The novelist and essayist Megan Nolan is strolling around Prospect Park in Brooklyn recalling a recent conversation with a friend where he asked her to gauge her life satisfaction, zero being the worst, and 10 being one’s best possible life right now.
She landed on eight or nine: “Because I would just keep everything. I’m not talking about the world. Obviously I would change the whole world.
“But personally, I would want everything the same, and I would just want more money so I could spend more time on the books.”
Nolan (35) is the middle of a draft of her third book, a collection of essays on a particular theme that she doesn’t want to divulge yet.
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It’s through essays that Nolan’s talent became widely recognised – she has written for a broad range of international publications including The New York Times, New Statesman and the Financial Times. She has also written two well-received novels – Acts of Desperation and Ordinary Human Failings – both very different, and with this book she will be shifting gears again.
“Doing something different every time is the only way I’m going to keep doing this forever, or for my whole career,” she says, “because partially I have such a limited attention span that I find it hard to find the requisite excitement to start work on a new project if it’s more or less in the same realm as the last one. I’m just like, ‘I just did that’.”
Nolan’s first novel, Acts of Desperation, landed the reader in the uncomfortable skin of a self-loathing narrator, driven – compulsively, obsessively, almost religiously – by a desire for love and partnership, wrapped up in a relationship with a horrible guy.
Her second novel, Ordinary Human Failings, was centred around the death of a young British girl, with an Irish immigrant family bearing the brunt of the ensuing tabloid and social scapegoating.
It was engrossing and emotionally complex, its fingertips red in the knots of all sorts of entangled things; how class and identity can assume a spectre of blame, the grubbiness of the games a particular type of journalism and its foot-soldiers play to gain proximity to tragedy and scandal, the strange opacity of violent crime.
It was shortlisted for the Encore Award, which celebrates second novels, and for the Orwell Prize in the category of political fiction.
Born in 1990, Nolan grew up in Waterford, living between her mother’s house and her father’s house.
“They had different cultures, I would say. I was Dad’s only kid so it was a much quieter and more sedate household. He was a big reader and really wanted me to be a big reader ... My boyfriend really hates these parents in Brooklyn who are like ‘my kid is going to learn Japanese and learn to read Russian’. Similarly my dad would have hated to be that parent, but he did have this thing where ‘you can read and watch whatever trash you want, but you also have to read a good serious book as well’.”
In her father’s house, she enjoyed being on her own. He would “get me a film every Friday night and leave me alone. That was very important”.
In her mother’s house with her stepfather and her brothers, “it was much more chaotic – in a good way. A raucous household with teenage boys in it”. Her stepdad was “a big music guy”, and so her mother’s house was where she listened to as music.
“That was actually quite nice, now that I’m saying it out loud: I got to have my quiet time in my dad’s house, and learned and studied, and then had a more social cultural life in the other house.”
She took her own initiative with reading as a child and teenager. Over a series of Saturdays, she read American Psycho in a bookshop, aged 11. Reading still offers respite.
“In my adult life I’ve been compulsive about things, compulsively trying to distract myself with drinking, eating, sex, whatever. Reading was the first thing where I was like, ‘uh I feel uncomfortable, but I can just read’. I try and get back to that now when I’m struggling to be where I am: ‘okay, it’s okay to distract yourself, but you can do it with this positive thing instead’.”
Reading is “a way to be alone when you’re not alone. A couple of times I’ve been in relationships where things haven’t been going great or we’re just having a bad day or whatever, or we’re away somewhere together and I’m like ‘I need to read now’. If I’m allowed to read, I can come back to you and be human with you again, but I need to get out of whatever this is, immediately.”
As a teenager, she went to see a Mark O’Rowe play with her father. O’Rowe had written the screenplay for Boy A, the adaptation of the Jonathan Trigell novel, partly influenced by the media coverage of the murder of Jamie Bulger. “I had seen that when I was quite young and had read about the Jamie Bulger case, and had become interested in general in children who are violent or have the capacity to be violent. The second book [Ordinary Human Failings] was a place to put all of that.”
Nolan left Dublin for London in 2015, and more recently New York, where she now lives. When people ask her why she moved to New York, she says there is no real reason. “I didn’t have to come here. There was no compelling relationship or any one thing.” Starting “from zero” is something she thinks is good for her.
She says she followed her nose and ended up in New York. It’s a city where “nobody cares what you’re doing, in a positive way ... It makes me feel like it doesn’t hugely matter if I fail once or twice or more than that, because nobody really is looking. I do find that important. London also did that for me. I hope not every 10 years it’s like ‘okay, you need to move continents again’.”
The differences between London and New York feel pronounced to her. At a certain point, London began to feel sedate, as some of her friends were moving further out of the city and starting families. New York feels freer.
“I wonder how much of this is to do with a cultural fantasy about the endlessness of America. I don’t know if this is good or bad, but there’s an absence of accountability.” In this city, she feels more playful, more open to new people. There is less of a sense of jadedness.
There is the issue of living in America right now under Donald Trump. But how that feels when you’re in it and outside of it is not the same, she says. Living in New York City in particular, with its new socialist mayor Zohran Mamdani and an almost endless menu of culture, art, food, bars and fun, the doom-laden news coverage consumed from afar feels at odds with daily life.
Her brothers “think I’m insane to be here ... I can empathise with that. But it doesn’t feel true. But it’s not like one or the other of us is mistaken. This is where my life is now. Obviously I chose for it to be that way. I wasn’t forced to be here.”
Nolan’s partner, David, has two children, both under 10. “That has changed how I’m feeling about being here. Before, my brothers would be like ‘it’s going up in flames, what are you doing there?’ And I’d be like, ‘yeah, but I can leave whenever.’ I can always fly back, which is obviously still true. But I do feel now I have a more committed situation here, it is a little bit scarier to contemplate certain things. Mostly just healthcare, honestly.”
[ I bought CDs, rented videos and lost my virginity to a boy I met on MySpaceOpens in new window ]
The same uneasy context could be said of London, the city she left, where across England the far-right is rising and people protesting the genocide in Gaza were being arrested en masse. “I was looking at those pictures [of protests in London] and going, ‘how can you think it’s so terrifying here and not feel that way about there?’” she says of the US versus the UK.
“I meant that not as a rhetorical question. I’m actually curious about how that is different to people, why people there don’t feel that way.” I suppose it’s about different frogs boiling in different water? “Yeah, and being like ‘that frog is worse off than I am’. I would imagine I’d feel the exact same were I still in London.”
But her own writing doesn’t deal with the macro impact of the times we’re living in. “I’ve always been a fairly granular thinker and writer. I do struggle to have a big picture grasp on things in general. Not just about world events, but even about my own life. That’s why a lot of my fiction is moment by moment and bodily impulse by bodily impulse ... I get overwhelmed very easily. Both emotionally – myself in my own life – and also intellectually, I don’t feel very confident.”
Why?
“Honestly, because I’m kind of lazy. I know I’m smart and I could probably be more intelligent than I am and I don’t do much work to be so. I don’t think I’m stupid, but I don’t refine my thought very much ... other people think I’m being false-modest when I say this.
“I just know how much I spend working hard, and it’s not that much time, frankly. Like, I work a lot. I work hard in certain ways ... All of which is to say, I find it more approachable for me to consider things on that [granular] level, rather than trying to have a wider grasp on them ... Approaching it that way helped me feel more on stable ground. Like, I know what a body does when it’s experiencing that feeling. Or I can try to imagine such minute things as that, but I don’t quite feel the authority to imagine things starting from a much wider or from a higher vantage point.”
Because her essays are so personal, I wonder has she a strategy in place to protect herself when the reaction comes. “I actually think I would like to get back to a place where I’m more exposed,” she responds. “When I didn’t really have much of a career ... the best parts of those [essays] were when I felt it was too much, but I did it anyway. Not that it’s too much in terms of revealing events or details or anything like that, but the most icky I felt about revealing myself probably ended up being the more interesting parts of those essays.
“They’re edited of course so they do get refined, instead of me just spilling everything. But I think I would like to be more free again, and less professional in my head, less mechanised. I think I’m getting there. I think with this new book, I’m really uncomfortable again, in a way I think will be good ... I’m feeling a bit more gross in a way I hope will be fruitful.”
As for the online reaction to such writing: “Your brain just does cauterise at some point. You can’t be upset about that any more because you can’t be a writer then, or at least not a journalist. I think partly from my experience of journalism, my brain has usefully gone: ‘It’s okay if this essay makes you unappealable to people. You can write an essay that might do that, and that would be okay’.”
Nolan says her personal life “is in good working order”. When she started out writing personal essays, “that was not the case. And so it was very dangerous feeling to me. It was really good sometimes, but it was also potentially not the best thing personally to be doing that stuff”.
“Whereas now, I do feel like that side of things feels very nurturing and healthy and I have a good handle on it and where it should be. It allows for the possibility of repelling people with these things that might be uncomfortable.”
