Megan Nolan

Megan Nolan (born 1990) is an Irish journalist and author from County Waterford. Her debut novel, Acts of Desperation, was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and was one of the four awardees of the 2022 Betty Trask Award for debut novels.

Quotes

• In the midst of all this, I've noticed a tonal shift in the way I and other Irish people speak about the English. Our anger is more sincere. We are more ready to call them out on all those centuries of excess, more likely to object to those pink-trousered, pink-faced dinosaurs who still perceive us as their inferiors.
• I've lived in London for three years. I hadn't spent much time in Britain before my arrival and had no particular feelings toward the English. I expected them to react to me with similar neutrality. What I didn't expect was the toxic mix of dismissal and casual disdain. It would have been easier, perhaps, if it was all as overt as potato jokes. But what kills you is the ignorance; what grinds you down is how much they don’t know about the past and, if they do know, how little they care. It's a strange and maddening thing to discover about the people who shaped your country’s fate and who are poised to do so again.
  • "I Didn't Hate the English — Until Now", The New York Times (18 October 2018).
  • In the context of Brexit and the issues relating to its effect on Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic.

• Almost as soon as I began, I was lost. The idea of getting up each day and going to class, of learning over and over again that I was stupid, and crass, and incompetent, did not seem doable. It hadn't occurred to me that I was there to learn, to become less stupid. I felt I had failed already, fumbled the opening pass. I had arrived to university quite mad already and quickly became exuberantly so, drinking litres of gin by night and lying in bed, shaking with fear, all day long.
  It wasn't laziness, exactly, that stopped me trying to work, but that fear. It lay immobile on my chest. All of Dublin, but especially Trinity, felt corrupted by some malign force that I couldn't break through.
• Though there is more I could say on this – details that would both elicit sympathy and make me look like a spoiled little shit – that was all there really was to it. The slow, boring poison of drink and secret-keeping, spread out into every part of my life, so that nothing was safe or good any more. Until I woke up one day and realised I could not remember the last time I had read a book.
  • "'The sense I was clever was knocked out of me': confessions of a university dropout", The Guardian (9 August 2019)

• Part of what I find depressing about England is that, rather than being upset with the wider forces that make your life horrible, you're encouraged to look at your neighbour like, 'He's making £10 too much a week on his benefits, and I'm going to report that f***er'.
  When I read a tabloid occasionally, I feel that being stoked — you're supposed to hate someone who has a tiny bit more than you to avoid having to look at why you don't have enough for yourself.
  • From an interview with Maedhbh McGrath, as cited in "'I'm wholeheartedly pro-Waterford now, which is obviously easier if you're not living there' – Author Megan Nolan", Irish Independent (8 July 2023)

• [H]is working-class background became embroiled in a circular logic with his misogyny, where [Russell] Brand's sexism was condescendingly validated by his class credentials and vice versa. Brand can't help speaking about women that way, that's just what someone with his background is like, people seemed to shrug – neglecting to recognise that this is not a condition of working-class people. In this way, he was allowed to be openly misogynistic for years, with anyone who objected to his presence dismissed as stuffy, classist or incapable of humour.
  • "Russell Brand’s career was defined by misogyny – and audiences delighted in it", The New Statesman (20 September 2023)
  • Referring to allegations of Brand's abusive, possibly criminal, behaviour towards women, claims which he has denied.

• It is, sadly, not unheard of for the mother of an abuse victim to side with a romantic partner who is the child’s abuser. Sometimes this expresses itself as blanket denial even in the face of clear evidence, sometimes it is a grim choice born of financial dependence on the abuser, and sometimes it is a consequence of being another victim of the abuser's violence. What is striking, and frankly repellent, about Munro's decision to stand by Fremlin is how lucid it appears to have been, and without any material necessity driving it. Rather it seems to have been a choice made for reasons that are sentimental in a ghastly sense – because she couldn't bear to be alone, to leave this man she loved.
• It is disturbing to imagine a figure of apparent dignity and autonomy, one who achieved such mastery in her field, as weak enough to indulge this sort of thinking. This sort of self-pity, this admission of dependence – not just on a man, but a man capable of abusing children and blaming it on them.
  • "Alice Munro and the shame of silence", The New Statesman (10 July 2024)
  • The daughter of the Canadian short story writer, Alice Munro, Andrea Robin Skinner, wrote of childhood sexual abuse from her step-father and her mother's unsympathetic response in an essay for the Toronto Star.