Irish journalist and writer Ana Kinsella first came to attention with her 2022 non-fiction book Look Here: On The Pleasures Of Observing The City (Daunt), a post-lockdown reverie about the joys of London life.
Now comes her debut novel, Frida Slattery As Herself, which follows the lives and fortunes of the eponymous Frida, an actor, and her creative (and sometimes romantic) partner, the playwright and director John Reddan.
The book was acquired by Scribner in a six-publisher auction, and it’s easy to see why editors might have been excited. The Irish characters and setting, the tortured and misunderstood relationships, the acute observations are all prime Sally Rooney hallmarks, but I found the book more readily called to mind novels such as David Nicholls’s One Day in how it spliced commercial storytelling with literary reflection to produce a perfectly bittersweet summer read.
Kinsella is pleasingly attentive to story, detonating little plot points at frequent intervals, ensnaring her reader in the characters’ emotional turmoil. The characters themselves are absorbing and believable – even the peripheral ones like Kitty and Edel. Her writing style is easy and understated, with regular illuminating lines like this one describing Frida’s relationship with her absent father: “He treated them with curiosity, like they were exchange students from another country.”
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Kinsella cleverly structures the story around Frida and John’s collaborations over the years, as well as their hiatuses, which allows her to cleanly jump over periods of time while adding tension, pace and mystery in the process.
Anyone who read Kinsella’s first book will recognise her preoccupation with place as she examines the subtle effects that location has on our identity and our behaviour. John and Frida are very different people when they are in Dublin, London, New York and LA. The book is ultimately a love story, but not just on the obvious, romantic level. It also explores the more difficult task of falling in love with one’s own self, one’s own life, and one’s hopes and dreams.
It’s also, as debut novels should be, a big, earnest exploration of existential questions such as selfhood, womanhood, family, freedom, and what it is to be an artist. My one reservation concerns the ending, which is somewhat withheld, a deliberate stylistic choice, but one that left me feeling a little cheated. Endings aside, this is an effortless, elegant and impressive debut from a promising young writer.
Edel Coffey’s latest novel, In Glass Houses, is published by Sphere
