The award-winning Irish novelist on the psychology of violence, why prurience is natural and writing in bed
Columnist and author Megan Nolan, 33, was born in Waterford and lives in London. Her first novel, Acts of Desperation, narrated by a self-destructive millennial in a degrading affair, was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas prize and won a Betty Trask award; its fans include Marian Keyes and Karl Ove Knausgaard. She’s now on the longlist for the Gordon Burn prize, as well as the shortlist of the inaugural Nero fiction award (announced on 16 January), with her second novel, Ordinary Human Failings, about an Irish family targeted by the press after the killing of a toddler on their south London estate in 1990.
Was this book consciously departing from Acts of Desperation?
No. I have to stop denigrating that novel – I keep on being, like: “Urgh” – because it’s really rude to people who actually like it. Young women, especially, write to me about it in very moving ways. The melodrama of that book was an attempt to exorcise once and for all subjects I’d written about in my personal essays. The reason Ordinary Human Failings is so different is that I didn’t feel I had the authority first time out to write the sort of [Jonathan] Franzen-y family saga I like to read best; Acts of Desperation gave me the confidence to try. Publishing a novel had always seemed an unrealistic ambition on a par with winning the lottery – and then it happened relatively easily. Writing it was hard work but [getting published] was shockingly smooth, which made me feel like an idiot for having agonised for years. I thought: “OK, maybe even though it feels unlikely that you can write a more traditional novel, just do it.”
