Acts of Desperation by Megan Nolan

Published 2021 · 288 pages · 60,237 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Fiction, Literary Fiction, Autofiction

How hard is Acts of Desperation to read?

Acts of Desperation scores 68 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 48 out of 100
Nolan writes in contemporary, accessible prose drawn from the registers of ordinary Irish life — bedsits, restaurants, galleries, bus routes. Occasional flourishes like 'maudlin self-pity,' 'incandescent with rage,' and 'hyperbolically' land within common literary usage. There is no specialized jargon or archaic diction; the vocabulary sits close to The Great Gatsby in accessibility while occasionally reaching for the precise emotional word.
Sentence structure: 57 out of 100
Sentences frequently build through multiple embedded clauses and parenthetical self-corrections — the narrator will launch a thought, interrupt it with a qualifier, then resume, often within a single long sentence. This creates a stream of acute self-analysis rather than simple declarative prose. The complexity never approaches Jamesian hypotaxis but consistently demands more than 1984's direct sentences.
Abstraction: 68 out of 100
The novel moves readily from a concrete Dublin scene — buying apples on George's Street, climbing back through a bedsit window — into extended philosophical passages about the nature of victimhood, the body, love as infrastructure, and what it means to be a woman who wants to be loved. The retrospective Athens sections in particular operate almost entirely in the abstract. The balance of concrete and philosophical sits between The Great Gatsby and The Brothers Karamazov.
Information density: 58 out of 100
Each paragraph packs the narrator's internal monologue with emotional reasoning, memory, and self-interrogation stacked on top of the surface events. Scenes like reading Freja's email or attending the gallery opening carry multiple simultaneous currents — jealousy, self-analysis, class consciousness, gendered power. The density is psychological rather than encyclopedic, comparable to Lolita's rich texture but without its allusive scaffolding.
Narrative indirection: 68 out of 100
The narrator explicitly declares her unreliability — she knows she is lying to Ciaran, knows she is rationalizing, knows the difference between how events would read to others and how she feels them. Yet she still proceeds, and readers must constantly hold the gap between her stated account and the implied reality. This is less demanding than Lolita because the narrator flags her own self-deception, but more demanding than The Great Gatsby because the gap is internal rather than perspectival.
Symbolic density: 65 out of 100
The amber brooch Ciaran gives her for Christmas — warm in her palm on the bus home, described as throbbing like a living thing — becomes the novel's central symbol of false promise and self-deception, later bitterly recalled. Ciaran's 'stillness' recurs as a motif for his emotional inaccessibility. The narrator's body operates symbolically throughout: alternately site of worship and site of damage. The symbolism is present and purposeful but never overwhelms the realist surface.
Ironic distance: 75 out of 100
A sustained ironic gap separates what the narrator claims to feel from what the reader observes in the events she describes. She interprets Ciaran's cruelty as complexity, his indifference as depth, his controlling behavior as the inevitable cost of loving someone exceptional. The Athens sections provide retrospective commentary that partly acknowledges this gap, but even there the narrator maintains defenses. The reader must supply the judgment the narrator withholds.
Resolution withholding: 80 out of 100
The central relationship with Ciaran ends definitively and violently, but the novel's psychological questions — what made her stay, whether she has changed, what she will do next — remain explicitly open. The final line, 'That would follow,' is deliberate non-resolution: the narrator has escaped the relationship but not yet constructed a new self. The Athens sections reveal she is still cycling through the same patterns six months later. The ending is ambiguously hopeful rather than closed.
Structural complexity: 72 out of 100
The novel interleaves two timelines: the Dublin relationship with Ciaran, narrated in short numbered chapters, and retrospective sections labeled '2019, Athens' that offer fragmentary commentary on the same events and their aftermath. Chapter numbering resets multiple times as the narrative moves through different phases, requiring readers to actively orient themselves. The structural interruption is purposeful — the Athens sections destabilize the linear momentum and complicate any sense that the narrator has achieved distance or clarity.

How Acts of Desperation is regarded

Acts of Desperation holds a literary regard score of 36 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Where Acts of Desperation sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (101 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, Acts of Desperation scores 85 out of 100. A second mythos, tragedy, pulls at it with a weight of 0.2. About the map of stories.

Mode: Ironic
I said through my huddling and hiding that I was nothing, and I was happy to be nothing if nothing was what pleased him best.
Symbol: Formal
I would build a great sturdy red barn which could stand for centuries. I would build a magnificent golden cathedral. I would build the eighth wonder of the world.
Mythos: Tragic Pathos (Irony phase 4) (irony iv)
I had suffered, and I had made the suffering into something I could consider good. I made it so that suffering was a kind of work.
Genre: Confession + Novel
There are those of you, the enlightened readers, who will find my willing debasement embarrassing.

Where the story of Acts of Desperation takes place

  • Dublin and Athens, a toxic relationship, 2010s (2015 to 2020), the main setting
  • Dublin, April 2012 to November 2014 (with Waterford Christmases and a London weekend) (2012 to 2014)
  • Athens, 2015 to 2019 (retrospective frame)

6 things that are true of Acts of Desperation, with the passage for each

  1. Ciaran lost his sense of smell and most of his taste in a car accident in infancy.

    He had lost his sense of smell and most of his taste in a car accident in infancy

  2. The narrator tells Ciaran she has slept with nine people when the real number is probably around thirty.

    I didn’t know how many people I’d slept with. It was probably something like thirty then, maybe more.

  3. The narrator reads Freja's email in Ciaran's phone while he sleeps, and Freja writes that she has loved him for seven years.

    I’ve never loved anyone but you, and I have loved you for so long now. Seven years.

  4. After they reconcile, the couple move in together two weeks later.

    Two weeks later, we moved in together.

  5. The narrator wakes on her twenty-fifth birthday, 1 November, bruised in an artist's studio.

    It was the first day of November in Dublin and it was my birthday. I was twenty-five years old.

  6. The final break-up scene opens with Ciaran sitting on the bed surrounded by the narrator's diaries.

    All around him were my diaries.

Scenes in Acts of Desperation that Frye would name

29 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Hamartia, untitled
Some part of me had already decided to live for him and let him take over the great weight of myself. The founding misstep: the secret decision to erase herself, which drives the whole fall.
Sparagmos, untitled
He slapped me first, and when I didn’t open my eyes, he hit me with his fist. The assault that ends the relationship is the demonic tearing-apart of her body.
Displacement, untitled
he was the first man I worshipped. His body would become a site of prayer for me Religious myth (worship, prayer) shows through the realistic psychology of an obsessive crush.
Anagnorisis, untitled
I knew then that Ciaran had not loved me. The pivotal late recognition: Ciaran never loved her in a way that had to do with who she was.
Displacement, untitled
What I was feeling was the failure of superstition and charms – the unreliability of prayer. Her bargains with love are displaced ritual and sacrifice, as in the dead-cat memory that follows.
Anagnorisis, untitled
In that moment I knew that Lisa, and only Lisa, was able to see me as I really was. An early recognition of her own insatiable need, delivered through another's gaze.

Books that share these scenes with Acts of Desperation

About the author

Megan Nolan