Naoise Dolan is on a Zoom call from Berlin to talk about her highly anticipated second novel The Happy Couple. Dolan’s adopted city, like her hometown Dublin, is in the midst of a housing crisis. “You’d be hard pressed to find a European city that isn’t,” she points out. On the plus side, tangible Berlin-specific problems such as learning a new language appeal to the writer’s pragmatic side.
“The challenges associated with getting to grips with a new setting in a new country are the kind that I find less stressful,” says the 31-year-old author of Exciting Times, one of those debut novels that arrived in 2020 accompanied by a serious buzz and turned out to live right up to expectations. “As brilliant as everyone says,” came the imprimatur of Marian Keyes.
“Learning German is not easy, but you simply need to show up,” Dolan continues. “And if you keep showing up, eventually you will know enough German. I can’t fix the biggest issues that would be in my life in Dublin just by showing up, because those issues aren’t my fault. Whereas it was my fault that I didn’t know German when I came here and I’m slowly fixing that. So it’s nice to have solvable problems in that sense.”
The Happy Couple will no doubt be translated into German and make a useful prop in Dolan’s linguistic self-improvement. Some of the “issues” not of Dolan’s making in Dublin are highlighted early on in the book by main character Celine, a virtuoso piano player, neurotic about her hands and many other things, who also teaches piano. Here she is giving out about Luke, her intended, who has poor punctuality but also criticises Celine for her lateness. “Did he teach piano? Did he visit homes across Dublin? Did he rely on western Europe’s worst public transport because he couldn’t afford a car in western Europe’s most expensive city, and couldn’t cycle lest western Europe’s shittiest lanes break his livelihood-earning fingers?”
There are a lot of people who are longing to read The Happy Couple for exactly such spot-on pronouncements. In 2019, before Exciting Times was published, this newspaper suggested Dolan was a writer likely to fill “the Sally-Rooney-shaped-hole in many readers’ lives”. But while Dolan did attend Trinity College around the same time as Rooney, and was first published by the Normal People author while she was editing the literary magazine The Stinging Fly, she has a distinct voice and a sardonic style all her own. The Happy Couple, then, is a book likely to fill the Naoise-Dolan-shaped-hole in many reader’s lives.
Her fans – full disclosure: this interviewer is one – are passionate about Dolan and will argue that she is among the wittiest, sharpest and most emotionally articulate young writers at work today. She’s an exceptionally astute observer of sexuality, relationships, class and the human condition, and her writing exudes the kind of verve and brio that is rare. It’s not for nothing that she is namechecked in the same breath as Edward St Aubyn. Dolan also speaks as beautifully as she writes, so it’s a pleasure to spend an hour listening to her musings on everything from Japanese self-help books to climate anxiety. We’ve both turned off the video function on this Zoom, at her request. She was diagnosed as autistic three years ago and feels more comfortable without the distraction of visuals.
In her debut Exciting Times, we were drawn into the mind and heart and romantic entanglements of Ava, a bisexual 22-year-old Dublin woman teaching English in Hong Kong. Critics called it “affecting” and “powerful”, praising her “caustic cleverness” and “deadpan” delivery. In a case of what she calls “maximally bad timing”, that first book, written in 2017 over the course of just four months, came out just at the beginning of lockdown in 2020. The paperback was released in another lockdown the following year.
While she finds travel “logistically stressful”, she’s looking forward to a different experience this time around to promote The Happy Couple, which is centred around the impending nuptials of Celine and Luke. The book has a bigger cast of characters and a more complex structure than her debut – we hear all sides of the story from the bride, the bridesmaid, the groom, the best man and the guest. The Happy Couple did not come easy. “I have never in my life made anything easy,” she laughs. After Exciting Times, she wrote a novel she didn’t much care about “which I didn’t show anyone. Then I wrote another novel that I showed my agent, but eventually I just didn’t feel it was worth the time to continue editing. I didn’t feel I’d advanced enough as a writer since the last one. Then this third one, I started, maybe a year after Exciting Times was out ...”
So she’s actually written three books since her debut? “I cannot stress enough that two of them will never see the light of day because they are no good,” she insists. There was “an element of necessity” to the writing of The Happy Couple. The pressure was on, there was a contract to fulfil. “I could have spent the next ten years trying to write a book that felt good enough to be a second book and I still wouldn’t get there ... I think an element of it was just having to cop on and go, okay, the deadline was two years ago, I have to either just write this book and stay with it, or else renege on a contract. Either way, I’m gonna f**k up in some sense. So I might as well do the one where I get something out there into the world.”
Dolan did not f**k up. The Happy Couple is as fun and charming as it is insightful and entertaining. There is Dubliner Celine, the obsessive, glove-wearing pianist and eldest daughter of divorced parents. Dolan herself played piano well into her teens, describing herself as “decent but not exceptional”. There is Luke, who grew up in England. His parents were both from Dublin but he’d never met his dad: “I was born in London when my mother’s plan to go off to England and get an abortion had been executed partly but not fully”. Luke is also a classic commitment-phobe and serial cheater. Spoiler alert: while Luke and Celine are clearly each other’s very favourite people, the couple are not as happy as the title ironically protests, and their individual insecurities and doubts about the wedding, and those of their friends and family, are at the heart of this romantic comedy of manners.
I can never blame anyone for wondering what the gays are up to. Arguably all of western culture, or at least the best parts, concern themselves with the issue
— Naoise Dolan
Dolan has only ever been to one wedding herself, “which I liked a lot ... but mostly I wanted to write about a countdown to a big life event because I figured that it would help me keep the narrative focused, and I chose a wedding because I didn’t want a funeral”.
There are hardly any straight people in the book, apart from Celine’s Aunt Maggy and Uncle Grellan who live in leafy Hampstead – two brilliant characters reflecting the London-Irish experience of immigrants-done-good. Maggy has a collection of Waterford Crystal animals, one of which serves as a poignant totem in the book, and Uncle Grellan is an engaging interpreter of the Irish condition. There’s a lovely scene where Grellan gives his niece a tenner “for tea” as she leaves for the airport. “Mammy always used to drill it into to me to say ‘no’” says Celine. “She was teaching you how to be Irish,” Grellan responds. “A no, pursued by a yes. That’s if you want to say yes. If you don’t, it’s a yes – pursued by a no.”
As with Exciting Times, this is not a heteronormative read. (Luke declares at one point, “heteronormativity is a near-ubiquitous form of mania”) Before Luke, bisexual Celine had a girlfriend, Maria, a fellow world class pianist. Meanwhile Luke, who is also bisexual, is still emotionally enmeshed with his friend and former gay lover, the coke-fuelled lawyer Archie, who banters like somebody out of a Wodehouse novel. Celine’s sister Phoebe – a straight talking, chain-smoking, depressive – is also gay. Phoebe also has some of the most memorable lines in the novel. Her mother Brigid thinks: “Trinity is Ireland’s best university.” Phoebe thinks: “Trinity is Ireland’s manufacturing centre of wank.”
What’s interesting is that none of this romantic and sexual fluidity is made a fuss of, there is no inner-turmoil about the character’s preferences, no angsty coming-out stories. When I ask Dolan, a queer woman, about the high volume of gay or bisexual characters in the book, she says she is merely reflecting her own experiences of friendships in her circle.
“I think it’s just faithfulness to my understanding of reality, which is that queer people usually have queer friends,” she says. Plenty of books, films and television shows feature a token gay friend, so I wonder whether she may also be pushing back against this. Not so. “I don’t object to art where a bunch of straight people have one gay friend – I can believe there are friend circles where that happens, and even if I couldn’t, I’d think artists should depict whatever they want. The friend circle in The Happy Couple isn’t inspired by a negative reaction to straight art, but by a positive desire to write about gays ... inasmuch as the crafting of each new character is an opportunity to create another gay person, I will nearly always press ‘gay’. It’s a fun button to press. God should press it more often.”
I don’t think my parents had adamant wishes or goals for me, beyond that I be happy and avoid jail
— Naoise Dolan
She doesn’t enjoy reading about dramatic coming-out experiences, so “why would I put that in a book of mine? I just did what pleases me, I guess. And I hope it pleases enough other people that the book has added value to the world. But we’ll have to see.”
I remind her of something she once wrote: “As a queer novelist, I veer between motives. One is to depict LGBTQ+ people as individuals, as complicated, and the other is to make them as universally likable as possible. Expectations also weigh on me, from cisgender heterosexuals who read my work anthropologically (‘Whatever are the gays up to now?’).
She laughs at the memory. “I can never blame anyone for wondering what the gays are up to. It’s the eternal question. Arguably all of western culture, or at least the best parts, concern themselves with the issue. It’s an understandable concern.”
In addition to “the gays”, the book is also full of Dolanesque moments of bleak feminist comedy, such as when Celine recounts Grandaunt Bernadette making the following observations about her, in order of pride:
You’ve lost weight – amazing
You’ve a boyfriend now – superb
You’re a virtuoso pianist of growing renown – not bad
Shortly after recalling this and other formative memories, Celine “momentarily wonders why she’s marrying a man – but doesn’t much question it. She’s not an idiot. She’s just been carefully taught”.
The book also interrogates the idea of monogamy and the way young girls and women are still socialised to think happy-ever-after begins with a white dress and a stroll down the aisle to a waiting man. Does Dolan think monogamous romantic relationships are soon-to-be extinct? She’s not sure. “A lot of people seem to be having a really bad time out there, but I don’t have enough data to take a broad view. Maybe loads of people are enjoying the apps and they’re just not vocal about it because they’re too busy having fantastic, algorithm-brokered sex. To which I say, good for them!”
“The only potential bad outcome here is people staying in arrangements that don’t serve them. Or people inventing different, worse arrangements that serve them even less; I wouldn’t put it past our species. So what I hope goes extinct is the belief that it’s inherently moral to ‘make it work’ and cruel or defeatist to leave a relationship you don’t want to be in. If romantic relationships are to survive our general flurry of social change, we will need to find more compelling reasons to stay in one than ‘should’, because ‘should’ loses its power as coercion diminishes. But maybe coercion won’t diminish. I don’t know!”
One character in the book eventually comes to the conclusion that relying on one person for everything in your life is neither realistic nor sustainable, which goes to the core of what Dolan is exploring. “Pick a human – any human – anyone you know: we’ve all felt there’s too much of us for a fellow individual to comprehend. That’s why you need people, plural: so that between them, they’ll understand all of you.”
I mention polyamory and thruples. Does she have any thoughts about these arrangements? “Ah, power to them, like,” she says. (“Power to them/her/him” is a favourite, much used expression of Dolan’s.) “I don’t find any of that remarkable living in Berlin ... it’s a pretty open-minded setting.” Does that suit her? “I feel like it can sometimes feel a bit isolating from an Irish perspective to be in a city where nobody really cares what other people are doing. But there’s also a freedom to it, once you get over the lack of inquiry on that front.”
Living away from home has provided opportunities to look more closely at what constitutes Irishness – her own and other people’s. This clarity provided by distance is partly why she prefers to live abroad. She’s lived in Singapore, Oxford – where she did her master’s in Victorian literature – Hong Kong, London and Italy at various points. One less positive aspect of her Irish identity, and something she has been working on, is a tendency to worry excessively about keeping other people happy. “I think a lot of one’s upbringing as an Irish woman, certainly mine and that of my mother and many other Irish women I know, is you are taught to always anticipate how other people might react to what you do and say and to try to manage it so that you’ll never make anyone feel bad,” she says.
“The problem is you’re not actually in their head. You’ve no idea what reaction they will actually have ... so then inevitably, you will still upset some people because that’s life, and then you’ll blame yourself for that. That’s no way to live, constantly blaming yourself, for other people feeling bad ... it’s something that I’ve been enjoyably, at times very painfully, unlearning in the past couple of years.”
I’ve read that she grew up “surrounded” by books, and am curious about whether her parents encouraged her writing career. “I don’t think my parents had adamant wishes or goals for me, beyond that I be happy and avoid jail. I wouldn’t say ‘surrounded’ by books exactly – I definitely had access to them, which many children don’t, but they weren’t pushed on me and my parents don’t read much or write at all.” She describes herself as being “a wilful, stubborn child” who never did what she was told “unless it happened to also be what I personally wanted to do. But I mostly just wanted to read, so my outward behaviour seemed obedient enough.”
What do her parents think of her writing? “I don’t know ... I asked them a long time ago not to tell me – given that my job depends on whether people think I’m a good writer, I try to carve out spaces in life where it doesn’t matter at all.”
She needn’t be so anxious on this front. Some of Dolan’s biggest admirers are literary stars themselves: Along with Keyes, Colm Tóibín and Zadie Smith are enthusiastic and vocal champions. Does the validation of such established authors mean a lot to her?
“Definitely,” says Dolan. “Their words are the closest thing to praise that I can accept ... it’s really useful when I’m having evil thoughts about my abilities, or lack thereof.” She describes the praise as a “trusty bat” she can use to swat away her insecurities. “Oh, so you think you know better than these people? They think it’s a good book, but you still think it’s trash? How does that work, exactly? Why do you think you know better than these people?’ So you can kind of use your own self doubt against yourself.”
I’m curious about what she’s watching and reading as she heads into the first in-person publicity tour of her writing career: Currently, the German dubbed version of Netflix series You, and a Japanese self-help/philosophy book – the German edition naturally. “The title translates as ‘you don’t have to be liked by everyone’ ... it’s really underscoring a lot of the stoicism that I’ve arrived at, bit by bit, out of personal necessity, but it’s interesting to see it explored in a more thorough way.”
Three years ago, Exciting Times was optioned by US-based Black Bear Television, who planned to develop and produce the book for television as happened with Sally Rooney’s Normal People and Conversations With Friends. The Happy Couple also feels ripe for some kind of adaptation. Dolan is uncharacteristically coy on all of this, saying only “at the moment I don’t have any new updates to share”. When I press her a bit more, she says “burn an aul’ candle, or a secular one if you prefer”.
An environmentally minded person, Dolan is a vegan. “I suppose I do what is reasonably feasible,” she says, while making the point that government policy, rather than individual actions, are key. She’s interesting on the reasons for divergent generational attitudes to the climate crisis. “There’s never consistently been a world that I’ve lived in where we have felt fine on that front ... so the doom and gloom is, for better or for worse, the reality that I inhabit.” Regarding the phenomenon of some young people reportedly being reluctant to bring children into the world due to environmental concerns she says “blanket judgments” usually falter when it comes to individual cases, “like being glad when your friends are having a kid, even if the kid can look forward to some very strange temperatures within Europe”.
On the day we are talking, one prominent author has been bemoaning the rise of “sensitivity readers”, editors who read manuscripts with a view to offering notes on the portrayal of marginalised groups or anything that may cause offence. Did Dolan have one? She did and it was a positive experience. “I’m really glad that it went through that extra set of eyes. And the report was a pleasure to read ... in general I’d say my experience was good and not traumatic. Being edited is generally a positive thing.”
After we finish our hugely enjoyable chat, I feel inclined, given the subject of The Happy Couple, to send a follow-on email asking whether she’s ever received a marriage proposal herself, and to nosily inquire about her own relationship status. She emails back hands-down the best and most entertaining rebuttal to the relationship question one could hope for from an interviewee:
“I have six wealthy late husbands who died in mysterious but writing-career funding circumstances, and I am unfortunately not at liberty to say more about my relationship history without a lawyer present.” It’s deliciously Dolanesque. Power to her.
The Happy Couple by Naoise Dolan is published by W & on May 25th, and available to pre-order from Kenny’s bookshop. Dolan will also be in conversation at the International Literary Festival Dublin on May 29th, tickets from ilfdublin.com
