YouSaid · the spoken record

Megan Nolan

lines on the record: 44
first: 2022-02-04
most recent: 2022-02-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, yeah, so I'm just here. I work from home mostly, but then I've got a couple of short little time brackets away in between now and when the deadline is. So I've got like two weeks on a residency in March. So I'm hoping that I'll be wrapping it up then and I'll be able to just do some edits at that point.”
2022-02-04 · Intelligence Squared · Megan Nolan on Acts of Desperation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think that's the aim, but I've got no idea how, I mean, they might want to change everything, so it could be longer, but I think 2023 is the current target.”
2022-02-04 · Intelligence Squared · Megan Nolan on Acts of Desperation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, definitely. The main thing for me is I really, really don't want to disappoint my agent and my editor because they both took a gamble on me and they both really spent a lot of their wisdom and time on me and helped to make this book a success. So I would hate to now let them down and to write something that isn't worthy of their time. So I think about that quite a lot.”
2022-02-04 · Intelligence Squared · Megan Nolan on Acts of Desperation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't feel like a lot of pressure to, it's not like the classic second, difficult second album thing, but I think I do have to sort of forcibly forget all of my career context every time I sit down to write this next novel because I just think like I don't ever want to be writing things in what I'm thinking about careers than money and like I kind of just need to make myself remember what it was like and like why I started writing when I was a kid and why I want to do it all.”
2022-02-04 · Intelligence Squared · Megan Nolan on Acts of Desperation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think with Act to Desperation, it was just never going to be any other way because it was meant to be her perspective. And I wanted the reader to be so totally saturated in her perspective. This next one is in the third person at the moment. So that might change up or maybe I'll have like several different kinds of perspective. Who knows? But at the moment, it's all in third person.”
2022-02-04 · Intelligence Squared · Megan Nolan on Acts of Desperation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, Yeah, a little bit. Not quite like I'm not confident enough to like go straight into trying to do a whole, you know, Dickensian or like Elizabeth Strout really, you know, elaborate, great community style thing that I love to read. I'm not quite there yet, but yeah, definitely it's like a bridge between those two extremes. What I'm trying to do next, it has maybe like six major characters and several different settings and stuff like that. So it's a little bit more expansive than this first one.”
2022-02-04 · Intelligence Squared · Megan Nolan on Acts of Desperation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I guess like at the moment the way that I'm best at writing is probably like focusing on quite specific things and then really, really like narrowing in on them and hopefully like describing them to the best of my ability and making quite an intense experience. But the sort of books that I like to read a lot are quite expansive and like world building and they have like whole communities in them. And I really love to read things like that more than anything else.”
2022-02-04 · Intelligence Squared · Megan Nolan on Acts of Desperation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So broad about that, where you can also say, okay, people in America who are in marriages. And that's like, you know, so many different novels. So it does seem like a bit of a redundantly universal way to think about it.”
2022-02-04 · Intelligence Squared · Megan Nolan on Acts of Desperation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was trying to think about this recently. I guess maybe it just happens in every generation that people have to group people together in the same way they would have done with, you know, I don't know, the Amoses and the Hitchens of this world. Like, you know, they have to say the people who are coming up at the same time have relationships to one another, which they just don't always have. And there's some writers who are around my age who I really worship and revere a lot. I'm not really able to write my favorite sorts of books yet. So I would say like anyone that I love the most as a writer, I don't have any actual similarity to a relationship to in terms of style probably. But yeah, and there's a couple of them that are on a more prosaic level. They're about young people in Dublin having sex and being in relationships and stuff like that. And, you know, you understand why those comparisons are made, because it's in a way similar subject matter, but then you can just be.”
2022-02-04 · Intelligence Squared · Megan Nolan on Acts of Desperation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that is probably quite. In this way, we sort of suffered from the lack of live events where, like, I just wouldn't necessarily bother to engage in an Instagram DM conversation with somebody about my book, but in person, these things tend to be more organic. So like, possibly I will in the future speak to more men about it. But it was noted in this writer called Kevin Powder in Ireland wrote a sort of essay about my book and about the reviews of my book. And there was, I think there was like 95% of the people who reviewed it were women. Obviously it's targeted at what women when you look at the marketing for it, I would say.”
2022-02-04 · Intelligence Squared · Megan Nolan on Acts of Desperation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hard to quantify, isn't it? But yeah, obviously it's like loads less, many, many fewer men, I would say, maybe like 10% of the people who post or write to me about it are men, maybe even less than that.”
2022-02-04 · Intelligence Squared · Megan Nolan on Acts of Desperation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mom, and like she would never have suggested that I needed to be with somebody to be happy. And I think that shows just how pervasive it still is, the idea that you need to be in love to be happy, that it managed to even get through all those nets of feminism. And yeah, I think that the sort of empowerment feminism doesn't have it can obviously be quite thin and not very substantial. And I don't feel very empowered by it probably.”
2022-02-04 · Intelligence Squared · Megan Nolan on Acts of Desperation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think that definitely, I didn't like think about feminism, like the word feminism when I was writing it very much, except for in my separate life where I do think about that quite a lot, but definitely the intention of the book was partly to show the failings of those teachings insofar as they've worked out materially and in practice, even in the most privileged of people like, well, you know, like I grew up absolutely fine in pretty much every way and even so still sort of managed to be quite deformed by expectations that evaded the aims of like what feminism was setting out to do to like help us stop feeling that we needed to be with the man to be all right in our lives. So definitely it was like in the back of my mind that I wanted to like think about how that was possible and it's not as though I've solved that question, but it was something, especially like I grew up with a very feminine.”
2022-02-04 · Intelligence Squared · Megan Nolan on Acts of Desperation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I don't like when what does bother me sometimes is when people point out things that she does that are manipulative or ugly and act as though I wrote them without knowing that, you know, like when people say, oh, there's a particular bit where she locks herself in the bathroom when they're having an argument and she's self-harming. And somebody was like, what a disgustingly manipulative thing to do. And like, and I agree with that, but like that's part of the book, you know, like it's not that's not meant to be like, and we're now going to take a moment to be very sad for her tragic sorrow in that moment. It's obviously intended to highlight a lot of different things at once. So I guess that's the only thing that really grinds my gears is when people think I don't, I didn't mean for her to be dislikable, you know?”
2022-02-04 · Intelligence Squared · Megan Nolan on Acts of Desperation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They Yeah, definitely. I think there's, well, my relationship to the book has changed totally, and I'm just trying to figure out how much of that is to do with just me getting older or on how much is to do with other people's reception to it because the character is like an exaggerated, slightly more horrid version of my prior self. When people criticize her loads, I tend to. Mentally distance myself from her further as a coping mechanism, I suppose. So like probably I feel a lot less, I don't identify with her anymore in the way that I probably did pretty much up until I finished writing it in 2019, 2018, 19, whatever it was. So yeah, I guess like I don't really feel like it bears much meaning on my current life anymore is the biggest change probably.”
2022-02-04 · Intelligence Squared · Megan Nolan on Acts of Desperation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, no, genuinely does. Yeah, no, there's genuinely no Akiran, but definitely there are a couple of people that I went out with who would recognize parts of an incident that takes place or parts of a personality trait. But they, yeah, they're so kind of dispersed and changed in the character that I don't think it could terribly offend anyone as far as I know. I don't know if I'm not like enemies with any of those people, but I wouldn't be close enough with them to ask them if they've read it. And also I wouldn't want to patronize them by assuming that they would care as well, you know.”
2022-02-04 · Intelligence Squared · Megan Nolan on Acts of Desperation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm quite anxious sometimes, and so I'm having a bad day of anxiety, sometimes I don't feel very well able to do stuff like this. If I was having a bad day today, I'd probably be suffering quite a lot right now. But, you know, that will be true of any work that I might be doing, not just writing. So overall, I feel like really lucky and great. Yeah.”
2022-02-04 · Intelligence Squared · Megan Nolan on Acts of Desperation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was I nervous? No, it was a funny one because it's all quite contingent on COVID stuff because if you remove COVID from the equation, I was just very excited for it to come out when I first sold the book. And then when COVID began, that was about a year. It was roughly a year between COVID beginning and when my book was published. And so I just spent a lot of that year not really knowing what was going to happen. And if it would be published at that time. And also then dreading the lack of a celebration or like the lack of a launch and all that sort of thing. I was just thinking about practicalities more than about what the actual reception would be like. I genuinely didn't like the day that we had a first review, I was like, I hadn't even remembered that there might be reviews. I hadn't really thought about that at all. So I wasn't nervous. I was just sort of annoyed that I couldn't have a party. Fair enough.”
2022-02-04 · Intelligence Squared · Megan Nolan on Acts of Desperation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Why am I adding to the immediate stress of my life as a person who works a lot and doesn't make any money by adding this into the mix? So yeah, I suppose it was that. It was just like”
2022-02-04 · Intelligence Squared · Megan Nolan on Acts of Desperation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. It's fine. With that caveat. Yeah, yeah. So when I was writing it, I really had absolutely no money at all. Like I was making about like £12,000 a year at the time when I started writing it. sacrificed like having a nice life for a while and I did have a nice life sometimes but when when you don't make a lot of money and your leisure time is very precious to you for that reason and you want to like enjoy your friends and go for a drink with your boyfriend or whatever it is and you have to work more you know it's it's hard to convince yourself to do that so so yeah over the course of the three year three or so years that I took to write it there was quite a few times where as a naturally extremely social person who more or less always wants to be hanging out with my friends it felt like I have no idea if this is worth doing and you know why am I having”
2022-02-04 · Intelligence Squared · Megan Nolan on Acts of Desperation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I was very lucky in terms of the plot and characters. I only had very supplemental editing rather than taking away anything. It was and is quite a short book. So my agent and editors only ever really suggested adding in extra context. So I didn't have to lose anything that I was very touched to in terms of lifestyle. It was quite a lot of sacrifice, not in any sort of, you know, it's funny using the word sacrifice because you feel like you should really do it.”
2022-02-04 · Intelligence Squared · Megan Nolan on Acts of Desperation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I do, insofar as I don't think that she had some sort of really amazing revelation where she suddenly felt full of confidence and full of self-sufficiency. The way that I see it, I suppose, is that it's all exhausted or so terribly trying to pursue this idea that being in love with somebody will save her. And it's all gone so disastrously wrong for her that I just see her as having depleted her ability to try that all the time. And I think she's going to have to try something else now. I don't think she's like really empowered all of a sudden. I just think she's sort of out of options and she needs to try another option now.”
2022-02-04 · Intelligence Squared · Megan Nolan on Acts of Desperation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and it's really, as you say, it's so nice when you do that afterwards, and you can be sure that you haven't cribbed it, you know. But yeah, no, I loved that.”
2022-02-04 · Intelligence Squared · Megan Nolan on Acts of Desperation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You read it before you. No, actually, after my agent gave me a present of it when I finished the book because she said I'd find it interesting. Yeah.”
2022-02-04 · Intelligence Squared · Megan Nolan on Acts of Desperation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I've written enough of it that I'm tired enough of writing it. But that doesn't mean that I think people are wrong to need to speak about things and to get a response about them as well, even if people can individually dislike the manner in which we do that. But it's not, you can't say that it's wrong to need attention, I don't think.”
2022-02-04 · Intelligence Squared · Megan Nolan on Acts of Desperation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think it was something I had read the Leslie Jameson book at the Empathy exams not that long before I started writing the book. And in that, she talks a lot about acting out behaviors which people decry by saying you're just looking for attention. And she has this response, which is sort of like, well, yeah, and maybe I need the attention, you know. And even if it's an ugly way of getting it, it's not actually an inherently evil thing to want attention. And I think, I mean, and I get the sort of, you know, what's the word like I get people being weary about reading the same source.”
2022-02-04 · Intelligence Squared · Megan Nolan on Acts of Desperation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, he was definitely always going to function as the ultimately incidental point of her feelings. And also I think that, yeah, like, I mean, it happened to be him, but I think the story could have been her and probably any number of other people in Dublin. And it just happened to be him. And also finally, the book was always intended to be like sort of almost insistently one person's perspective. So I think it would just make it such a different book if I was to try and start giving his perspective on things or to rationalize things from his view, you know. So yeah, I was never going to go too deeply into him.”
2022-02-04 · Intelligence Squared · Megan Nolan on Acts of Desperation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think I thought about him as an object of very desire mostly. And I imagined the way he looks and like the way that he would make her feel more than I imagined his inner life. But then a little bit more so there's a few bits that I didn't end up in the book that are to do with him and his life. And there needed to be some sort of background for why not even a reason why he is the way he is, but some sort of context for his manner and his coldness and his refusal to be intimate with her. And so I had some thoughts about that and his family background that might relate to that, which, you know, there's a very, very small amount of in the book. But no, I would say primarily I thought about him in relation to her rather than, you know, like a big project of his own.”
2022-02-04 · Intelligence Squared · Megan Nolan on Acts of Desperation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think that it's definitely a moment where a lot of her life with him is spent hiding her true nature to try and be liked by him. And then there's this horrifying moment where all of that attempt that's been going on for years now is actually rendered pointless in the space of a few minutes when he's read these diaries and can kind of see the real her. And yeah, just like the horror of that taking place maybe would have been enough even, but seemed to be part of this, yeah, like unveiling of them both, where her real self is there and then also his real hatred for her is also there. And like, that's the first time they're kind of truly in the same room together being, you know, in that sense.”
2022-02-04 · Intelligence Squared · Megan Nolan on Acts of Desperation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think I didn't have it planned out that it would definitely end in with that specific scene of violence, but I did sort of know that it had to end in some quite concrete and also dramatic way for her to have the momentum to leave the relationship. So I guess I had planned that there would be something about him uncovering her secrets with the diaries. And I think that was in my head already that he would kind of suddenly and quickly see her most private and shameful secrets and private desires and things like that that she had been hiding from him. And then it just sort of, when I was writing it escalated and it seemed to work in that moment to make sense of the clean break. I honestly don't know if I would write that. I don't think I would write.”
2022-02-04 · Intelligence Squared · Megan Nolan on Acts of Desperation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To say. Yeah, it is. And it's funny because it's like it's maybe like half of what I set out to do is that I just really wanted somebody to have an experience with the book and like a genuine An actual lived experience rather than just sort of observing coldly, you know, like sometimes you read novels that are very fine in style and like very intelligent and very beautiful even, but they're quite observational and they're quite removed from their subject matter. And I always knew like.”
2022-02-04 · Intelligence Squared · Megan Nolan on Acts of Desperation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I don't honestly didn't think very much about it before I was doing it because I knew that in the same way that drinking and love and everything else is a way for her to cope with the world so was sex, you know. So it wasn't something that I had to like consciously think, how am I going to strategize to make these sex scenes good? It was just like, yeah, as you're saying, like that is the sort of sex a lot of people have when they're young, young and drunk a lot of the time is that sort of like quite gross and often quite embarrassing sex. And, you know, I had enough of it to be able to write it convincingly, obviously. And also to be fair, I think by the time the book was coming out, I had written a bit about sex in my journalism. So I'd sort of already had a couple of like a hurdle of the first time.”
2022-02-04 · Intelligence Squared · Megan Nolan on Acts of Desperation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Consequences as well, and yeah, obviously you see that more and more as she goes on that she's being drained of her energy by all these encounters in a way as well.”
2022-02-04 · Intelligence Squared · Megan Nolan on Acts of Desperation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“feminist. And again, obviously, it's not to shame anybody for any of these things, but like when you're drunk all the time as she is for a lot of the book, you know, obviously you're not making the decisions that you would necessarily make when you're not drunk. So, you know, I think there's several parts in the book where she's with some guy that she wouldn't be if she was sober and it is because she has an urgent need to feel okay about herself. And so she goes along with it. But you can tell it's not something that is giving her either pleasure or even really the validation that she's there for. It's just something that happens. And because she's in this state of pure immediacy from her drunkenness and her needs, it all just sort of happening to her and she, as you're saying, like probably wakes up thinking, you know, sort of brassly thinking, oh, well, you know, I do what I want. And I did that last night and I wanted to do that last night. And that's true in a way, but it's not without it.”
2022-02-04 · Intelligence Squared · Megan Nolan on Acts of Desperation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He's a kind of broadcasting that I'm okay and I'm attractive. And yeah, obviously it's not a very endurable, like it's not a very durable coping mechanism with these things, but it does give you some temporary kind of past that makes you feel like maybe you're going to do all right.”
2022-02-04 · Intelligence Squared · Megan Nolan on Acts of Desperation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, definitely. I think there's something about especially in the time in your life when you're really focused on perceptions of you and like images of yourself and what people see when they see you walking down the street. And I think we can kind of forget how strong an obsession that is when we're young. Like now that we're probably largely out of that really hardcore obsession with the way people look at you. Like when I was a teenager in my early 20s, I couldn't walk down the street without considering what everyone I passed was making of me and having a boyfriend who I perceived to be, you know, very good looking, looked like he had a shit together, you know, just like looked like an aspirational person. That was sort of a shortcut to not having to worry about that all the time because there was somebody right next to you validating you because you think, well, he's attractive and he's chosen me. So automatically he's telling everyone.”
2022-02-04 · Intelligence Squared · Megan Nolan on Acts of Desperation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At life Yeah, and such a difficult thing to wrap my head around even now because when you are in love and you're in a good relationship, it is life-changing and, you know, an incredible force for good in your life when it works and it's part of a whole life rather than being your whole life. And it was very confusing to try and unlearn or unlearn that the idea that it can be the whole point of your life without totally rejecting it too because, you know, I think I went through a couple of years where I thought, well, okay, now that I've learned men aren't going to be the point of my life, I have to just be totally glacial and never leave room for love in my life. And I still sort of struggle with that about like recovering from being so needy in my earlier life. And I sort of struggle now to let myself need at all openly.”
2022-02-04 · Intelligence Squared · Megan Nolan on Acts of Desperation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Could not have sat in my apartment and read a book and gone to sleep at 10 p.m. Like it was physically not realistic to think that I would do that. I needed like distraction and I needed movement and, you know, dynamism to distract me from myself. And I just couldn't do the sensible alternative. So yeah, that's definitely the moment that she's in as well.”
2022-02-04 · Intelligence Squared · Megan Nolan on Acts of Desperation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To Definitely. And also, love is apparently or like ostensibly a good positive thing. And obviously it mostly and or can be often genuinely a good positive thing. But compared to, say, drinking too much or eating too much or cushing herself, like falling in love is about as unimpeachable a coping mechanism as we have in society, you know. So it's like a good one for her as a cover for how lost. She's really feeling. And yeah, like exactly as you say that, and I know obviously people always mean well when they advise, you know, like exercise. And I now do find exercise really helpful. But sometimes when you say those things to somebody, you may as well be telling them like you have to go to the moon and then you'll feel better, you know. And I just remember those years in my early 20s when I was so uncomfortable in my body and in my life and like the choices I had made, I could.”
2022-02-04 · Intelligence Squared · Megan Nolan on Acts of Desperation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's funny, yeah. I've been thinking about this a lot recently because, yeah, obviously, as I said earlier, the more distance you get, the sort of my perspective on the book is so totally different now than it was when I started it and even when I finished writing it, I wanted to write it as a love story about a love that's like inexplicable from the outside and to try and forensically dissemble it so that you can have some understanding of why these sorts of love affairs happen. But now with like the advantage of a couple of years distance from writing it, I sort of think of the love story such as it is as like an incidental part of her trying to find something and it happens to be that. So I guess maybe for me now it's less a love, a book about love necessarily and more about, you know, methods that she's using to try and find a place for us.”
2022-02-04 · Intelligence Squared · Megan Nolan on Acts of Desperation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Before she met him, and while she was with him, it needed to have, like, she needed to have something concrete to prove to herself that love wasn't going to be the savior for her and that like making somebody live with her wasn't going to take away all her anxiety and all those things that she suspected would help and save her, but in reality couldn't she sort of needed to have this terrible crescendo of it all not, you know, of it all exploding and not working out for her.”
2022-02-04 · Intelligence Squared · Megan Nolan on Acts of Desperation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think that sometimes we can kind of get into sort of a morality play a little bit too much with novels and art in general where there's action A and there's action B as a consequence of that and it's all quite neat and you know how to feel about it and obviously life is like rarely as clean cut as that. So I know exactly what you mean when you say like you just want to shake her out of it and remove, you know, you want to remove her. But I think maybe what I realized as I was writing it and sometimes it was really difficult to like keep making her do these awful have these terrible experiences willingly and to keep on trying to get something that was never going to come. And it was quite draining sometimes to write that. But eventually I realized that I wanted her to have this experience with him because there was like no other way for her to get out of the way she was living.”
2022-02-04 · Intelligence Squared · Megan Nolan on Acts of Desperation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's in her orbit, even because she's so dependent in the book, and that's sort of something that scares me off a lot now is people who have this very total dependence. But I feel like towards the end of the book, I'm trying to, as the author, take care of her a little bit and like make sure that by the end, it's not a big fairy tale, happy ending, but make sure that she's got some sense that the world has interesting things in it and she'll sometimes find them, you know.”
2022-02-04 · Intelligence Squared · Megan Nolan on Acts of Desperation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I didn't like her when I started writing the book and I started from a place of trying to expose her and to try and, it was some attempt to like stop victimizing myself and to like show that even when bad things happened to you as a woman or to me as a woman, I mean it's not an excuse for like bad behavior and manipulation and selfishness and all the other bad traits that the narrator has. So that was like sort of the starting point was that I was trying to really expose her bad points. And then as I got into it and also as I aged away from her, you know, further and further because the book took me a good few years to write, I sort of started to have a bit more sympathy for her, you know. And stopped being so total in my condemnation. So yeah, I still don't like her. Like I would never hang out with her. I would never want to be around her or anybody.”
2022-02-04 · Intelligence Squared · Megan Nolan on Acts of Desperation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT