Naoise Dolan - Acclaimed young Irish autistic author

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DAVID GREENE, HOST:

Let's meet Naoise Dolan. She is one of Ireland's most acclaimed young authors. The 28-year-old's new novel is called "Exciting Times." I am not sure these are the most exciting times to release a book, given the pandemic, but Dolan is taking it all in stride. This is her first book after all. Doing everything remotely, it's really all she knows.

NAOISE DOLAN: I'm sure I would have been completely floored and not know how to react at all if I saw it in a bookshop because I've never known that feeling.

GREENE: So her novel is set in Hong Kong. It is about Ava, a young expat English teacher from Ireland who's navigating two romantic relationships.

DOLAN: She's a somewhat repressed but fairly wry young woman who I think uses a lot of dark humor as a coping device and maybe is better at thinking about things analytically than she is at understanding herself or those around her on more emotional levels. So a lot of her narration comes from that disjuncture between, on one level, getting it and, on another level, not getting anything at all.

GREENE: There's so much emotion. And I would say, you know, I mean, is self-hate a fair way to describe Ava at some points? And just in the process of being an author, like, I wonder if that's - like, how much of that is creation? How much of that comes with personal experience? Because it feels so, so personal, the experience reading it.

DOLAN: Yeah, I think, definitely, it's something that I and most other people I know in their 20s have indulged at one point or another, where you want to analyze yourself - not least to gain a better understanding of your place in the world - but for whatever reason, you aren't culturally permitted to do that through a neutral or positive gaze. So in order to feel allowed to think about yourself at length, you come to it through self-loathing. I don't know if that's what I'd describe as a uniquely me thing; I think it's a thing a lot of people do. But if people don't always relate to that and they can instead read it and learn about what it's like for people who do do that, then that's good, too.

GREENE: There were moments that seem so mundane in life today, like looking for a text message and whether someone is writing back to you and you see those three little bubbles, you know, thinking so seriously about whether we should look at someone's Instagram story or not. You gave these very sort of mundane moments literary significance in some way, and that felt like some of the magic of your writing.

DOLAN: Thank you. Yeah. I think with novels, there's always going to be that slight time lag between when something comes into our culture and when we see it in fiction because, aside from anything else, books just take so long to write and get published. So I think it was in 2016, '17 that the story's future was first developed. So, like, I think this is probably the absolute earliest that we could expect that to appear in a novel.

So then there's always that slight thing of, like, when something's in a novel for the first time, it feels weird seeing it there. But then, obviously, novels (laughter) do slowly adapt. We're not still reading Dickens - well, we are (laughter), but we're not still reading it expecting to see ourselves reflected completely.

GREENE: Yeah, that's so true. Well, I wonder - I mean, since we are all going through this pandemic together as a world, as a planet, have you thought about how Ava, your character in this book, would deal with the pandemic if that's the place that she found herself in?

DOLAN: Yeah (laughter). I mean, I think she has a little bit of a self-imposed quarantine life a lot of the time, anyway, so a woman well-practiced in not leaving the house at plenty of points. So maybe she'd have a bit more of a toolkit than a lot of us. But yeah, I have in my head, broadly, where they're all going to end up, but I don't think I'd ever feel tempted to write a sequel because I already have so many microdecisions that I try to manage when I'm writing that I think the additional one of, how do I make this interesting both to people who haven't read the first one and to people who have, would just drive me mad. So (laughter) not for me.

GREENE: One thing you've talked about is that being autistic gives you kind of an interesting perspective on what we're living through right now, feeling like that everyone needs accommodations right now that are things that people who are autistic always need and ask for. I wonder if you could reflect on that. I'm so curious what you're thinking about.

DOLAN: Yeah, sure. So a lot of things, like remote working - I think the thing that's difficult to explain about social masking is it's not that any individual interaction is hugely draining; it's the accumulation of all of it that makes it exhausting. But then it's so difficult to get that across.

So then when something like remote working just happens for other reasons, you're like, oh, wow, I have so much more energy now. What makes, especially social experiences, distinctly autistic to me is the sense that your instincts won't be understood or appreciated. So when we all started Zooming each other at the start, we all faced uncertainty of, how do I say hello correctly? How do I end this when I can't use the old excuses I used to?

But I think for neurotypicals - even shy, socially anxious neurotypicals - there isn't that underlying feeling that they might do what they intuitively feel to be intelligent and correct and have it misunderstood in a way that happens to you when you're autistic. And that's why many of us learn to mask in the first place because our experience is that if we rely on our instincts instead of telling ourselves how to do everything, it just won't work.

GREENE: Yeah. I mean, you - I did want to ask you. I mean, you wrote in The Irish Times that you - your dream reader is one who doesn't know or care who you are. Why do you prefer readers like that?

DOLAN: First of all, I want people to enjoy novels above all, and I think you're likelier to enjoy a novel if you approach it on its own terms than if you come into it with particular assumptions or curiosities about the author because books are best at being books, and (laughter) anything else that they do is going to be secondary entirely. Like, a novel that I write is never going to as successfully tell you about my life as an autobiographical thing, which - it's like judging a car by how well it imitates a bicycle. So there's that, the enjoyment aspect.

But I think as well it's just that, for me, that's how I feel I get the most out of books. I've never enjoyed them as much when I've come to them from any place of prurience or of feeling obliged to learn about someone. My favorite reading experiences are always the ones where I just open it up. So I guess I want that for other people.

GREENE: That was Naoise Dolan. She's the author of "Exciting Times."

There are at least four good reasons why Naoise Dolan is certain to be described as “the new Sally Rooney” this summer. One: she’s Irish and has written one of the most talked-about novels of the year, Exciting Times. Two: they were at Dublin’s Trinity College together. Three: not only are the characters in Exciting Times and Rooney’s debut Conversations with Friends young and liberal, with complicated sex lives, but both authors explore modern female self-loathing. Four: like the adored BBC adaptation of Normal People, Exciting Times has just been snapped up to become a TV series.

The comparisons may prove to be superficial, however. Dolan had just finished writing Exciting Times when she was formally diagnosed with autism, but she’d always known she wasn’t like most people. “As a kid, I was broadly pretty cool with being different, until I started school, then I hated it,” she tells me over Zoom from her parents’ attic in Dublin. The 28-year-old was flagged as being on the spectrum aged 16, but “understood the whole thing so poorly that I thought everyone was on the spectrum line, which is completely untrue”.

The way that “on the spectrum” is used as a catch-all term to describe people who are socially inept is “straight-up wrong”, Dolan argues. “Excavating a term to describe someone’s neurology with a negative trait is just ableist.” Does she find it frustrating there is not more of a movement against it? “Because autistic people are intensely analytical, we discuss things amongst ourselves a whole lot, but it doesn’t reach mainstream ears,” says Dolan. “But there are definitely moments where I feel like I’m on a completely different planet from even the rest of the young left.”

While Dolan is clearly a meticulous thinker – as she speaks she is constantly analysing and unpicking her own arguments – she says she is “extremely careless with pretty much any matter except for the writing of novels”.

We have moved on to the subject of scattiness because of how Ava, the central character in Dolan’s witty, caustic debut novel, organises her thoughts. Ava is a 22-year-old Dubliner who moves to Hong Kong, where she starts sleeping with an emotionally repressed banker, Julian, and a free-loving lawyer, Edith. For a while, Ava hides her lovers from one another, her self-hatred deepening in the process. That might sound rather mirthless, but this is a book full of humour and piercingly astute social observation.

Ava writes out draft texts telling people how she really feels, before deleting them. One message to Julian reads: “Sometimes i love you and sometimes i think it would be best if a plane flew into your office and you were on the plane or in the building.” The text is never sent because Ava decides, on balance, that “this message would not have the propitiatory effect intended”.

It’s a habit that’s very relatable to the iPhone generation, with many of us using our Notes app to experiment with our feelings before we send them out into the world. “I do think we’re intensely epistolary in how we relate to each other,” says Dolan. “I have an extremely disorganised mind, so setting things out in a palpable way definitely helps me. If I lived in the pre-literacy era, I honestly don’t know how I would have had thoughts, because if I’m just in my head it becomes overwhelming very quickly.”

Dolan never got into diaries, “because if it’s personal and painful enough for me to want to vent it, I don’t want it there in writing. Typing it and scribbling back on a phone is much easier”.

If Dolan’s diaries had existed, they would have made for fascinating reading. Growing up queer in Ireland wasn’t exactly easy. School was an “intensely homophobic environment”, she says, where the word “gay” was used to mean “stupid”, and girls were accused of looking at their friends in the changing rooms. “I could have come out in school, just like I could open a car door and jump out onto the M50; but the consequences wouldn’t have been pretty,” Dolan wrote in a piece for the Irish Examiner earlier this year.

Dolan recalls going through a second adolescence as a queer person. “When you’re closeting something about yourself it leads to emotional repression and a stalling of maturity,” she says. “It delays you in getting to know yourself and moving spontaneously through the world.” She recalls “masking”, a technique where she would act as if she were straight, in order to “minimise the risk of being attacked”.

The 2015 same-sex marriage referendum in Ireland was “an intensely painful time to not be straight”, says Dolan, “because Dublin was plastered with posters telling us we weren’t fit to be parents”. The No campaign was largely funded by right-wing Christian groups in America, a dynamic that was seen again in the abortion referendum three years later. In the end, the abortion ban was overturned with 66.4 per cent in favour, and the yes campaign won marriage equality with 62 per cent of the vote. “It’s hurtful to have a huge chunk of the country vote no even if the result is the majority,” says Dolan. “And we had to watch people being congratulated for deciding they no longer wanted to deny us a right. We were told in canvassing briefings not to call anyone homophobic. Sadly, that was a good strategy, but it made me feel sick to my stomach.”

Dolan explores the uncertainty that can come with queer dating in Exciting Times, Ava spending hours analysing Edith’s Instagram for clues about her sexuality when they first meet. “Gaydars are funny ones,” says Dolan. “Mine is extremely good, but you’re culturally taught to doubt it at every turn, so you find yourself looking for things that could never actually constitute evidence in order to back up your intuition.”

Ava’s other love interest is Julian, a former Eton student who Ava says “wanted to know if my accent was posh where I came from” – just one example of Dolan’s pitch perfect social commentary. Dolan says she couldn’t not mention this particular British preoccupation in the book. “It’s my experience of English people that they’re fixated with class,” she says. “Ireland has a class system too, but it’s much more directly tied to capital. In our country, people with money were historically English in some way, so the idea of a purely Irish way of being posh is an entirely new thing.”

The legacy of British colonialism is threaded through the story, too, Dolan peppering the text with politically charged references to the Irish War of Independence, and English as it is spoken by the British – as opposed to the Irish and Hongkongers. “Language remains one of the most tangible tools of imperialism,” says Dolan, “because of the global need to learn English and the structural endorsement of a certain form of English, which is tied to whiteness.”

As for those Rooney comparisons, Dolan doesn’t mind them, but she points to many other novels that portray women’s interiority through self-hatred, from Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar to Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. She believes self-loathing is a form of narcissism. “Simply put,” says Dolan, “if you’re constantly thinking about how much you hate yourself, you’re still constantly thinking about yourself.”

The divergence between the two may become apparent with Dolan’s next novel. While Dolan is undecided about whether to write about autism, she has already completed a second book that tackles mental health. She’s reluctant to publish it, though. “It is an intensely depressing book about two people who go insane,” she says, “and I can’t see myself doing several months of publicity about it, so I might just keep it on my laptop.”

But there is good news for Dolan’s fans: she’s on to book three and the production deal for her debut novel includes Dolan herself on board as an executive producer. Exciting times, indeed.

‘Exciting Times’ is out now
‘Exciting Times’ is being adapted for television (Orion Publishing)

I end up going back three times to listen to the recording of my interview with novelist Naoise Dolan. It wasn’t only because the phone connection was a little glitchy; it’s mostly because Dolan speaks in beautifully intricate long sentences. Miss one word when transcribing and the architecture of the sense of the sentence tumbles down.

It will be fascinating to see how television handles a character whose voice is so interior in nature: Exciting Times was optioned by Black Bear Pictures soon after publication last spring as a US television series.

“I’m not really able to share anything at the moment about it, but it is really nice to have it optioned,” is all Dolan will cautiously say about any timeline for production.

She could just as easily have been an academic as a novelist. Dolan studied English in Trinity and did her master’s in Oxford. She talks me through some of the work she did for her thesis; the dauntingly fine-comb analysis of very specific pieces of English literature.

“I specialised in Dickens, so for one of my essays I did a comparative analysis of different abbreviated versions of David Copperfield,” she says. “It’s enormously popular for that purpose because it’s a coming-of-age story about a boy finding his way in the world, so it’s suitable for younger audiences. There are a lot of shortened versions out there, adapted for different audiences. I went through data on hundreds of these things, compared them, and made some suggestions as to why different publishers decided to cut different things.”

Did she ever consider a career in academia?

“Yeah, I was very close to considering it, because I love that sort of thing; I love going down a rabbit hole and just living there. But I think the reality of what it is actually like to work there now just seemed too harsh: the crippling career uncertainty and just how competitive it is, and how poor the conditions are. If it was a few decades ago, I might have tried to be a Dickensian.”

She mentions in passing that, as a teenager, she was “very much into reading plays”, which is an atypical interest of most teenagers. “The way I write I think is informed by the fact I was very much into reading plays as a teenager, so it’s [the novel] focused on imagining a couple of talking heads in a room; it was very centred on those set pieces around the characters.”

“Sometimes I feel a pressure to tell people that I am autistic, just in case I am too blunt for their liking. So that they know that I am not trying to be offensive: I am just trying to tell the truth, but then I think hang on; why is it until I say I’m autistic, people will project so much on to each other’s words? We should cut more slack in general; it shouldn’t be the case that only some people get compassion.”

Is life less confusing for her now, with the diagnosis?

“Yeah, there is so much shame gone,” she says. “It has been such a reflective year for everyone obviously, and one of the things I have been reflecting on are the many times when I could have been kinder to myself, because I didn’t have this external cause and so often malice is read into the behaviour of autistic people. There are just so many moments in my life where I was perceived as being too blunt, or I didn’t get something, and people thought I was just pretending.”

I ask Dolan what advice she can offer to people like me, who know very little about what it is to be autistic, and who want to know more, but without unwittingly causing offence.

“Given the lack of public knowledge of autism, first of all, it’s best to listen to autistic people themselves, and second of all, you really don’t have to think or assume or express opinions on something until you have more information. I think so much hurt is caused in the autism community by people just bringing us in where we don’t belong, where they truly do not need to comment on autism,” she says.

Can Dolan look back and identify now how being autistic has informed her work as a writer?

“One way – this is broad strokes, obviously – that autistic brains have been described is as extreme pattern seeking, and I think that makes a lot of sense. I think often when your early interactions with the world are perhaps a bit unreliable compared to those around you, just to take a couple of examples, if you find rooms hotter than other people, or if you can’t understand slang but everyone else can, you then become a pattern seeker, not to intuit it or copy it, but because you need to get the reasoning behind the world to understand how it operates.

“And I think that goes over into the analytical stance of how I approach life, which then comes through in my work and how I discuss it. Dissections of social interactions, and of the emotional underpinnings are the sort of thing I engage in day to day so therefore it doesn’t feel like overkill for me to have a character do it in a novel.

She has been writing a lot during lockdown. There are “a lot” of short stories, and some nonfiction pieces “in the works, or in the works according to the deadline, if not according to my actual working patterns. So I am juggling a fair bit.”

Dolan is also currently doing edits on her second novel, which as yet doesn’t have a publication date.