An intense, biting portrayal of a young woman in a toxic relationship. I really liked Megan Nolan’s writing and I would definitely read another novel of hers in the future. However, I did find Acts of Desperation a tad frustrating at times and I felt like shaking the protagonist and urging her to forget about the awful Ciaran, whose apparently unrivalled beauty is clearly his only redeeming feature (and another minor gripe of mine was, why did she bother cooking him elaborate meals when he lost his sense of taste and smell?!). Most straight women, whether they want to acknowledge it or not, would probably recognise the protagonist’s desperation as she obsessively researches Ciaran’s ex and tries to police her own behaviour to his liking. Overall, despite the occasional flashes of dark, self deprecating humour, this was not exactly a fun read, but Nolan is a clear talent.

Acts of Desperation is an intense reading experience, the narrative follows our unnamed protagonist as she falls deeply and dangerously in love with a man who consistently treats her badly, The book is an exploration of self loathing, identity and loneliness in contemporary life.
Megan Nolan is a very good writer and there are some really interesting comments on young womanhood and toxic relationships. However, I found this a difficult read at times as the main character's self hatred is so relenting and the behaviour of most of the men in her life is so cruel, it left me feeling pretty sad. I think if you're a fan of writers like Sally Rooney, you'll find a lot to love here.

This may seem like a strange way to begin a review of Acts of Desperation, which in broad terms is about a woman’s account of her obsessive relationship with an abusive man, but I’m currently taken by an article by Maria Tumarkin, ‘This Narrated Life’ in the Griffith Review, which outlines her suspicion of turning all experiences into stories. She’s talking about the danger of turning experience into the typical arc that brings personal development because of the enforced omissions and elisions the form requires. She’s talking about the danger of repeating difficult stories that remain, regardless, unlistened to.
One of the things that Megan Nolan does so well, is to avoid the clichés of speaking her trauma. I know this is a novel, but the character is definitely someone who sits very neatly in this arc of personal development and yet very early on Nolan writes:

‘Events that were objectively worse than what was to follow with Ciaran had taken place in my earlier adulthood, sordid checkpoints of the wounded woman. I cannot speak about these things too soon because their names alone summon like a charm the disinterest of an enlightened reader. Female suffering is cheap and is used cheaply by dishonest women who are looking only for attention - and of all our cardinal sins, seeking attention must surely be up there.’

She writes with a vividly awake sense of what it means to be a woman whose past contains stories of victimhood. Here’s another fabulous quote:

‘Mediating your own victimhood is just part of being a woman. Using it or denying it, hating it or loving it, and all of these at once. Being a victim is boring for everyone involved. It is boring for me to present myself through experiences which are instrumentalised constantly as narrative devices in soap operas and tabloids.
Is this why I am so ashamed of talking about certain events, or find them interesting? This is part of the horror of being hurt generically. Your experiences are so common that they become impossible to speak about in an interesting way.’

The novel has a depth that I’m not convinced the marketing team is aware of. The cover of this book (see above) has a woman’s face appearing through the outline of an apple, reducing women and the narrator, once again, to victim or temptress, to that naughtly little Eve who perpetrated mankind’s original sin. Acts of Desperation is a much more interesting narrative that attempts to move away from and challenge that dichotomy.

Though the language isn’t always as visceral as I’d like, there is a delight in reading eloquently described emotions and experiences that are so broadly recognisable to the female experience. There are two really stand out moments for me in this novel. The first is when the narrator is standing at the sink making dinner.

‘It’s a peculiar anger, resenting doing something that nobody asked you to do. And it’s a peculiarly impotent sort of anger that domestic labour brings about. It was building up in me, a feeling like the blood of my body slowly becoming dirty as it coursed through.
With every strip shorn off the potato I cursed him and the apartment, even though as I did so I knew it was I who had begged - quite literally at times, had begged on my knees - for the privilege of living in this place with him, in this exact manner. It was I who had been so anxious for domesticity, for the reassuring sameness of our shared routine, for the comfort of knowing that it was me he slept with every night.’

The second is about how hard it is to say no. I could have quoted quite a large amount on this, so the ellipses represent some large gaps in the text.

‘I thought, not for the first time, that wheedling of the sort he had employed should be forbidden in men. It was already so near to impossible to say no to a man, so difficult to accept the possibility of being hurt or disliked or shouted at. It takes so much out of you to make yourself say no when you have been taught to say yes, to be accommodating, to make men happy.
Once you’ve said no, a man wheedling feels unbearable. Even if he does it politely, or gently, it overrides the clearly expressed intention. It says: Your choice does not really matter. What I desire matters, and I don’t want to feel bad for forcing you into it. So perhaps you ought to reconsider?
Wheedling is cowardly, and violent. When you change someone’s no to yes by wheedling, you have stolen from them what does not belong to you.
It was the last thing I wanted to do, and I did it.
… When I sleep with men I don’t like, men who irritate or scare or disgust me, because it is easier to do so, I make myself as bad as they are. … I hate them less afterwards, because I’ve made myself as pathetic as they are.’

There is little point in telling the plot of the story. It is a familiar one. What’s interesting about this book is the way that it approaches these experiences as narrative devices that have been exploited so many times. Hence my many quotations above. It’s great that Acts of Desperation makes the reader think about how and why certain stories are told, about what it means to speak of the peculiarities of being a woman in a patriarchal society. Sometimes it does feel whingey, sometimes it does feel exhausting, but it is also astute and page-turning. It’s drawing attention to some interesting complexities at the heart of turning difficult experience into narrative and it does it in a way that will grip the reader.

I recommend reading the book and the article together and having a think about what we want story to do for us, about the ways we use it and how that might enhance as well as detract from the way we shape ourselves and our future world.

Acts of Desperation is an uncomfortable to read, it is a brutally honest account of the life of a young woman who is in a toxic relationship. The interesting part of the story is that she is aware the relationship is toxic, having struggled with anxiety and mental health issues since childhood she seems to be fully aware of her triggers and that her relationships with love / sex / men and her own self worth are intrinsically linked.

Despite it being a difficult read it is a compelling story.

I was given a copy of Acts of Desperation by NetGalley and the publishers in return for an honest review.

This is a highly impressive debut, well written, candid and honest. It centres on a toxic relationship and, as it is a first person narrative, the author can be insightful, revealing and, at times, shocking. In the course of the story, the protagonist passes through several stages of a long term relationship while at the same time experiencing different types of emotions with other temporary partners. The novel feels, fresh, contemporary and promises much from Megan Nolan.

Acts of Desperation is A-MAZ-ING!! Never have I read a book that more accurately portrayed an emotionally abusive relationship, and the dynamic that exists between an empath and a narcissist. Nor have I ever read a book that speaks so candidly about what it is to be a woman who has had her voice and her power taken away by a man. We never learn the name of the central character, which I think speaks of her feelings of nothingness. She allows Ciaran to become her all, while she shrinks herself to try to hold onto him. She loves him, but knows deep down that he doesn't love her, for he doesn't see her. She isn't herself with him. She's on edge at all times, longing for those rare moments of approval that she mistakes for his love. He cheats on her, he dismisses her feelings callously and discards her at whim. But what was really interesting to me was how the dynamic changed when she started to pull away. There is quite a graphic scene towards the end of the book that some readers may find triggering. But ultimately there is hope and I could feel every emotion this complex and wonderful woman went through in her journey to wholeness. A triumph.

3,5
I’ve been reading too many novels about young women in toxic relationships lately. And yes, ‘Acts of Desperation’ is another one. Complex, painful, very well written. I had probably valued it more though when read another time.
“You grow cold, or you die yourself.”
Thank you Jonathan Cape and Netgalley for the ARC.

This is a difficult book in many ways and difficult to review. On the one hand it is brilliant, an unmatched account of obsessive love and self-hatred. But it is a tough read. Other reviewers have given good synopses of the themes and plot, so I will just give my reaction which is that whilst I can see how it is brilliant in many ways I would rather not have read it. This may be because of the year we’ve all had, being still in lockdown and yearning for light and joy. Neither of these is present in this book.

Perhaps in time I will appreciate it more.

Scott Fitzgerald famously observed that there are no second acts in American lives. But the unnamed narrator of Acts of Desperation, after an episode of obsessive “love” and betrayal, turns a moment of weakness into a second act which vindicates her self-hood and demonstrates that there can be a whole range of betrayal, while still retaining a form of faith in love.

In 2012, the narrator, a female of about 24 who dropped out of Trinity and works in a hip burger place, is unhesitatingly eager for a relationship with Ciarán, an “exceptionally beautiful” man, making a precarious living as a reviewer in Dublin. He is also somewhat exotic in having a Danish mother.

The narrator’s passion quickly turns obsessive. “There was no religion in my life after early childhood, and a great faith in love was what I had cultivated instead.” Blind to his many faults, even the miserliness so minutely detailed, she enters a very one-sided relationship. However, a serpent in this Paradise is Freja, Ciarán’s former girlfriend (though maybe more “girlfriend” than “former”) and the first act of desperation takes place over a Christmas when she returns to her parents in Waterford. Her increasingly frenzied attempts to establish contact at a distance and the worry about some accident and then the hope that there was a misunderstanding are conveyed so authentically.

Later, with betrayal coldly confirmed, she is so mentally displaced that she dreams in detail of killing Freja and, on waking, is not dismissive of the idea. And Dr Google is consulted about “obsessive love.” We also learn of episodes of obsessive fasting and cutting as a teen.

But a casual, lonely text to Ciarán kicks off act two and this time the narrator moves in with him and, while initially remaining obsessed, observes Ciarán almost as a laboratory rat, detailing all his behaviours.

She also begins to outwit him, firstly by covertly drinking a bottle of wine before the one bottle the anti-alcohol Ciarán permits her for an evening. “Nothing works like drinking does.” Later, comes the observation that it had been a full year, of her 24 years, since she had spent a full evening with anyone but Ciarán.

She increasingly realises that the sex is all that holds her to him. “Then we went to bed...the friendliness of a body’s smell and softness overcoming the sour rest of him.” As she increasingly develops her independence and resumes and initiates social contacts, the tables turn. “I had chosen someone who was by nature indifferent, and made it my project to make him love me. And she had succeeded.

Ciarán is then introduced to desperation, including one grossly amusing sexual episode where he unwittingly comes into close contact with the narrator’s lover of a few hours before.

The story, while its bones have been the basis for many books, is compellingly told, moving at a fast pace, interspersed with calm, philosophical, and often biting interjections from the narrator five years later, in Greece. It’s absolutely a page-turner and gives a vivid sense of what Dublin was in fairly recent times for a woman in her mid 20s unafraid of acting on her desires.

Unlike some bestsellers of the past few years about women being subjugated by partners, the situations here have credibility and an awareness that the narrator is slowly rising from the depths and will breathe freely again

And love is not inextricably linked to desperation, as the narrator notes (with a nice use of semi-colon) five years later: “Being in love feels like nothing so much as hope; a distilled, clear hope which would be impossible to manufacture on your own.”

I honestly don"t know what to make of this book. The only thing I can say for certain is that I found it highly disturbing and painful to read. I suppose that the fact I kept reading on until the end means there's something in it. The subject, of course, is an important one, and you can't help feeling for the girl while wanting to throttle her boyfriend. But the book as a whole is depressing, and seems to go on and on about the protagonist's self-hatred, until you find yourself irritated at her and hating yourself for it. To me, literature is about turning harsh experiences into beauty, and I guess there is simply not enough of it in this novel to supersede the pessimism and violence.

(I see a lot of reviews comparing Acts of Desperation to Normal People. Apart from the fact that it's Irish and about a relationship, I can't see any other similarities between the two to be honest, neither in terms of style nor in terms of content. Normal People remains a love story after all, whereas this is the story of a toxic, ultimately abusive and unredeemably horrible relationship.)

I’m afraid I found this just boring. I really wanted to enjoy it, the premise sounded so intriguing, but it just left me feeling a bit cold. The characters were all fairly one dimensional, and I never felt like the reader was allowed to get under the skin of any of them. It all felt just a tad mundane, and others have told tales of troubled narrators with more rawness, depth and originality.

“Love was the great consolation, would set ablaze the fields of my life in one go, leaving nothing behind. I thought of it as the great leveller, as a force which would clean me and by its presence make me worthy of it.”

Just wow. Acts of Desperation is going to be a really hard book to review, because my love for it feels so personal.

Our unnamed narrator recounts her clearly doomed from the start relationship with the beautiful & aloof Ciaran. She is determined to shape herself into the kind of person he might love, but their relationship grows more and more dysfunctional. It’s dark and intensely painful to read in places, yet absolutely compelling.

I would suggest this for those who feel other millennial fiction (I’m not going to name drop the author many people are comparing this to) is too cool and ironic, because Megan Nolan’s narrator is anything but detached. Even in the interspersed sections where the older narrator reflects on her past, emotion is always present, never florid but so true to life.

The writing is absolutely pitch perfect. I first came across Nolan’s distinctive voice in a piece she was commissioned to write for Voices at the Table, about the food memories tied to a particular relationship (I really recommend listening to it on their podcast). She was so memorable that when I saw this on netgalley I knew I absolutely had to read it. I definitely recommend trying some of Nolan’s essays (for the Spectator, the Guardian or Vice to name just a few, she’s bloody prolific) to see if you like her style, because I have a feeling it might be quite marmitey!

Acts of desperation is a poetic and observed novel about toxic relationships and all it’s
intricacies and complexities. This debut novel is a painful and accurate examination of abuse told through beautiful and poetic prose.

Beautifully written, but painful to read. A sad book about a toxic relationship by Irish writer Megan Nolan.
If you read the books by Sally Rooney and are in need of something similar, this is the book for you.

If you enjoy Megan Nolan's personal essays, then you'll love her debut novel. It has that voice. The book does feel very close to memoir. The unnamed narrator, a young woman from Waterford, Ireland, recounts the story of a painful relationship at the remove of about six years and two thousand miles.

Our narrator suffers from bouts of depression, and a general self-loathing, that she feels only love can cure. She delves back into her teenage years and analyses her early relationships, while unfolding the story of her doomed romance with the beautiful but cold Ciaran.

There's lots of truth about the power imbalances in heterosexual relationships between men and women, how we treat our friends differently when we find love and how our partner's past comes to feel like a thing we can - should - own.

Many scenes from the relationship feel raw, unprocessed and verge on becoming hard to read because they're so painful. Alternating with scenes set years later, the narrator does sound different, calmer and more introspective. A question mark remains over whether she has really changed, though.

The book ends a bit abruptly, but then maybe the narrator herself is not as removed from the past as she would like to think so?

A compelling read, I inhaled it in a day and would read more about this main character!

*NEW REVIEW*

There is nothing that I could call “enjoyable” about this debut by Irish author Megan Nolan, other than the writing. It is a compelling read though, an overwhelming and frightening narrative of a toxic relationship and a woman in a spiral of self-destruction, and one of the most intense, visceral books I’ve ever read.

The unnamed narrator, a woman in her 20s living and working in Dublin, meets and falls head over heels in love with Ciaran. Ciaran is aloof and self-centred, controlling and cold.

The narrator, for all intents and purposes a functioning alcoholic who derives pleasure from being abused by men, is so deeply in love with Ciaran (or believes she is) that she is willing to do anything to prevent their toxic relationship from falling apart (hence the title which btw is perfect for the book - it reads a bit like a play I thought).

Some of the narration takes place in Greece some years after the events, and these parts gave me a much needed reprieve from the unyielding discomfort I felt throughout most of the book.

I found it unrelenting, soul-baringly personal and deeply disturbing; it was almost more than I could handle at times. The writing is sensational in parts (the beginning and climax in particular). At other times it’s a little underwhelming but never boring.

I find it hard to rate this one. I didn’t enjoy it, but objectively speaking it’s an impressive piece of work.
4/5 ⭐️ - I’d suggest that you only read if and when you’re in the headspace for a book like this.

*TW for physical abuse, graphic sexual violence, alcoholism, disordered eating, self-harm. All the TW 😳😰.*

This book will be published on 4 March 2021. I read an advance copy courtesy of the publisher @Random HouseUK, @vintagebooks via @NetGalley. As always this is an honest review.

Important, intense, nuanced, painfully sincere; Nolan' novel explores and dives deep into important themes such as toxic relationships, empowerment, identity and sense of self, sexuality and love.

An unnerving confessional account by a young woman about obsessive love, self harm, shame, and the struggle to know what and how it is to be a woman.

One of the best books of fiction I've read in a long while.

On love/lust, desire, and the self-destructing shape-shifting we do to mould ourselves into being lovable.

Brutally honest, disturbing, unflatteringly relatable, it felt like I could peel back the protagonist's skull and rummage through her brain.

Themes similar of Raven Leilani's 'Luster' - both are debuts written so good it puts you off ever wanting to write anything yourself.

And I thought *I* had been in bad/toxic relationships before!

Is it weird that I connected with the main character so well here? Probably, but that's why we read, to escape our real world and spend time with people more interesting than us, I suppose.

Parts of this book were borderline uncomfortable to read, and for me to say that is saying a lot, but that's the exact reason I loved this book to the degree I did--I could NOT look away. Megan Nolan has a true gift for telling a story in a different way than you may have experienced before. Don't miss out on this 5 star read!