Five minutes with author Diana Reid
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Diana Reid, author of the knockout debut Love & Virtue, is back with Seeing Other People, the darkly funny story of two very different sisters, and the summer that stretches their relationship almost to breaking point.
We took five minutes with Diana during her book tour.
Stories of and with sisters are special; why did you want to write about sisters?
I’m always interested in female friendship—all the ways women shape each other, support each other, and sometimes bring each other down. As someone who doesn’t have a sister, I think I’ve always been intrigued by that most-intense female friendship of all.
Was there an event or action that you see as the kernel of the book, or had the themes and ideas (or characters) been brewing?
The core theme was definitely brewing for a while before I started to write. I’d noticed that the long COVID-induced lockdowns lead to a (very necessary and productive!) public conversation about mental health. From my perspective, I felt like these conversations, especially when they took place on social media, were always exhorting young people to look after themselves, prioritise themselves, learn to love themselves, be their best selves etc. And it made me wonder, is there a point at which all this self-focus stops being a legitimate pursuit of self-fulfilment and happiness, and becomes plain selfishness?
But it took me a long time to come up with a way to dramatise that question. Eventually, I thought of a situation where one sister can’t be the happiest or “truest” version of herself without seriously hurting the one she loves most. So she has to decide: which comes first, principles or desires?
There’s a fair skewering of self-help and psychobabble in the book—what’s your interest/preoccupation there?
Oh wow, how long have I got? Kidding haha, but I’m glad you picked up what I was putting down. I think that my generation (people in their twenties) are very fluent in therapy-speak, and we apply it readily to ourselves and other people.
Obviously, this is broadly a good thing. It’s great that we’re equipped to discuss our mental health, both to make sense of our own experiences, and to articulate our struggles to other people. However, as a novelist—and therefore someone who’s always interested in language—I worry that the use of these technical terms can be more weaponising than empowering.
The objective, technical language of therapy-speak claims a medical authority that implies: case closed; we’ve gotten to the bottom of the matter. If, for example, you say you’ve been “gaslit” instead of “contradicted,” you’re positioning yourself as a victim and saying—not only that there’s a disagreement—but also that you’re objectively on the right side of it.
I just worry that if we keep parsing our social interactions in these terms, we’ll lose sight of how complex they really are. Aside from being destructive to interpersonal relationships (it’s exhausting to always feel objectively wronged rather than subjectively hurt, and to always be blaming other people for the way you experience life), it also strikes me as a very boring way to view the world: one that omits so much nuance. And that’s precisely why literature is so important! TikTok videos and Instagram reels can tell us about narcissistic personality traits, but a novel can introduce us to a real human person, who maybe exhibits some of those traits, but also has a personal history, hopes for the future, a desire to be loved and to do better—and all the normal human frailties we all suffer from.
For readers who read your first book, Love & Virtue, what would you say is similar and what different in this one?
My aim for this book was definitely: “same, same but different”. I wanted readers to feel like they had a “Diana Reid book” in their hands. So to that end, the darkly comic tone is very similar to Love & Virtue, and it’s still about young people in contemporary Sydney. Having said that, I was also conscious of not over-dramatising. By that I mean: I noticed when writing Love & Virtue that there’s a compulsion as a novelist to make something crazy or dramatic happen to hold the reader’s attention (like a fatal motorbike accident). But some of my favourite novels are those that recognise the drama in seemingly ‘ordinary’ experiences, like family dynamics and messy relationships. So with Seeing Other People, instead of forcing conventionally ‘interesting’ or ‘dramatic’ events on the reader, I tried really hard to make real life seem interesting.
Speaking of first and second books, did you feel pressure to follow up Love & Virtue—especially with it being so very popular?
I’d actually already written a draft of Seeing Other People by the time Love & Virtue was published, so the response to the first one didn’t impact the second too much. I like to joke that my third book will be the one that’s the product of all the head noise and anxiety. But to date, I’ve found the reader response to Love & Virtue far more encouraging than stultifying.
Seeing Other People is out now.
Feature image: Daniel Boud.
