For the past few years, my Google search history and bookstore queries have always begun with the following requirement: “Novels similar to Diana Reid”. Ever since her debut, Love and Virtue, was first released, Diana’s writing has become the bar against which all other books (for me, at least) have been measured.
Diana’s follow-up novel, Seeing Other People, was no different. Though it covered different terrain, the appeal of her writing only grew with its publication. Having run a book club in Melbourne’s inner north for over a year, I can guarantee it isn’t just me who gravitated to Diana’s novels.
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When I call Diana for our interview, she’s preparing for a tour to promote her latest novel, Signs of Damage, where she’ll no doubt meet legions of adoring fans. “The people who you interact with at the tour are sort of the ones who are the most enthusiastic and probably the most engaged in the literary world,” she says.
Posting a photo, or receiving an advanced copy of Diana’s books, comes with a certain social clout. What you read is often revealing in some way – it hints at your interests, the questions you’re asking and the needs you might have, whether it be a feel-good romance or escapist fantasy. But for those who don’t know Diana’s work, why do her fans love her so much? And what might her books say about you, as a reader, if you do?
Part of the appeal is Diana’s characterisation. She writes people. Not characters that feel as though they might exist in a far-off world – but people you’ve likely been to parties with, friends of friends you’ve met in passing, an older sister or maybe even someone you see an uncomfortable amount of yourself in.
It could also be that for readers in their twenties and thirties, there’s no literary equivalent (barring the inevitable Sally Rooney comparisons). What other young, Australian writer has released three critically acclaimed books in four years?
Or perhaps it’s because, unlike most other novels, you never finish Diana’s books feeling totally complete. More often than not, you’ll leave it with more questions about life, morality and ethical dilemmas than when you first started. When I speak to her, she confirms this: “I think I want to always complicate things for the reader.”
In Signs of Damage, Diana grapples with the ‘trauma narrative’. A concept used in psychology, trauma narratives are used to help people make sense of painful or confusing experiences. Weaving between past and present, the plot follows a young woman (Cass) suffering from an illness that modern medicine struggles to explain.
“It’s about how the people around her impose their own explanations and specifically, they wonder whether the answer lies in the events of a disastrous family holiday they all took in the south of France 16 years ago,” she says.
It’s a riveting, suspenseful story and one you have to stop yourself from drawing your own conclusions about. The closer you get to discovering what happened to Cass when she went missing as a 13-year-old, the more you find yourself holding your breath.
Diana calls Signs of Damage a ‘summer noir’; a genre where dark events occur in idyllic settings. “I was interested in trauma narratives, and I knew I wanted to play with them and subvert them,” she says.
“I think trauma narratives are a good example of where we’ve seen so many renderings of someone who’s exhibiting certain behaviours that ultimately all get explained by reference to a terrible thing that happened in their past. For some people, that is reality, but I’m always interested in imposing a critical distance between these cultural scripts, which are the ways that we’re taught to make sense of reality, and our actual lived experience, which is often much more complicated.”
It’s different but similar to her previous books. For one, it pushed her as a writer. “My previous books started at the beginning and progressed through until the end,” she says.
Not only was the flashback structure harder to “wrangle” in the drafting stages but it saw Diana go beyond her own experience. “My previous books were told from the perspectives of women essentially my age, whereas this one weaves in and out of multiple different perspectives.”
But how exactly do writers navigate characters – for example, a 13-year-old, an older gay man and a woman of colour – whose lived experiences might differ drastically from their own? For Diana, what was most important when drafting her book was not including characters who were representative of their whole community.
“You always want [characters] to feel idiosyncratic and that they’re their own person. Perhaps their identity is situated in a particular community but they’re not meant to be a stand-in for that whole community.”
While Signs of Damage undoubtedly feels different from her previous work, part of Diana feels as though she’s covering similar ground. “In some ways, I feel like I’m exploring the same thing but just telling them a different way.” However, when handled well, issues of trauma, class and people’s right to tell their own stories will never not be fascinating, particularly when the circumstances are so morally ambiguous.
With two critically acclaimed books under her belt, Diana’s writing process for Signs of Damage took an entirely different turn. Her first novel was written in lockdown as something to do, without the expectation of it ever being published. When drafting Seeing Other People, Diana was far more regimented.
“I felt like I had such an amazing stroke of good fortune by what happened with Love and Virtue getting picked up and people responding to it so well. So I felt like I had to prove myself and that I had to prove I was diligent, and I wasn’t wasting these opportunities that had been given to me,” she says.
By her third book, she’s found a middle ground. “I feel like I have less to prove, or I’m less driven by anxieties about how other people perceive me. I’m happy for the books to just be for themselves.”
Keep up with Diana Reid here.
This article “I want to always complicate things for the reader”: Author Diana Reid on creating her new novel, ‘Signs of Damage’ appeared first on Fashion Journal.
2025-03-05 07:30:00
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