Getting published was a “dream come true” for Diana Reid.
“You know when you’re a kid so excited for Christmas Day that you wake up really early?” she says. “For a month after I found out I was being published, I woke up unnaturally early every day because I was so excited to live my life.”
The Sydney author was just 24 when she started writing in 2020, as a lockdown project. She didn’t think anything would come of it – but it went on to become her critically acclaimed debut, Love & Virtue.
That 2021 novel, set at a prestigious Sydney campus, tapped into the zeitgeist from all sides: exploring feminism, female friendship, privilege, rape culture and consent. It became a bestseller, winning the ABIA Book of the Year award, the Sydney Morning Herald’s best young novelist and a Bookseller’s Choice fiction award – and endorsements from Helen Garner, Hannah Kent and Annabel Crabb.
“It definitely was something I always wanted to do in a very pipe-dreamy, I-loved-reading-and-I-thought-it would-be-such-a bucket-list-thing-to-try, [but] if it weren’t for that lockdown, I know I would not have done it,” she says. “I felt there was the freedom to fail, because I was like, ‘If I write a book and nothing happens, then it won’t make a difference because no one else is doing anything anyway.’”
Reid has since been able to quit her graduate role at a law firm for the coveted gig of full-time writer – and just 12 months after her debut, she is already releasing a follow-up. Out this month, Seeing Other People is a wry examination of two sisters in their early 20s, and their respective, sometimes intoxicating, attraction to the same woman; told from all three perspectives, it’s a gripping and tense read.
Underpinned by Reid’s take on the difference between infatuation and love, the story is delivered with a cutting appraisal of her generation, with characters who are both performative in the way they act, and profoundly ethically aware. The younger sister, Charlie, an actor, fantasises about the social currency of dating Helen, a director who commands admiration from every room she steps into. While the older sister, Eleanor – fresh from a break-up with the nondescript Mark – is gripped by the intensity of her feelings and a growing dread of what it would look like if she acted on them.
Seeing Other People is similar in tone and style to Love & Virtue (“I wanted people to feel like they were reading a Diana Reid book,” she says): a think novel with a moral dilemma at its heart. But the characters feel like older, more evolved versions of the university students of her campus novel. Reid says her education (she went to the elite Ascham school in Sydney’s east, before studying Law and Philosophy at the University of Sydney) gave her the permission and confidence to question everything – an “exhausting but useful practice” that sees her begin the drafting process with a moral question she would like to explore.
It’s this emotionally analytical undertone of her work – as experienced by young, erudite, mostly white, middle-class characters – that has drawn numerous comparisons to Sally Rooney, who Reid says has been “hugely influential”.
“I guess the more politically conscious [response] is that it’s reductive to equate women because they’re of a similar age and demographic – but I love Sally Rooney so much that I don’t care; I find it really flattering,” she says. “I read Conversations with Friends in 2019, in the year before I wrote Love & Virtue. It [was] the first book I’d read that I felt really reflected my social world … the first time that I realised that lives like mine were worthy of a literary rendering, which sounds like a crazy thing to say because as you say, I am white and university-educated, so I am not shy of representation at all.
“I think it’s more that it was treated so seriously as a piece of literature. I am not naive to the fact that my book sold so much better because Normal People had been so successful, and so publishers saw, ‘campus novel written by a young woman – we know that sells.’”
Of the similarities between the characters in her own novels, Reid says: “I am always interested in the dynamic of female relationships, where it’s a grey area between knowing whether you want to be like someone, or be with them. In Love & Virtue, the main character is obsessed with this Eve figure, but because they’re in a heteronormative environment, she ultimately channels it into this competition for male attention instead. It’s what [philosopher] Adrienne Rich calls compulsory heterosexuality.
“I guess I was not done with that dynamic and I wanted to explore it a bit more. In Seeing Other People, it’s more queer, more diverse, and they’re in that artistic environment, so that kind of obsession is channelled more into a romance rather than this sort of toxic competition.”
Centering queer stories was also a byproduct of another decision: to make the main characters sisters which, Reid believes, can be a more fraught and intense bond than that between brothers and sisters. She won’t comment on whether those characters’ sexualities come from a place of experience; she hopes the book’s merit is taken on its own terms.
“I was so conscious of really powerful queer literature which looks at [queerness] from the context of oppression, which is really real and worthwhile,” she says. But her own story consciously refrains from the politics, normalising queerness to the point that one sister’s move from a straight relationship to a queer one, for instance, is barely commented on by those around her. “What I wanted was to tell a love story, where love was the subject, and the moral dilemmas were the subject, and where queerness was an aspect of the story but not the subject of the story.”
Seeing Other People by Diana Reid is out now through Ultimo Press
