so how do you go about having your coffee then do you have it first thing when you wake up do you make it at home do

you buy it out like what's your kind of coffee routine i only keep instant in the house because otherwise my intake creeps up too far more than any human system can handle but i at least try to make it visually appealing and the thing is because of the first coffee it still tastes delicious because I am a starving woman and have zero options and so my body still adores it if it were the second coffee I would throw it right up but um I I make a little instant espresso and I have a little white espresso cup and a little white dish they cost maybe collectively two euro but they bring me a lot of pleasure yeah there's I have I have like a tiny little espresso cup and like a little melt jar and it's like even the silly ritual of filling

up the melt jar to then pour it into the jar first it's nice I don't know what it is like satisfying yeah why does something only to like all it has to do is just be smaller than the thing as you usually see it like it's true of cats kittens are more delightful than a grown cat although they're grown cats also yeah children coffee children depends on the child yeah well they probably won't grow into a better adult I guess it's true yeah it's just when you said children my my first thought was like screaming child on a plane. It's like, I don't care how small you are, be quiet. I want to move on to your second love.

So you have chosen visual art. What exactly do you mean by that phrase, visual art, first of all? And why have you chosen that? The type that I make is very narrow. I will usually just do biro drawings and my aims will be purely figurative but I'll end up enjoying the slant that I put on it maybe because that tells me something about how I perceive the world or maybe because I just love the reality that even if you get a bunch of people into a room who don't have any particularly high amount of artistic training and you ask them to draw the same thing they will all still have a unique take

on it and because I don't ever particularly need to be good at art I can enjoy the uniqueness even when the uniqueness is bad and the fact that it's in biro means that I don't get persnickety about mistakes I have to just work with them and when I do my main job on a laptop where everything is eminently deletable at all times, that's a pleasant change. But then the art that I enjoy has a much wider range. I love going into a museum and looking at things for a very long time,

often without having any context at all. And on another level, I find art history fascinating, but I almost pursue that separately to the experience of just being with a painting for a bit. I think maybe it's linked to having another artistic activity as my job, because then in order to get the psychological release that I once got from art, where I can do it without any consideration at all about contracts or how it's going to be received or how it compares to things I've previously done or anything. Yeah, visual art is a pleasant way to keep up that pure,

almost childlike engagement, I guess. Yeah, I think childlike is a really good way of describing it because I think it's so easy. When making art of any form becomes your profession it's very easy to lose sight of the fact that you know fundamentally this is about play you know in any way and you know whether it's theatre or writing or painting and it's so easy to lose sight of that and then if the second you start creating art purely for commercial gains you lose the kind of the purity of it I suppose yes I think not irretrievably and this is the nice

thing about my brain because the downside is I cannot ever make myself do something that requires a lot of focus unless I find the thing inherently enjoyable this often occasions a lot of disaster in my life but it does mean that when I'm in focus I'm able to cast aside all the considerations about the industry and the reality of getting a thing made and seen through and in that moment I'm just there with the characters but I think having the parallel pursuit of something where that's always the case and there's never any external pressure then helps me get into that zone more with writing yeah yeah that makes a lot of sense and I want to ask you about like your kind of writing routine then because in one of your um when you when you sent over your loves you said that sometimes you can

find writing can be quite draining whereas creating visual art isn't in the same way what is it about the writing process that you find draining and do you have yeah like I said you have like a writing routine because it's every writer is different you know some people will write for three hours a day they'll just write in the morning and then the afternoon they'll exercise or go for a walk or whatever and some will just kind of sit at their desk from like nine to nine to five some will do nothing nine till five and then work in the evenings or in the early mornings what what's your approach I think what tends to drain me is the level of choice and being able to foresee

the implications of those choices and so when I'm picking a given name for a character I can see the full range of qualities that I might associate with that name I can see the names that sound a bit like that name that I now can't give another character or you can imagine that for every other tiny consideration along the way and so usually what I end up doing is in some way constraining my choice so for this second novel I just right, it's going to be about a wedding. There are going to be, I think I started with three narrators who all took turns, like ABC, ABC, then two more kind of snuck in. And the structure ended up not so rigid, because I later moved things around. Yeah, so that initial constraint was very freeing.

Georges Parekh is probably the writer who's influenced me the most in terms of that approach. I think most famously he wrote a novel without the letter E. I haven't gone quite that far, but that's definitely a range of approaches that guide me. And then on a more practical where physically do i go level it's the same principle when i'm overwhelmed by choice i will limit myself in some way i like cafes for that reason because the range of things that i can productively do in a cafe is much smaller than the range of things i can productively do in my own home that's so true yeah i can't go and help clean the cafe for yeah yeah yeah or do your laundry

yeah my god i relate to that so hard i'm like i'm just gonna like go put my stuff i'm just gonna go I can't go and help clean the cafe. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or do your laundry. Yeah. Oh my God, I relate to that so hard. I'm like, I'm just going to like go put my stuff. I'm just going to go wash my sheets. Yeah. Instead of finishing this paragraph. Yeah. But also I'm very bad at sitting in an ergonomic way.

So I like to keep moving throughout the day. So at least whatever disastrous posture I adapt, I won't be there for too long. So I'll break it up with a lot of movement but I don't like to break up anything that's cognitively taxing so I like windows where I'm moving around a lot but I'm not having to intensely focus on anything besides writing so I try to limit my internet time for that reason and I'll write things out by hand a lot too there is the pitfall here that I get very bored typing it up and so I try not to

write too much by hand because I know later me will despise present me for doing that but it's good for getting an initial flow going because of the same constraint factor yeah yeah I do that too I kind of like jot down lots of ideas like on notepads and kind of on my phone but then yeah if I ever write anything too full and then I come to type it I'm just like why did I do that and it's just so frustrating I'm like how did people write full books just on paper with a pen I'm like my hand cramps up I just can't do it well I think the old male author approach was you get your wife to type it I sadly do not have a wife or write it in many cases as well um and so your final love um you have chosen something very unique that I love tell me why you've chosen meeting strangers

yes I love this um first of all because it's one of the easiest ways to make something that would be boring more interesting when I'm in a, if the driver clearly doesn't want to talk, then I will respect their wishes on this point and let them just do their job. But if they do want to talk, that's so much more fun than whatever else I could be doing in that taxi. And my most recent encounter was with a second-generation Irish taxi driver named Jan.

So we had a great chat about her experiences coming over to the UK when she was very small and you don't see that kind of history recorded too often there are things about it small details like what her parents brought with them or the kind of flat that they lived in when they came there that you're not necessarily going to get in a history book and I think a writer really can't afford to be particular about what they want to learn certainly for me because I don't start my books with any particular focus I just see what comes up as I write so I like stocking my inventory of things that I know can be true of people and then maybe it'll come out eventually maybe it won't either way it's good to know yeah that's so true actually and I think you know that's that story in and of

itself highlights how much value there is you know whether you're a writer or not but just in engaging with strangers and you know the idea of just talking to people you wouldn't normally come across and I think it's something our culture really doesn't value and really doesn't prioritize in any way. Like I had to write an article once where I was tasked with talking to strangers on the tube. And you can imagine how well that went. I would literally sit down and kind of turn to someone and be like, hi, how are you?

And people would honestly look at me and just look back. And that was it. Like they were so bold in the way that they I do not care I do not want to talk to you and just turn away um and I think it's such a shame and it's like you know we're really missing out on those kind of meaningful conversations that we could have how I guess I want to ask you have any tips on talking to, having meaningful interactions with strangers? And why do you think that is something that is so alien to us when really it should be the most natural thing in the world, like human connection? My narrow version of the tip would be move to a foreign country and start learning the language. Interesting.

But the broadly understood version of the tip, if you don't want to do that or can't is have some other thing that you're consciously learning and trying to improve at even if the thing is literally the skill of talking to strangers I find even the thinnest veneer of a mask that depersonalizes it a bit really gives you a confidence in going about it so when I first started speaking German in Berlin where I now live obviously I was nervous but because I had a thing that I was focusing on that wasn't me as a person it was rather the specific domain of my German skill it then made any perceived rejection or failure much easier to take than if I had the mindset

that all of me was being rejected or failing so I would imagine that's transferable to just going today I'm going to work on my skill of talking to strangers and if it doesn't go well maybe it's not about me at all but if it is maybe it's just about the small region of me that's associated with talking to strangers so make it less personal I would say yeah I think that's a really good tip and and then just to go back why do you think that we have lost that ability do you think it's the, do you think it's a pandemic thing? Or was this kind of, because that piece I wrote was before the pandemic. And I feel like now having had those periods of lockdown and isolation, we're even worse at interacting with people we don't know.

I think to some extent it's a city thing. And probably to the extent that life becomes harder and harder, that's going to make people less patient and more aware that time is scarce even when it's not literally scarce I think even when you nominally have free time if you feel straightened in your circumstances that time is another thing that will come to feel scarce and you won't feel as generous with it but I find in rural Ireland for example people are still exceptionally talkative. But I find even comparing London to Dublin, both capital cities, I find London is less talkative. And I think it's to do with efficiency.

I think efficiency can almost work against human connection sometimes. So in Dublin, you're much more likely to be stuck waiting for a bus and the next bus won't be for 30 minutes. So you might as well talk to someone sometimes in that scenario it happens less often in Dublin than in the countryside but it still happens whereas in London the next bus will be in five minutes and that's great for getting to where you want to go but it's not good for finding those moments where you aren't going anywhere and you're just enjoying being there yeah it's so true it's such a loss it makes me sad that we don't have that because you're right it's like yes, we can click our fingers and order anything we want. It can be here in minutes. We can get the tube in two minutes. But the thing that we're all lacking and the reason why, you know, we're all so lonely, you know, that's a proven stat about loneliness going up is because we don't have those kind of daily meaningful chats with people anymore. chats with people anymore. Yeah and it's ironic because in some ways we've never been more available to one another but it's remotely and it's via WhatsApp and maybe that's part of it

maybe if the standpoint is that you can text your best friend anytime you don't feel the same compulsion to have a conversation with someone that you might never see again. Yeah. But I always feel so much healthier and secure in my close relationships if I'm having a lot of fleeting encounters it gives me so much more sense of perspective and distance and then I'm able to come back to my deep friendships with I suppose a feeling of lower stakes that lets me be myself around the person whereas if I've only got a tight circle that I'm talking to then if anything goes wrong as it inevitably does sometimes it feels much huger and much less fixable. Finally, before we wrap up, can you tell us anything about what you're working on next after The Happy Couple? I'm writing a novel because it's my favourite form.

But whenever I say something publicly about a novel, the very next thing that occurs to me is I should really change that. In order to keep it about the things that it's presently about, I better not say anything. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. I understand. Thank you so much for joining us. That is it for today. Thank you so much, everyone,

for listening and watching. You can listen and watch all of the Love Lives episodes on independent TV. You can also catch us on all major podcast platforms and all social media platforms. I will see you soon. Bye. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work with you. From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program,

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