{"id":1931,"date":"2021-11-29T11:19:33","date_gmt":"2021-11-29T10:19:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/monblogeur.tech\/index.php\/2021\/11\/29\/facebook-made-me-realise-i-didnt-have-a-social-life-author-louise-nealon-on-sex-dreams-and-friendship-independent-ie\/"},"modified":"2021-11-29T11:19:33","modified_gmt":"2021-11-29T10:19:33","slug":"facebook-made-me-realise-i-didnt-have-a-social-life-author-louise-nealon-on-sex-dreams-and-friendship-independent-ie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/monblogeur.tech\/index.php\/2021\/11\/29\/facebook-made-me-realise-i-didnt-have-a-social-life-author-louise-nealon-on-sex-dreams-and-friendship-independent-ie\/","title":{"rendered":"&#039;Facebook made me realise I didn&#039;t have a social life&#039; &#8211; author Louise Nealon on sex, dreams and friendship &#8211; Independent.ie"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"cfbc967f0983488262956e73eca9483a\" data-index=\"1\" style=\"float: none; margin:10px 0 10px 0; text-align:center;\">\n<script async src=\"https:\/\/pagead2.googlesyndication.com\/pagead\/js\/adsbygoogle.js?client=ca-pub-3859091246952232\" crossorigin=\"anonymous\"><\/script>\r\n<!-- blok -->\r\n<ins class=\"adsbygoogle\" data-ad-client=\"ca-pub-3859091246952232\" data-ad-slot=\"1334354390\"><\/ins>\r\n<script>\r\n     (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});\r\n<\/script>\r\n\n<\/div>\n<p>                                                  <a class=\"icon1 -i:independentie\" href=\"https:\/\/www.independent.ie\/\" aria-label=\"Independent.ie\" data-vars-category=\"Header\"data-vars-action=\"Logo\"><span>Independentie<\/span><\/a>            <br \/>     <label for=\"header_search\">Search<\/label>     <input type=\"text\" name=\"q\" id=\"header_search\" value=\"\" placeholder=\"Search\"  data-vars-form-name=\"Header\" \/>     <button type=\"submit\" aria-label=\"Search\"><i class=\"icon1 -i:search\" aria-label=\"Search\"><span>Search<\/span><\/i><\/button> <br \/><time datetime=\"2021-11-29\">Monday, 29 November 2021<\/time> <small>|<\/small> 4&deg;C <a href=\"\/weather\/\">Dublin<\/a><br \/>         <label for=\"section_search_580\">Search<\/label>     <input type=\"text\" name=\"q\" id=\"section_search_580\" value=\"\" placeholder=\"Search\" data-vars-form-name=\"Sub Navigation\" \/>     <button type=\"submit\" aria-label=\"Search\"><i class=\"icon1 -i:search\" aria-label=\"Search\"><span>Search<\/span><\/i><\/button> <br \/>                 <a href=\"#sections\" aria-label=\"Sections\" toggle=\"body\/is-sections-active\" data-vars-category=\"Navigation\" data-vars-action=\"Sections\" data-vars-label=\"Expand\">                     <i class=\"icon1 -i:menu\" aria-label=\"Menu\"><span>Menu<\/span><\/i>                                            <span>Sections<\/span>                                      <\/a>             <br \/>         <label for=\"section_search_203\">Search<\/label>     <input type=\"text\" name=\"q\" id=\"section_search_203\" value=\"\" placeholder=\"Search\" data-vars-form-name=\"Sub Navigation\" \/>     <button type=\"submit\" aria-label=\"Search\"><i class=\"icon1 -i:search\" aria-label=\"Search\"><span>Search<\/span><\/i><\/button> <br \/>                 <a href=\"#sections\" aria-label=\"Sections\" toggle=\"body\/is-sections-active\" data-vars-category=\"Navigation\" data-vars-action=\"Sections\" data-vars-label=\"Expand\">                     <i class=\"icon1 -i:menu\" aria-label=\"Menu\"><span>Menu<\/span><\/i>                                            <span>Sections<\/span>                                      <\/a>             <br \/>             <i class=\"icon1 -i:close\"toggle=\"^.message2-outer\/-hidden\/+\" aria-label=\"Close\"><span>Close<\/span><\/i>            <span id=fp-snackbar-message><\/span>         <br \/> <span class=\"premium1-wrap\">     <span>Premium<\/span> <i class=\"icon1 -i:harp\"><\/i> <\/span> <br \/><span>The winner of the <i>Sunday Independent<\/i>-sponsored Newcomer of the Year at the Irish Book Awards, talks <\/span><span>about dreams, boundaries, porn culture, trauma, and how they fed into her debut novel \u2018<\/span><span><em>Snowflake\u2019<\/em><\/span><br \/>                         <a href=\"javascript:void(0)\" class=\"c-lightbox1-top-close icon-close\" data-close><span>Close<\/span><\/a>         <br \/>Louise Nealon says we need healing for what society has put on us. Picture by Darren Kidd\/PressEye<br \/><strong data-current><\/strong>\/<span data-count><\/span><br \/><strong class=\"name1\" >Victoria White<\/strong>                            <br \/><time class=\"time1\">     November 28 2021 02:30 AM <\/time><br \/>Louise Nealon was 18 when she dreamed a dream that belonged to someone else. \u201cThe dream wasn\u2019t very vivid. It was just an overall feeling of being disembodied. What I remember much more than the dream is the feeling of disappearing completely from myself.\u201d<br \/><span>This may sound like an experience of mental breakdown, and Nealon, now 30, did indeed suffer from anxiety and depression as a student. But she\u00a0deliberately returned\u00a0to the surreal experience of dreaming someone else\u2019s dream as the inspiration of her first novel, <\/span><span><em>Snowflake<\/em><\/span><span>. <\/span><br \/>She says now that sharing her dream world with others by writing has helped her back to good mental health. As a writer she can be \u201cauthentically\u201d herself. <br \/><span>Her decision has been validated by the recognition that <\/span><span><em>Snowflake<\/em><\/span><span> has received since it was published <\/span><span>this year, and which culminated this week in her winning the <\/span><span><em>Sunday Independent<\/em><\/span><span> Newcomer of the Year in the An Post Irish Book Awards.<\/span><br \/><span>She says she\u2019s \u201cthrilled\u201d even to have been on the shortlist with the five other books that were nominated, all of which she loves: <\/span><span><em>Diving for Pearls<\/em><\/span><span> by Jamie O\u2019Connell, <\/span><span><em>Dinner Party: A\u00a0Tragedy<\/em><\/span><span> by Sarah Gilmartin, Una Mannion\u2019s <\/span><span><em>A Crooked Tree<\/em><\/span><span>, Fiona Scarlett\u2019s <\/span><span><em>Boys Don\u2019t Cry<\/em><\/span><span> and Eimear Ryan\u2019s <\/span><span><em>Holding Her Breath<\/em><\/span><span>. <\/span><br \/>Eimear Ryan and Nealon are close friends. Both play camogie \u2013 Ryan is an inter-county camogie player for Tipperary, and Nealon played camogie for her native Cappagh, Co Kildare. Indeed, says Louise, Ryan gave her her first \u201cpaid gig\u201d as a speaker at an event promoting women in sport.<br \/><span>She jokes that the votes of her camogie club helped win her the award but in fact the public vote is balanced by that of an \u201cacademy\u201d of literary experts including writers, librarians and book sellers and <\/span><span><em>Sunday Independent<\/em><\/span><span> literary editor Madeleine Keane. <\/span><br \/>Such an award, says Nealon, validates the work of writers and \u201ccelebrates all the different ways we can use our imagination to make a living\u201d. \u00a0<br \/><span>Nealon\u2019s career as a writer really began to take off when agent Marianne Gunn O\u2019Connor spotted her Se\u00e1n \u00d3 Faol\u00e1in Award-winning short story \u2018What Feminism is?\u2019 in the <\/span><span><em>Irish Times<\/em><\/span><span> in 2018 and got in contact. <\/span><br \/><span>Last year their combined efforts paid off handsomely when <\/span><span><em>Snowflake<\/em><\/span><span> was acquired for a six-figure sum by Manilla Press along with a second novel, which is still a work in progress and about which Nealon is keeping mum.<\/span><br \/><span>The film and television rights have been sold to Element Pictures, the company that turned Sally Rooney\u2019s <\/span><span><em>Normal People<\/em><\/span><span> into the multiple award-winning television series.<\/span><br \/>Since the book deal was done, Louise Nealon has been living other people\u2019s dreams all right \u2014 those of most writers on the planet. <br \/>The novelist says she still \u201chasn\u2019t got her head around\u201d this degree of success and is worried that servicing the publicity machine is going to give her the full-time job of \u201cpretending to be a writer\u201d. She explains: \u201cI try to make intelligible answers but I\u2019m way too close to the book to put it into words.\u201d<br \/>But her current success has been very hard won. She spent her 20s trying and failing to tell the story of a woman who dreamed other people\u2019s dreams, including a year at Queen\u2019s University, Belfast, doing a master\u2019s degree in creative writing. <br \/>The novel only really took off, when, as she says, she \u201cmet\u201d her characters and \u201cgrounded\u201d the action in her native Co Kildare.<br \/><span>The story of <\/span><span><em>Snowflake<\/em><\/span><span> unfolds on a small farm where a young woman, Debbie, comes of age under the shadow of a mentally unstable mother, Maeve, and under the care of her uncle Billy, who lives outside in a caravan. Maeve and Billy are both clairvoyants, but while his powers of divination are sought after by the local community, hers are by the same token ridiculed. <\/span><br \/>Debbie is given a ticket to freedom in the form of a place on an English course in Trinity College where she makes friends with a rich townie called Xanthe and slowly works her way back to loving and understanding her home and her family of mystics. <br \/>Nealon wrote the book on her parents\u2019 dairy farm in Cappagh, Co Kildare, where she grew up, close to the Meath border between Enfield and Kilcock. <br \/>While her family has been supportive of her writing, the wider society seemed money and career-obsessed to a girl coming of age in the time of the Celtic Tiger. <br \/>A couple of weeks ago, she visited her former secondary school in Kilcock and, she says, her English teacher recalled asking the class, \u201cWho\u2019s going to do English in college?\u201d <br \/>No hands went up. From the back of the class, one girl said, \u201cI want to be able to buy nice things.\u201d<br \/>Contemporary Ireland left little space for a dreamy girl whose father named her, \u201cthe Fairy\u201d. Being a dreamer didn\u2019t seem like a viable option, she says: \u201cIn the age of social media, it\u2019s all about presenting a very clear picture of yourself to the outside world in a way we didn\u2019t before. It was a watershed moment when Facebook took off. I didn\u2019t really place much value on my social life until I realised that everyone else had one and I didn\u2019t. I started to feel really down.\u201d<br \/>What the disembodied eye of the smartphone and the pornographer\u2019s camera have done to sex for young people is made terrifyingly clear in the novel. Her characters don\u2019t have very much sex but they obsess about their ability to please others. <br \/>The reality of sex as a performance for young people is far from funny, however: \u201cIt\u2019s not what the man expects of the woman, it\u2019s what she thinks he expects,\u201d Nealon says. <br \/>One of her funniest images is in her short story \u2018What Feminism is?\u2019 when a young woman speaks of her experience of sex as feeling like the corner of a hot press into which a bulky sleeping bag is pushed but keeps falling out.<br \/>She describes young women preparing for sex like they would for an exam but adds that young men are also \u201cvictims\u201d of societal demands which previous generations simply did not feel. \u201cIt\u2019s incredibly damaging and it\u2019s something we\u2019re not talking about.\u201d <br \/>When I suggest that the relationship between men and women is undergoing a traumatic readjustment Nealon laughs and quips, \u201cThat\u2019s why I\u2019m single\u201d, but she declines to comment further.\u00a0<br \/>Relationships between women seem to interest her even more than relationships between the sexes. She loves Elena Ferrante\u2019s Neapolitan novels which she says broke the taboo on describing female friendship in all its intimacy, jealousy, love and hatred.<br \/>\u201cI got into the habit in my late 20s of voicing my jealousy of my female friends and it really helped our relationship. I was surprised when they also said they were jealous of bits of me. I discovered we all had really low self-esteem and we were always projecting what we wanted to be onto each other,\u201d Nealon says. <br \/>She is fascinated by the dynamic between younger and older women. \u201cI see so much beauty in older women. I admire my mother so much and it hurts me when she doesn\u2019t see what I see. But I\u2019m repeating the same pattern.\u201d<br \/>Nealon believes intergenerational trauma is also at the heart of Irish women\u2019s lack of self-esteem. \u201cMy grandmother had to give up her job when she got married. It\u2019s not that long ago. We\u2019re actually part of a much longer journey and all these superficial changes in society, if we choose to go deeper, they\u2019re small changes.\u201d<br \/>Going \u201cdeeper\u201d is, she says, where \u201cmysticism comes in\u201d. Nealon is a strong believer in tapping into the spirit world. \u201cWe don\u2019t know everything,\u201d as she puts it. Maeve, Debbie\u2019s space-cadet of a mother, whose most memorable scene involves jumping into a coffin and landing on top of the corpse, is a mystic character that Nealon based on \u201cworst case scenario for me if I didn\u2019t\u2026 didn\u2019t&#8230;\u201d<br \/>Rein yourself in, I suggest?<br \/><span>She describes using objects like sea shells and Brigid\u2019s crosses and dandelions during the writing of <\/span><span><em>Snowflake<\/em> as \u201cport keys\u201d into the world of her characters, the points at which Nealon\u2019s world \u201ckind of crossed\u201d with that of her fictional characters.\u00a0<\/span><br \/>When I suggest she means they\u2019re symbols, she insists they go much deeper: they\u2019re keys into the \u201cspirit world\u201d of her fiction. How firmly she believes in this alternative world is clear in the way she talks about her characters as if she didn\u2019t make them up. \u201cDebbie lives down the road from me in Kildare,\u201d she says casually. <br \/>Nealon grew up on the farm with her brother and three sisters in what sounds like a comfortable environment. \u201cI need to make clear,\u201d she says, \u201cthat I didn\u2019t grow up in poverty. And neither did Debbie.\u201d <br \/>When she arrived in Trinity College Dublin at the age of 18 she found, however, that she and her background were looked down on. As does Debbie.<br \/><span>It\u2019s a real ouch moment in <\/span><span><em>Snowflake<\/em><\/span><span> when Debbie crosses herself after seeing an ambulance go by and her friend Xanthe remarks that it\u2019s a \u201ccute\u201d thing to do. Nealon, too, found she was patronised at Trinity and expected to be much more innocent than the townies.<\/span><br \/><span>She takes the opportunity in <\/span><span><em>Snowflake<\/em><\/span><span> to make sure that farming and the land get their due respect. Vegans who say \u201cdairy takes babies from their mothers\u201d don\u2019t really win the argument with Billy who responds, \u201cWhat are we f**king meant to do? Leave the calf there for it to grow up enough so mammy and son can start riding each other?\u201d <\/span><br \/>She doesn\u2019t mythologise the land either, but the novel makes an argument for people to connect both with the land and with each other. And above all to make time for the survival skill that\u00a0is daydreaming. <br \/>I suggest that she\u2019s really arguing against an economy that seems to demand more and more hours from its workers and leaves no time for thought, let alone dreams. She agrees that she\u2019s \u201cprivileged\u201d to be able to spend her days writing but says she worked hard for it. <br \/><span>Grateful as she is to win the <\/span><span><em>Sunday Independent<\/em><\/span><span> Newcomer of the Year award, she\u2019s dying to stop doing interviews and go back to write full-time in her home in Belfast, a city she learned to love as a master\u2019s degree student and \u201cisn\u2019t finished with yet\u201d because it\u2019s \u201cgas\u201d and the people are \u201cso warm\u201d.<\/span><br \/>Maybe she\u2019s finally learning to follow her own prescription: \u201cI think that women being radically kind, not to each other, but to themselves \u2013 and supporting each other in that \u2013 is a starting point for the healing that we need to do for what society has put on us that\u2019s not us.\u201d\u00a0<br \/><em>\u2018Snowflake\u2019 is out now from Manilla Press<\/em><br \/>             <!-- Logo -->             <a class=\"icon1 -i:independentie\" href=\"https:\/\/www.independent.ie\/\" aria-label=\"Independentie\"><span>Independentie<\/span><\/a>        <br \/>     <label for=\"footer-search\">Search<\/label>     <input type=\"text\" name=\"q\" id=\"footer-search\" value=\"\" placeholder=\"Search entire site\" data-vars-form-name=\"Footer\" \/>     <button type=\"submit\" aria-label=\"Search\">         <i class=\"icon1 -i:search\" aria-label=\"Search\"><span>Search<\/span><\/i>    <\/button> <br \/>         <a href=\"https:\/\/www.mediahuis.ie\/\" class=\"owner1\">             A <i class=\"icon1 -i:mediahuis\"aria-label=\"Mediahuis\"><i><span>Mediahuis<\/span><\/i><\/i>  Website             &copy; Independent.ie         <\/a>     <\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.independent.ie\/entertainment\/books\/facebook-made-me-realise-i-didnt-have-a-social-life-author-louise-nealon-on-sex-dreams-and-friendship-41091387.html\">source<\/a><\/p>\n<!--CusAds0-->\n<div style=\"font-size: 0px; height: 0px; line-height: 0px; margin: 0; padding: 0; clear: both;\"><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Independentie Search Search Monday, 29 November 2021 | 4&deg;C Dublin Search Search Menu Sections Search Search Menu Sections Close Premium The winner of the Sunday Independent-sponsored Newcomer of the Year at the Irish Book Awards, talks about dreams, boundaries, porn culture, trauma, and how they fed into her debut novel \u2018Snowflake\u2019 Close Louise Nealon says [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"googlesitekit_rrm_CAow1sXXCw:productID":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-non-classe"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/monblogeur.tech\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1931","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/monblogeur.tech\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/monblogeur.tech\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monblogeur.tech\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monblogeur.tech\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1931"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/monblogeur.tech\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1931\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/monblogeur.tech\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monblogeur.tech\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monblogeur.tech\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}