Last summer, Diana Reid’s debut novel Love & Virtue dominated reading lists and book club conversations. It was awarded the Abia Book of the Year Award, and the now 26-year-old author was instantly compared to Irish writer Sally Rooney for her conversational style and ability to capture the voices and preoccupations of a generation of students.
Set at one of Sydney’s prestigious universities, Love & Virtue told the story of two friends – Eve and Michaela – who, surrounded by more privileged peers, bonded over their scholarship status. Its topics of sexual assault, student-teacher relationships, and who gets to tell their stories, seemed to speak to a moment in history, all in 300 gripping pages.
Now Reid’s second novel, Seeing Other People, is out only 12 months after her first (she was encouraged to start writing it before Love & Virtue was released). For those who relished the pace and relatability of the first book, Seeing Other People is a sibling of sorts – with a similar voice, sense of humour and moral framework.
“I think it’s what interests me the most,” Reid says of the moral dilemmas at the heart of her two novels so far (she’s in the process of writing her third). “It’s what interests me in the things I like to read. I always like to finish a book feeling like the situation it described looks more complicated for having read the book than it did at the start.”
She says she thought a lot about the books she likes to read before starting Seeing Other People – “not just contemporary fiction, but classics”.
“I realised that a lot of my favourite books don’t necessarily have hugely dramatic or traumatic things happen – they derive the stakes from the interpersonal relationships, and the craft of it is making real life seem high stakes, rather than putting characters in impossibly high-stakes situations and watching them respond.”
Authors that do this really well include Rooney, who is up there as one of Reid’s influences, she says. As are Jane Austen and Henry James and their great novels of manners. “Every now and then someone will get a cold and die of it, but other than that it really is about how people feel about each other and how they relate to the people they love and their efforts to understand them,” she says.
Where Love & Virtue was written through Eve’s eyes alone, Seeing Other People is written in third person from the perspectives of sisters Eleanor and Charlie, and their love interest, Helen.
“Your love-life can at any given time be one of the most dramatic things that’s happened to you,” she says of the book’s focus on the sisters’ sticky situation, encompassing deceit, desire, and the line between self-love and selfishness.
One of the best compliments she’s heard so far is that the author “must have a sister”, as Eleanor and Charlie’s relationship is so well drawn. (Reid has a brother, but no sisters). It’s both flattering and a source of frustration that some readers assume her writing is autobiographical.
“I like to write about a general social world that I’m familiar with,” she says. “I think the idea that I would have just copied out my life as it happened felt like it was undermining the craft that goes into it. My life is not that interesting and I’ve gone to great lengths to make my books interesting,” she says, laughing. “But I’m more relaxed about it now.”
In both her novels, Reid gives as much colour and attention to the location – Sydney – as she does to her characters. In Seeing Other People, Charlie and Helen live together in a party house in the inner west, there are coastal trips to recognisable swimming spots such as Gordons Bay and Clovelly, an argument kicks off at an Enmore Theatre comedy gig, and difficult conversations unfold at a park under a noisy Sydney Harbour Bridge.
“[Sydney] certainly looms very large in my imagination, and I would like it to loom large in other people’s as well. I think it’s such a visually beautiful place that it can have a real effect on people’s mood, and I also love the fact that it’s a city of lots of different villages with their own cultures. As a writer that’s a fun thing to play with in terms of showing character – where people live can say a lot about them, I think.”
Seeing Other People, published by Ultimo Press, is available in bookstores now. $32.99.
