So it was that Hong Kong became the backdrop of the story she began to write there to fill her weekends and hours off: the pawnbrokers’ neon lights and the hilariously tall buildings and the MTR underground she rode with her Octopus card while a lady’s voice intoned ‘mind the gap’ in Mandarin, Cantonese and English. She wrote in cafés, careful not to upset her coffee. She started small – a few lines of dialogue, a sketch of a street corner – and let the pages multiply. Everything around her seemed to feed her writing. One time, at a rooftop bar, a row of hooks at a standing table snagged her attention. Where other women hung their handbags she hung a scene in her story.
On some days the sentences flowed and she could write nothing wrong; on others the words seemed to drown in their own ink and the delete key became her friend.
With these eye-hooking details and astute deletions, page by page Naoise built her paper Hong Kong. For months she lived happily there, in a city under her own construction, moving streets and shops around her chapters, and changing a bookstore’s green door on Park Road to red when red suited the scene better.
Ava was the name Naoise gave her story’s narrator – something a barista might write on a customer’s cardboard cup when that customer was called Éabha – Irish for Eve. If Ava wasn’t Naoise, the resemblance was nonetheless strong: Ava was only slightly younger than her twenty-four-year-old creator, and taught slightly older Hong Kong children English. Naoise put her circuitous thoughts into Ava’s head, and her sometimes spellcheck-defying words – like defalcatory and procacious – into Ava’s mouth. But in other ways character and creator differed. Ava’s love interests – the story’s title characters, Edith and Julian – were hers alone.
In the story, Ava shares her life and bed with Julian, a wealthy English banker, but her heart belongs to a new friend, Edith Zhang Mei Ling, whose name promises the change (the ‘edit’) Ava needs. Alphabetically and emotionally, Ava is closer to Edith than to Julian. All the pages of Naoise’s writing, then, turned on the question: would Ava accept her feelings and choose her soulmate?
Towards the end of her year in Asia, a large envelope came for Naoise, red and regal with English stamps and postmarked Oxford. Shaky hands. Then a different shaky: she’d been accepted into the Victorian Literature MA programme. A pinch of her arm reassuringly hurt. So she packed her story and clothes and flew to read the Greats in the shadow of spires, and in other cafés continued to write and cut and revise.
Sally was sent an excerpt. When not being literature’s next big thing she was editing the Stinging Fly, a literary journal, and gave an enthusiastic thumbs up to publish. Naoise read what became her novel’s second chapter in the summer 2018 edition, under the title ‘Autumn in Hong Kong’.
It wasn’t long before a literary agent approached her. The novel needed only a few more tweaks before it could be published whole. Naoise went down to London to share a flat while she made ever finer revisions.
✲
I wanted something to read on the train. My Eurostar wasn’t leaving St Pancras for another couple of hours, so I went into the station’s bookshop, down the end to Fiction and found the Dolan on the top shelf, sandwiched between Doerr and Donoghue.
Edith and Julian was still the title in Swedish (Edith och Julian), but here, as in most of the dozen or more countries where the novel has appeared, the plush front cover said Exciting Times.
This bright, blocky cover had become a familiar sight to me over the course of the Covid pandemic; an Internet word-of-eye success during the time when physical bookstores had been forced to close. I saw it in online reviews (generally, very positive) which sent me to e-commerce sites informing me that readers who liked Exciting Times also liked The Hunger Games, The Bell Jar and Normal People.
I saw it in coverage of all the awards the debut novelist had been nominated for: the Women’s Prize and the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year, among others.
I saw it in pictures that ran with the novelist’s interviews with the press, in which she spoke openly about the neurodiversity she and I share.
After seeing these, I had managed to get a message to her on social media. An author myself, I had the idea of writing about her formative years leading up to her novel.
She was buried under interview requests from everywhere, and up against a tight deadline for a second novel, but Naoise was kind enough to email me several anecdotes from her childhood. I read these and her years of social media posts, alongside the essays and short stories and articles she’d published in various media. On the Eurostar back to Paris one evening, I began to read her book. The instagrammable sentences and very short chapters and vivid wordplay kept the pages turning swiftly.
Naoise Dolan’s second novel came out in May 2023. In her black-and-white author photo she looks sultry, glamorous, marvellously composed.
Billy
One moment, the boy was standing twice, thrice, four times his mother’s height; the next, the top of his head hardly came up to her chin. He was playing on the trampoline.
His mother, Eve, liked nothing better than to stand back and watch. Particularly now, in the still good light of a long summer evening. She craned her neck to see her son’s figure high in the barn (that wasn’t a barn but his playhouse), energised by the trampoline, sailing his limbs through the currents of air, which were warm-smelling and mote-speckled. Up he would jump, the soles of his shoes leaving the taut mat and showing their grooves, his arms outstretching, the rising T-shirt disclosing the small of his back, the cheeky belly button. Up and down went Eve’s head, up and down, nodding along. Every time she thought he had crested he would soar another inch or more and reach new heights. His mop of blond hair stood on its ends at his zenith. An infectious grin widened his face.
That’s my boy! That’s my Billy!
To unsuspecting onlookers he would have seemed much like any other North American boy, well-fed and rosy-cheeked, deeply absorbed in his happiness, knees scabby below the shorts which ballooned with every leap. But had they looked again, and closer, they might have seen the signs, small but telltale.
A slight rigidity in the limbs. The fixed gaze. Six knots laced tight over the tongue of each shoe.
It was quite the relief for Eve to see him come back down to earth, in a final ceremonious thud, and resume the height of an eight-year-old.
✲
One day in the mid-1980s, Eve lifted the hefty receiver to her ear and dialled a familiar number. When the ringing ceased and her mother picked up, Eve knew that she would tell her everything. Her mother had the quiet authority of the city mayor she would later become; her Tennessee vowels – unaltered by her family’s years in Cleveland Heights, Ohio – could get all sorts of anecdotes, admissions, reminiscences out of her eldest daughter. It never ceased to amaze Eve that when she was little, her mother sat in her pew every Sunday and did not say a thing. Not even a prayer aloud to praise the Lord’s word. Then the sixties happened. Eve’s parents exchanged their church for one in a YWCA basement, where babies bawled and women preached. The first Sunday her mother spoke in public she sounded as though she had gained an octave. A voice hitting its stride, the same clear and purposeful one Eve was addressing now over the phone.
She told her mother what the weather was doing in Massachusetts. Nothing special. They were expecting heavy rain later that week. She couldn’t wait for the sun.
‘Evie, is anything the matter?’
‘I’m OK, Mom. I’m just feeling kinda bored, I guess.’ Her days were too long, her routines too familiar, the foreseeable future threatening to resemble too much the recent past.
‘You know you can tell me anything.’
‘I’m … bored,’ Eve said again. Even to her own ears, the admission was rather surprising. Her marriage of several years, to her college sweetheart, was happy. Their situation was more than good: Matt had made partner at an asset management firm in Boston; she was teaching theology at Thayer Academy. She had interesting thoughts enough, and free time to read and think and wonder. She wondered about agape, about unconditional love. She wondered what Jesus had meant when he said, ‘Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly father is perfect.’
Was it all the hours spent at a desk? Marking her students’ papers was getting old. She should go out more, her mother suggested. Volunteer. Start getting her hands dirty. Her mother led by example, making and delivering sandwiches for the homeless.
But Eve, though she admired the example, and was touched and moved by it, was not her mother. She felt dedicated to her life of the mind, even as she half feared it was the only life she might ever know.
When she hung up the phone, she had no idea the explanation for her restlessness was already inside her. A first pregnancy – 1986. That was Ben. And three years later she became pregnant with Billy, who did not give her half as much trouble his brother had – none of the morning sickness or the swollen feet. She even had a good appetite; carrying Billy made her hungry. She craved tender cuts of meat. Grilled, broiled or fried. Medium-well.
Billy was born on 23 November, Thanksgiving Day, during a snowstorm. The snow was quite something that day, even by New England’s standards.
✲
It was Christmas in Cleveland Heights, PBS was showing The Snowman and Billy sat hypnotised. Bar the theme song’s lyrics, no one said a word in the animated film or its audience, whose members included Billy’s grandparents, aunties and cousins. He had just turned six the month before; he was all eyes and ears before the pictures and music on the screen. The family knew what to get him for his next birthday. They didn’t wait until then.
He wore that VHS down to the spool, never tired of watching it. Some years it seemed Christmas came every month, every week, to his home TV. You couldn’t change channels whenever The Snowman was playing, even if the remote on the sofa’s arm was flirting with you non-stop. You could only sit back and watch and try and see and hear what Billy saw and heard.
The pensive piano as a red-haired boy wakes to snow. Joyful flutes and pyjama jumps. Rush of dressing and racing outdoors. Drumbeats of deep footsteps, a snowball thrown awry, cross finger wagging at the window, retreating black tracks through the white lawn.
The boy makes a man out of the snow. Floppy green hat and scarf, an orange subtracted from the fruit bowl for a nose, black coal for eyes and buttons. The sweep of a finger to draw a smile. The mother’s long shadow beckoning the boy in for bed.
