Megan Nolan: ‘People say you shouldn’t do an issues novel’

Columnist and author Megan Nolan, 33, was born in Waterford and lives in London. Her first novel, Acts of Desperation, narrated by a self-destructive millennial in a degrading affair, was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas prize and won a Betty Trask award; its fans include Marian Keyes and Karl Ove Knausgaard. She’s now on the longlist for the Gordon Burn prize, as well as the shortlist of the inaugural Nero fiction award (announced on 16 January), with her second novel, Ordinary Human Failings, about an Irish family targeted by the press after the killing of a toddler on their south London estate in 1990.

Was this book consciously departing from Acts of Desperation?
No. I have to stop denigrating that novel – I keep on being, like: “Urgh” – because it’s really rude to people who actually like it. Young women, especially, write to me about it in very moving ways. The melodrama of that book was an attempt to exorcise once and for all subjects I’d written about in my personal essays. The reason Ordinary Human Failings is so different is that I didn’t feel I had the authority first time out to write the sort of [Jonathan] Franzen-y family saga I like to read best; Acts of Desperation gave me the confidence to try. Publishing a novel had always seemed an unrealistic ambition on a par with winning the lottery - and then it happened relatively easily. Writing it was hard work but [getting published] was shockingly smooth, which made me feel like an idiot for having agonised for years. I thought: “OK, maybe even though it feels unlikely that you can write a more traditional novel, just do it.”

What led you to the plot?
Gordon Burn’s book on the Sutcliffe murders [Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son] says a tabloid journalist approached Peter Sutcliffe’s family and offered to put them up in a hotel and give them booze and money [for their stories]. I started to imagine another crime that could bring about that situation. People say you shouldn’t do an issues novel but I realised I cared about the complex psychology of people capable of violence and harm, particularly younger people, and how reductive we tend to be about its causes.

What do you think explains the surge of literary interest in how we tell stories about crime?
The internet. We’ve had five or 10 years to reflect on the boom [in true crime] after the internet had a horrifying effect on the ancient human instinct to look at awful things. Prurience is natural; what isn’t natural is having literally endless fucked-up things to look at.

Some of the novel’s most vivid passages involve bodily experience: drunkenness, sex, pregnancy. How do you write those scenes?
I have sensory tricks: I write late at night in bed, in the dark, with white noise blasting, to try to get into this intense state of presence. Not the entire time – that makes me sound weird – but for certain moments, it really helps to imagine the physicality.

Do you see yourself as an Irish writer?
I feel very Irish, but I don’t think I do relate to myself as an Irish writer except in literal terms. I’ve never really had any literary community in Ireland. It’s almost a decade since I’ve lived there. It sometimes feels uncomfortable: you don’t want to be seen as rejecting Ireland or having ideas above your station. Because I’ve never been nominated for an Irish award, part of me wonders, Have they rejected me because I left? This year, I’m leaving London indefinitely for New York. It’s a more fun city. They throw better parties. Book launches in the UK can be fusty hour-and-a-half affairs: a glass of wine, a speech, then everyone goes home. It’s nice to be somewhere more celebratory – to feel like you’re in a community where the people around you care about the thing you do.

Related: Acts of Desperation by Megan Nolan review – fierce novel of obsessive love

Which came first for you, fiction or journalism?
I was an avid newspaper reader from the time I was a young kid but I revered novels more than anything else because of their ability to occupy multiple consciousnesses. If you truly understood the interiority of every person you encountered, you wouldn’t be able to function – you have to harden yourself to exist in the world. Novels feel like a place you can get some relief from the sadness of that.

Can you recall the first time you had that sense?
My parents separated when I was small. Both of them moved a lot and had different partners and life was in flux. I don’t remember feeling unhappy or even unstable but I was adrift. At that point, around eight or nine, I’d have been into The Secret Garden and A Little Princess, which both have lonely children trying to connect with the world. I remember feeling, Oh, other people are trying to do this too.

What made you want to write?
Starting to have a romantic life as a teenager. That’s when you really realise how mysterious people’s motives and desires are – and how little control you have over others, who won’t do what you want just because you want it. I started writing poetry, which I did until I was maybe 22. I loved TS Eliot; my dad had a well-worn copy of The Waste Land that I was imitating for a long time.

Tell us what you’ve been reading lately.
Dennis Lehane’s new novel, Small Mercies, was really good. And I just read Alive: you know, about the rugby players whose plane crashed in the Andes. I was interested in the negotiations that went on between them. Fifteen years ago I saw the movie with my friend and she asked: “If we were in a plane crash, would you eat my body?” I said: “Yeah, I’d eat your body.” She was like: “What if I asked you not to, then died?” I said: “Well, I’d tell you I wouldn’t – then I’d eat you.”

• Ordinary Human Failings by Megan Nolan is published by Jonathan Cape (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply