Acts of Desperation

In April 2012, an unnamed young woman living in Dublin sees a man at a gallery opening and is struck by his extraordinary beauty. She recognizes him from a previous encounter at the Rathmines Library. His name is Ciaran, a half-Danish, half-Irish art critic with downy blond hair, grey eyes, and a crooked Roman nose. Beyond his looks, she is captivated by an immense stillness radiating from his body, a quality of seeming wholly self-contained. She feels not just attraction but an overwhelming, almost spiritual tenderness for his humanness. They speak briefly, and he gives her his phone number.

Before Ciaran, the narrator's life is defined by loneliness, heavy drinking, and a desperate need for love. She lives in a bedsit in Ranelagh, splitting between a buoyant public persona and a private misery she can barely endure. Love has replaced religion as her faith, the only force she believes can validate her existence. Her drinking is severe: She identifies with the description of a "final-stage alcoholic" who wakes "terribly frightened." The night she meets Ciaran, she drinks until she vomits and blood vessels burst around her eyes.

Their first date at the Natural History Museum is pleasant but unremarkable. He kisses her goodbye and she runs up the quays laughing, certain she is in love. She reflects on the years preceding him: sleeping with musicians and DJs, a humiliating affair with a wealthy older editor, and her friendship with Lisa, her best friend from college and the only person who truly sees the narrator's bottomless need. When Lisa moves to Berlin with her girlfriend Hen, the narrator is partly relieved.

The narrator and Ciaran settle into a tender early relationship, but she observes the other side of his solemnity: frequent outbursts of anger at minor provocations. Their first real conflict comes at a gallery reading in late May, where Ciaran is openly rude to her friends and dismisses their relationship as merely sleeping together. Days later, he returns to her door, vulnerable, and reveals his history with Freja, his Danish ex-girlfriend, who cheated on him throughout their long relationship. He says he moved to Ireland partly to escape her and is afraid to be close to anyone again. The narrator vows to rebuild his trust.

Through autumn 2012, the relationship stabilizes, though the narrator separates her social life from Ciaran entirely. She lies about how many people she has slept with, saying nine instead of roughly 30. One evening, Ciaran reveals he has been writing poems about Freja and sent them to her for feedback. The narrator is devastated. The next morning, she reads Freja's email on his unlocked phone, discovering they have been communicating daily for months. Freja critiques the narrator's appearance, pleads for Ciaran to return, and declares eternal love. The narrator says nothing.

Over Christmas in Waterford, Ciaran ignores all the narrator's calls for days. She grows frantic, unable to confide in her gentle, intuitive father or her mother, Keelin, who remarried a school teacher named Stíofán. On the day after Christmas, Ciaran arrives at her Dublin door with a hard, cold face and announces it is over. She deduces Freja is staying at his apartment. He pats her back twice when she begs for a hug and walks away without looking back.

Months of grief follow. She obsessively tracks Ciaran online, dreams of killing Freja, and calls Lisa most evenings. In April 2013, she texts Ciaran while drunk that she misses him. He replies in kind. Days later, they meet at the Natural History Museum, and he says he wants to start again. Two weeks later, they move in together.

The narrator throws herself into domestic life. Cooking becomes her primary offering, each meal a ritual of devotion. She subsidizes his rent, cleans his clothes, and makes herself indispensable, strategically ensuring he cannot imagine life without her. But the relationship deteriorates. She begins evaluating women the way Ciaran would, cataloguing potential threats, and obsessively checks Freja's social media. Ciaran's control intensifies: He pours her wine down the sink, limits her smoking and drinking, emails her studies about cirrhosis, chides her for not going vegan like Freja, and once forces her head close to the sink to examine blood in her spit. The narrator spends many nights on the bathroom floor, cutting herself, hoping he will knock on the door. He never does.

In January 2014, she visits Ciaran's father, Peter, in his barely inhabitable cottage in Wicklow. She watches Peter mercilessly mock Ciaran while Ciaran absorbs it all with superhuman stillness. She recognizes their identical expressions of calcified resentment, decades of feeling left unspoken, and contrasts this with her own father, who always came for her.

In March, a colleague gropes the narrator at an office party and whispers a crude remark about Ciaran. That night, Ciaran screams at her and grabs her wrist, banging it against the kitchen table. Locked in the bathroom afterward, she fantasizes for the first time about being with another man.

In June, her father is hospitalized with a throat swelling. In Waterford, she reconnects with Reuben, her first love from when she was 15, and they sleep together. The sex is soft and easy, utterly unlike the anguished intensity of Ciaran. Overwhelmed with guilt the next morning, she blocks Reuben everywhere. After her father receives the all-clear, she begins a full affair with Noah, a charismatic musician she meets at a party in Dublin, whose warmth makes the world feel "good and ripe and ready to be run towards." She flies to London to see him play, lying to Ciaran about traveling with friends.

Her infidelities multiply through autumn 2014. She wakes on the morning of November 1st, her 25th birthday, alone on a studio floor, bruised and bleeding. Noah has invited her to move to London. She envisions a new life but recognizes she would only be running from one dependency to another. She decides there will be no end to the cycle unless she makes one herself.

She goes home and tells Ciaran she wants to break up. He leads her to their bedroom, where he has arranged all her diaries across the bed. He reads aloud her descriptions of needing to be hurt, her sexual dissatisfaction, her accounts of other men. He undresses. He kisses her and she kisses back, overwhelmed with relief. Then he becomes violent, slapping and punching her, forcing her to perform oral sex while repeating that this is what she likes. When he finishes, he walks into the shower. She packs a bag and leaves. Two weeks later, she leaves the country.

Six months later, in Athens in May 2015, the narrator is rebuilding a solitary life. Her loneliness has become peaceful rather than desperate. When her old friend Mark visits and pressures her into sex despite her clear refusal, she reflects bitterly on how men's persistence overrides a woman's stated no. At the beach the next day, she swims far out alone, feeling her body as natural and strong for the first time. She remembers how much she once loved learning things for their own sake, sitting in the Waterford library as a child. She recognizes that her entire life had been consumed by the desperation to be loved by a man, the belief that adoration would fill her so completely she would never need to harm or numb herself again. Now she is inside her own body with nobody to say what happens next. "But that was all right. That would follow" (279).