Megan Nolan
“People say you shouldn’t do an issues novel but I realised I cared about the complex psychology of people capable of violence and harm, particularly younger people, and how reductive we tend to be about its causes.”
“Nolan’s prose is clean and exacting, with an almost clinical interest in the power of shame: class shame, sexual shame, national shame, the shame of the addict. It seems to rank high among Nolan’s writerly principles that the cure for shame is honesty, however ugly the truth is.”
“Suffused with empathy, Nolan’s novel expertly illuminates the parts of ourselves we try to keep in the dark.”
“Gripping…With her careful and caring novel, Nolan shows how misfortune can start with a few bad decisions and how culpability is entangled in providence and privilege. Her prose is slicing and exacting; this is a book that smarts but also comforts with its precise generosity.”
“Megan Nolan is a huge literary talent, and her first novel, Acts of Desperation, is a love story like no other. The writing is intense and honest, with a rare access to real life, but it is also reflective and full of insights, and with this combination the novel manages to separate the idea of love and the experience of it, and take the reader to the place where it comes into being.”
“Wrenching…a chronicle of a sinister, deeply imbalanced and unsettlingly familiar romantic relationship…Nolan’s writing gleams with dark precision. Her narrator’s piercing, almost perverse self-awareness makes the action both more sad and more urgent…The decision to hold in suspicion the very form she is enacting is what makes the book refreshing and complex. What Acts of Desperation illuminates best is the chasm, sadly still enormous, between feminist politics and personal predicaments of love, sex and romance. The novel is a powerful counterweight to the notion that young women today are free to define themselves apart from men…It is satisfying to see a young female narrator wrest control of the story of her debasement, to show both its specificity and its utter sameness, her victimhood and her complicity.”
“Nolan’s raw and uncannily insightful writing glimmers in a way that will shed new light onto wounds both healed and open — and possibly save some other nameless woman the suffering. She tells the truth about obsession and drains it of all allure.”
Megan Nolan is an Irish writer based in New York. Her most recent novel is Ordinary Human Failings (Little, Brown and Company, 2024), chosen as one of the best books of the year by The Guardian, The Times, and Sunday Times. It was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, the Nero Prize for Fiction, The Gordon Burn Prize, The Royal Society of Literature Encore Award, and longlisted for the Women's Prize. Her debut novel, Acts of Desperation (Little, Brown and Company, 2021) was an international bestseller, and was chosen as a best book of the year by Time. Nolan was also among The Observer’s Best Debut Novelists of 2021.
In an interview with Interview Magazine, Nolan was asked about her relationship to true crime: “Obviously it’s good to be reflective and inquire about why we feel so entitled to these stories, what we’re getting out of them, and whether we should be allowed to re-victimize the families of these people and make these documentaries without their consent. But also, I feel like people are ponderous on this question in a way that I find a bit silly, where it’s like, of course people find these things interesting because they’re the most shocking, horrifying parts of human nature. Why on earth would you not find them fascinating?”
Nolan lives in Brooklyn, NY and is currently working on a book of essays.
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© Sophie Davidson
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