“It’s my experience of English people that they’re fixated with class,” she says.
Dolan says she couldn’t not mention this particular British preoccupation in the book. “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.”Īva’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. Sadly, that was a good strategy, but it made me feel sick to my stomach.”ĭolan 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. We were told in canvassing briefings not to call anyone homophobic.
“And we had to watch people being congratulated for deciding they no longer wanted to deny us a right. “It’s hurtful to have a huge chunk of the country vote no even if the result is the majority,” says Dolan.
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. 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. 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 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”. “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. 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. The comparisons may prove to be superficial, however.
Four: like the adored BBC adaptation of Normal People, Exciting Times has just been snapped up to become a TV series. 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. Two: they were at Dublin’s Trinity College together. One: she’s Irish and has written one of the most talked-about novels of the year, Exciting Times. There are at least four good reasons why Naoise Dolan is certain to be described as “the new Sally Rooney” this summer.
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