If Russell and her publisher had announced the novel as a memoir, this would be a valid question to ask, as readers would have purchased and consumed the book on the basis that it was factual. This tendency to see women writers as advancing personally inspired polemic plays into controversies like that Kate Elizabeth Russell faced over her debut My Dark Vanessa, where she described herself as ambushed by questions interrogating the nature of her connection to her novel’s content about a teenager’s affair with a teacher. (Positively or negatively, reviewers tend to note that they did not find my characters likeable the assumption being that I intended them to be liked, or at least that it is notable that I didn’t intend that.) It is easier for us to think in black and white when we imagine that authors endorse their characters’ decisions, and women are held to higher moral standards than men, so we are reluctant to see women writers as capable of writing with detachment and curiosity about the lives of made-up characters – ones with whom they mightn’t always be inviting the reader to sympathise. The author, Kristen Roupenian, was clearly not writing about herself when she was nearly twice the protagonist Margo’s age and in a long-term relationship with a woman but many readers insisted on seeing Margo as Roupenian and on discussing the story as though it were a binary ethical debate, and not a depiction of flawed human beings. This was evident in reactions to the viral short story Cat Person. Adult women are not afforded this respect.Īutobiographical assumptions also come from our refusal of moral complexity. There is no reason to assume that my fiction is autobiographical, particularly not when I have said many times that it isn’t and it is well-established that this assumption happens more often to women.Īs Irish writer Eimear McBride put it in conversation with Jamie Quarto in the White Review: “There can’t be a female author alive or dead who hasn’t experienced the ‘it’s really just you, isn’t it?’ phenomenon.” In primary school, I was free to write stories about girls who lived in red houses and had dogs, without the teacher inquiring as to the colour or canine occupation of my own house. It’s not that I’m immensely reclusive – I am fairly active on Twitter and Instagram – but I want my book to be read on its own terms, and not on whether it “really happened”. I don’t think my personal life is anyone else’s business just because I wrote a book. I can decline to answer such questions, and I do. When I have been interviewed about my debut, Exciting Times, journalists have asked me private questions about topics ranging from my relationship status to whether I've been in a love triangle (because the fictional narrator in my fictional book has sex with two also-fictional people).

It is strange to me that anyone wants to know about my life just because I write novels.

Naoise dolan exciting times