Title: Acts of DesperationAuthor: Megan Nolan
First Published: March 9, 2021
Publisher: Little Brown and Company
Pages: 288
Genre: Literary Fiction
Format: Hardcover
Source: Library
Rating:
Synopsis:
Wouldn’t I do anything to reverse my loss, the absence of him?
In the first scene of this provocative gut-punch of a novel, our unnamed narrator meets a magnetic writer named Ciaran and falls, against her better judgment, completely in his power. After a brief, all-consuming romance he abruptly rejects her, sending her into a tailspin of jealous obsession and longing. If he ever comes back to her, she resolves to hang onto him and his love at all costs, even if it destroys her…
Part breathless confession, part lucid critique, Acts of Desperation renders a consciousness split between rebellion and submission, between escaping degradation and eroticizing it, between loving and being lovable. With unsettling, electric precision, Nolan dissects one of life’s most elusive mysteries: Why do we want what we want, and how do we want it?
Heralding the arrival of a stunning new literary talent, Acts of Desperation interrogates the nature of fantasy, desire, and power, challenging us to reckon honestly with our own insatiability.
Buy the Book: AmazonReview
This book was toxic, and I ate it up, devoured it, asked for seconds. The unnamed narrator is in her 20s and stuck in an all-consuming romance with an older man named Ciaran, a severe writer who has already experienced his one great love. From the very beginning, their whirlwind romance is troubling. Ciaran is aloof and critical of the narrator. He is still in contact with his ex-flame and is very comfortable dismissing all of the narrator’s concerns about their relationship. She becomes utterly obsessed with winning his affection, even as she spirals into depression, forcing herself to act in any manner that will keep him.
The push and pull of this story was exhausting but extremely relatable. I read this book after a straight year of casual dating, which built my confidence and knocked it down to hell. Hello, it’s me; I’m the foolish woman that falls hard for people that I know don’t feel the same way about me to the point where I felt that I was going mad, clawing for the kind of affection I desperately wanted. This book exemplified this yearning perfectly like a paper cut. It is an intensely ugly novel and was such an impressive debut I couldn’t help but love it.
Quote
“I was shocked that he was not impressed and cowed by my delicacy, as other boys had been.”
Content Warnings
View Spoiler »About the Author
About Megan Nolan
Megan Nolan lives in London and was born in 1990 in Waterford, Ireland. Her essays, fiction and reviews have been published in The New York Times, The White Review, The Sunday Times, The Village Voice, The Guardian and in the literary anthology, Winter Papers. She writes a fortnightly column for the New Statesman.
Readings and performances commissioned across the U.K. and Ireland have included the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Goldsmiths Lit Live, Kunstraum Gallery, Cubitt Gallery, Wysing Arts Centre and the South London Gallery. Internationally, her work has also appeared at Hyper Local Festival in Buenos Aires and the Sandberg Institute’s “Wandering School” in Milan.
Her debut novel Acts of Desperation will be published in March 2021 by Jonathan Cape in the UK and Little, Brown in the USA, and is being translated into eight languages.
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