Acts Of Desperation
by Megan Nolan
Nomination: Dublin Longlist 2022
Date Read: May 18, 2022
The narrator of Acts Of Desperation is indeed desperate. Initially, I believed she would get dumped and turn into a stalker but this was a much more intimate deep dive into a very broken and flawed woman’s journey to herself. At times tedious and repetitive, overall this is an insightful and meaningful unravelling of all the ways the narrator sabotages herself and her relationship with Ciaran.
She meets Ciaran at an art gallery opening and they are off and running. After he briefly leaves her and returns to his ex-girlfriend, when they reunite they almost immediately move in together. From the get-go our nameless narrator knows that Ciaran doesn’t truly love her. She thinks he is biding his time until he returns once again to his ex-girlfriend who is the love of his life.
To make up for this awareness, that neither, honestly, truly love each other, she presents a different side of herself that she deems possibly loveable. She doesn’t drink. She cooks dinner. She curbs her bad habits. But ultimately, in a loveless relationship, eventually the wheels are going to come off and boy do they.
Our lost narrator begins drinking again, but hiding it from Ciaran. In time, she also begins sleeping with other men, randomly at first and then entering a full-blown lust fest with a musician while sleeping with other guys on the side of him. There are several nights when she doesn’t come home. Clearly things aren’t working.
After their relationship melts down in spectacular fashion, including him raping her, our narrator runs away to Athens. There, she ever so slowly pulls herself together – avoiding men, regulating her drinking and working a steady job. She discovers this hole inside herself and the only person that can really fill it is herself.
On a final note, when Mark, a friend from Ireland, comes to visit and begins to wheedle sex out of her after she says no, she makes a comment that really resonates with me. That when a man asks for sex and the woman says no, if he begins to beg, whine, and wheedle in the hopes that she will change her mind, if she relents, you are still taking something that doesn’t belong to you. A woman doesn’t go from no to wanting it simply because a man is begging. It’s her relenting to his will with often the impossible choice of giving in or being raped. Men take note. Don’t beg for sex.
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