When I first started reading Megan Nolan’s debut novel Acts of Desperation, it didn’t immediately draw me in. In fact, I ended up reading her second novel Ordinary Human Failings before I circled back to it. The only reason I did is because Megan’s writing is brilliant—well, that, and a quote I read that was lifted from the book: ‘He kept touching me and eventually I did what I had to do to stop him from wanting to have sex with me, which was to have sex with him.’
Oof! I have an enduring admiration for writers who are able to grasp these complex nuances that slip through the fingers like vapour, dissect them, isolate them and name them for what they are. It is both a craft and art form. Something I covet for my own writing. In this case, Nolan refers to it as ‘wheedling’— behavior that is at once childish and off-putting coming from a grown man, especially one who disregards denial of consent in his pursuit of sex.
Acts of Desperation is about a young, Irish woman in her twenties in a toxic relationship with an older, attractive, and casually cruel man—the withholding kind. One of those never-got-over-his-ex types. Despite knowing this, she gives herself over to loving him and in fact, seems to take pleasure in bending over backwards for him. She enjoys the psychological drama, the performance of her devotion to him despite her awareness that it is destroying her. She seems to be living a ‘90s RnB song — the ‘can’t breathe without you, can’t live without you’ variety… You know the one; the one that gave you warped ideas of what healthy love is supposed to look like.
With its themes of people-pleasing, alcoholism, violent sex, and martyrdom in love, Acts Of Desperation has been described as harrowing, wrenching, uncomfortable…an anti-romance. To sample some of that discomfort, here’s another quote from the book:
‘I know it is unfashionable to describe rape as sex (the implication being that rape is a violent, rather than a sexual act; can’t it be both? And sometimes more one than the other?) From a purely physical point of view it didn’t even feel very different to some of the worse consensual sex I had had, those times when I realized immediately that I would rather not continue, but did so to be polite, feigning enjoyment to make it end quicker… I have had sex without wanting to many times in my life. It was only once that I protested and was overpowered.’
It reminded me of that 2017 New Yorker article ‘Cat Person’ that went viral for its accurate depiction of a woman who acquiesces to awkward and unpleasant sex out of politeness, a need to be agreeable, and the ever-present, quiet fear of violent retribution women always carry with them when contemplating turning down a man’s sexual advances.
This is not a book for the faint of heart. It’s an unflinching look at the universal search for love and validation, and the terrible things we sometimes do to ourselves to get it. Nolan’s honesty and unsparing prose expertly lays bare the self-destructive nature of unchecked desire, which makes Acts of Desperation is a five-star, albeit confronting, read. A necessary reminder that sometimes, the greatest acts of desperation are the ones we perform against ourselves.
