Diana Reid is a Sydney-based writer, who graduated from the University of Sydney last year with a Bachelor of Arts (First Class Hons Philosophy)/Laws. In January 2020, her career in theatre was off to a promising start: the musical she co-wrote and produced, 1984! The Musical!, debuted and she was set to direct and write theatre performances in Sydney and over to the Edinburgh Fringe. When COVID-19 saw the cancellation of global theatre, she decided she’d spend her time in shutdown writing a manuscript. Love & Virtue is her debut novel.
1. Why do you tell stories?
For me, telling stories is a way to connect with other people. I’ve always been curious about other people’s lives and motivations. Sometimes it occurs to me that it’s strange to want to make up fictional people, and put them in fictional situations, in order to better understand how real people behave in real situations. But I really do think that’s the power of fiction. It helps you understand and care about other people.
2. Describe your [debut] novel in one (or two) sentence(s).
Love & Virtue is an Australian campus novel that looks at sex, power and consent through the eyes of two very different, but equally brilliant young women in their first year at university.
3. Conversations about consent often concentrate on sexual and intimate encounters, at times ignoring the interplay of consent in other personal relationships. What prompted you to explore this discussion in the context of the relationship between Michaela and Eve?
I obviously think that conversations around sex and consent are crucial, and I’m full of gratitude and admiration for the activists that have made them so prominent. As a novelist, and as a philosophy student (like my characters), I’m interested in how we construct meaning. With abstract concepts like consent, (or love or goodness) they’re much easier to throw around in a debate than they are to define. One of the things I wanted to do in Love & Virtue was to take consent out of its highly politicised sexual context, and ask: what is it, and why is it important?
For example, one of the storylines in the book is about a violation of consent—not to sex—but to tell your own story. When this is violated, it reveals how important consent is to a person’s autonomy and agency. Basically, I wanted to demonstrate that it’s through consenting that we gain control over our lives and our narratives. Without it, we can’t really consider ourselves ‘free’ or independent.
Hopefully this kind of thinking isn’t a distraction from the conversations around sex, but rather a way to illuminate them. If someone can see how important consent is as a means to achieve freedom and autonomy, then they should care about consent in all contexts, including sex.
4. Where Eve is a formidable character who simultaneously asserts herself as an independent and free force while constructing herself using Michaela's story, Michaela ''owns'' that she is a result of the interplay of relationships and experiences in her life. Can you comment on the interconnectedness of Michaela's experience and the apparent rejection of the same concept by Eve?
I wanted Michaela and Eve to represent two different approaches to morality. I don’t have a stance on which one is better—I think that we need to be able to accommodate both, and that’s precisely why morality is so complex and people have been debating it for centuries!
Michaela, as you point out, feels very connected to the people around her. She thinks that morality isn’t black and white, but is in part defined by the places we inhabit, and their cultures—what your peers deem right and wrong. This means that if two people see a situation differently, Michaela can become paralysed by nuance: she feels for everyone, and is reluctant to say that any one interpretation is objectively ‘wrong’.
Eve has a more black and white view of right and wrong. She thinks that it’s fixed, and that if you’re not engaged in active resistance against practices she deems immoral, then you’re enabling them.
5. I was overcome with nostalgia throughout Love & Virtue: a room described as a "windowless, stone-walled basement", drinking champagne out of plastic cups on the oval and playing King's Cup in a room needlessly nicknamed. What do you think it is about university life that is universally relatable?
Although, as you say, the physical setting is so important in Love & Virtue—the basement, the oval, the nicknamed room—I think what’s universally relatable and so deeply nostalgic is the characters’ youth. It’s that not-quite-adulthood time of being drunk on new freedoms (as well as, often, actually drunk) and not knowing who you are, but having this desperate ambition to become someone. I also think there’s something intoxicating about feeling like your life could still turn out any number of ways, and that the possibilities are growing all the time.
6. When most people were perfecting their sourdough technique, or trying that whipped coffee craze in lockdown, you decided the time was right to write! How did this (pandemic) time and space shape you as a writer, and/or Love &Virtue as a book?
Alarmingly it shaped me a lot. I’m very conscious that other people write while they have full-time jobs and carer responsibilities, not to mention normal social distractions. Obviously writer’s retreats and residencies are so sought after as a means to escape all that. I’ve never attended one, but I imagine that lockdown replicates the conditions in a lot of ways: a lot of time at the desk, no distractions. Needless to say, I feel enormously privileged to have written that way, and it really highlights the structural barriers that prevent so many people from being able to enter the industry—anyone with a job or children, for a start, can’t just sit at the desk for uninterrupted hours!
7. When and where do you write?
In my bedroom, mostly. I try to work a normal nine to five, but I find I’m very slow in the mornings, and then often have a guilty evening burst to make up for lost time.
8. You've spoken about how you were influenced in your writing by a number of other authors who had left an indelible mark on you. How do you want people to feel reading Love & Virtue, and what do you hope they will carry from the book forward into their lives?
The loftiest aim, I think, is that readers will come away seeing the world as more complex than they did before: that situations, which previously seemed black and white, now look a bit grey. Of course, I also have more modest aims—that they might find the book funny, and like some of the characters.
9. What are three things that sustain you as an author, or while you’re writing?
Sugar, my friends and family, swimming
10. Name three books that you couldn’t live without.
I’ll twist it slightly, and name three books, without which I would be a different person: books that I wouldn’t have my current life without.
The Harry Potter series, which made me a reader
The Secret History, which made me want to be a writer (and to write Love & Virtue in particular)
Middlemarch, which reminds me that a truly great book can change how the reader sees the world. That possibility—the idea that really great books are possible (with oodles more experience, and talent than I have now)—inspires me to keep writing.
bonus question:
What book are you embarrassed to admit that you’ve never read? Or what books are currently on your to be read pile?
My current shame is Bleak House, because I set it for myself as a lockdown project, and here I am—four-and-a-bit months later—still shy of half way.