Acts of Desperation, a novel by Megan Nolan.: London:  Vintage, 2022,  282 pp, ISBN: 978-1-529-11301-3

On a dreary February afternoon, I stumbled across Megan Nolan's novel in my local bookshop. The book's blurb alluded to tragic love, exclaiming “we're all looking to get what we want—but do we know what we need?”. Given how many of my therapy clients have been wrestling with this exact question, I hoped to escape the grey tedium of February and gain clinically relevant insights.

I did learn a lot from this book, but in more complicated ways than I expected.

Nolan's Acts of Desperation is set in Dublin and chronicles a young woman's increasingly violent relationship with an Irish-Danish writer. He is called Ciaran. She, despite being the story's narrator, remains nameless. It is clear from the first chapter that the couple's story will not end well; that the nameless woman will obsessively project her own desirability and agency into Ciaran until there is barely anything left of her. It is also made clear that Ciaran will be extremely adept at forcefully projecting into her what he despises most within himself.

The two meet at an art show where the narrator is immediately enthralled by Ciaran: “Although he didn't seem particularly happy, he seemed undeniably whole, as though the world was contained within himself” (p. 4). As the pair

begins to date, an unsettling chasm opens between the narrator's experience of Ciaran and the reader's: we learn that Ciaran is habitually cruel, “angry at a great many things, disgusted by more” (p. 30) and obsessed with his unfaithful ex-girlfriend. The narrator, however, is falling in love. She finds Ciaran's anger “invigorating” (p. 31) and the fixation on his ex-partner erotic. She appeases Ciaran when he rages and performs increasingly degrading acts to secure his affection. Enactments of sadomasochistic violence soon become the linchpin of the couple's relationship. This violence is emotional at first, but later metastasises to the sexual and physical