Love ceases to be love, if it ever was, when it becomes an obsession. That is the thesis on which Megan Nolan (Waterford, 1990) reflects in her novel Desperate Acts, which reaches bookstores thanks to Seix Barral. A narrative debut with which the author questions what it means to live according to the wishes of others.
The reader will closely follow a young narrator in her early twenties obsessed with finding love or, rather, with trying to find happiness at any price. “She was not capable of being happy alone, and since I knew that this was a sign of weakness, she forced me to wait as long as possible, although sometimes she thought I was going crazy. As I saw it, one felt fulfilled in the company of other people. That's why she wanted to be in love. The lover does not need the physical presence of the beloved at all hours to be fulfilled, ”Nolan writes in her pages.
His suffering ends when he meets Ciaran. Or that's what she thinks because, despite the fact that she ends her search for her love, she begins a spiral from which it will be difficult for her to get out of it. Ciaran is a Danish art critic who moved to Ireland when his father fell ill. They are both lost souls who seem to understand each other and end up together, even if that means being part of a toxic and unequal relationship. And it is that Ciaran warns her that he is only with her to console himself, because her true love is Freja, her ex-partner, to whom he even dedicates poems.
Circumstances take the protagonist to extremes, constantly straddling rebellion and submission, degradation and eroticism, love and the need to be loved. Prioritize a relationship to the detriment of the rest and the imbalance that this entails. And behind all this, as usual, the lack of self-esteem and the false belief that this effort will end up validating you as a person.
Nolan has recognized several times that, although what happens to the character is not a parallelism of his life, neither current nor past, there are traits in which he feels identified and in which he believes that more than one reader also will do. "In my early twenties I lost a lot of the ambition I had as a child and teenager, so it seemed very natural to turn to relationships instead."
With his constant interior monologue, so characteristic of his writing, Nolan destroys clichés, moralisms and even certainties and sets out to explore the ravings behind ecstasy and romance.
