I have very fond memories of a particularly enjoyable event at the Groucho where I met bloggers I’d known virtually for years.
Nolan’s debut is one of the five titles shortlisted for the Sunday Times/University of Warwick Young Writer of the Year award which I helped shadow judge two years ago. I wondered if the actors noticed.I’d been looking forward to reading Naoise Dolan’s Exciting Times for a while when I was offered a review copy. She managed this by holding her bag like a lapdog and thumbing away inside it. Throughout, Edith tended to her work inbox. We were too near the front to see both the words and the actors’ faces at once, so we had to choose which to follow. The play was a Chekhov number in Russian, with Chinese and English subtitles. She had fun-size cartons of soya milk in her bag and offered me one while she talked on the phone.
It wasn’t the fretful ranked surveyal of my teens so much as a hazy curiosity. She was a few inches shorter than me, but side by side our waists were level, which meant she had proportionally longer legs. “You don’t seem like most TEFL teachers.” That shouldn’t have made me happy, but it did. “How are you liking Hong Kong?” Edith said, as though I’d moved last week. Her manicure was perfect, though I noted with interest that she kept her nails short.īesides, Julian had been gone two weeks now, and I wanted to feel like a person again. Dad and George would regard her like a viscountess’s cougar they’d been paid to petsit without knowing whether it had teeth. She’d be a sight walking down my road: perfect posture, knee-high slouched boots, glossy tong-curled hair, small black handbag on a silver chain. I saw her begin to say Dublin wasn’t in the UK, remember I knew, too, and wonder why I’d said that. Besides school and uni, she hadn’t seen much of the UK. Three-syllable words spread out like the spokes on an umbrella: “attaches” became “a-tach-iss.” She said “completely” a lot and usually dropped the “t” in the middle. Button, water, Tuesday-anything with two syllables zipped up then down like a Gothic steeple. Her accent was churchy, high-up, with all the cathedral drops of English intonation. She was twenty-two like me, and now worked at Victoria’s law firm. She studied English literature at Trinity College Dublin and Oxford University.Įdith Zhang Mei Ling-English name Edith, Chinese name Mei Ling, family name Zhang-was a Hong Kong local, but she’d gone to boarding school in England, then to Cambridge. The following is excerpted from Naoise Dolan's debut novel, Exciting Times, an excerpt of which was published in The Stinging Fly by Sally Rooney.
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