Diana Reid dared herself to write a novel. She loved reading, so why not try? If she couldn’t write one during the pandemic, then she figured she probably never would. 

Unlike most of us who resolved to finish In Search of Lost Time or master the sourdough starter, Diana was a pandemic success story. In two years, she wrote two books, both of which are immensely popular in the U.K. and her native Australia. In 2022, she was named Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Young Novelist and included as a member of Vogue Australia’s Youthquake.

I found Diana’s books at an equally isolating time in my life. I was traveling across the country every two weeks to take care of a family member who’d received a dire diagnosis. Perpetually in airports and hospitals, I was straddling my “normal” life and my new one as a caretaker. I inhaled books, desperate for a fictional escape.

Diana’s novels were the first books I read during this period that made me pause, slow down, and savor. After reading her debut, Love & Virtue, a campus novel that follows two philosophy students who navigate the murky waters of both campus activism and party culture, I immediately ordered her second. In Seeing Other People, which came out in paperback this summer in Australia, two sisters try to decide whether to act on their desire for each other’s partners.

Beneath Diana’s breezy stories was a trapdoor that dropped me into complex moral dilemmas – what does it mean to be a good person? Can performing virtue actually be virtuous? Is self-care ever selfish?

As designed, Diana’s books left me with more questions than answers. Hungry for closure, I invited her to speak with me to discuss her novels and the role of morality in art.

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Shelby Heitner: I read in a previous interview of yours with Ramona Magazine that all of your books start with a moral question. I’d love to know how that grows into a novel for you with characters and scenes?

Diana Reid: It varies. With my first novel Love & Virtue, the question and its dramatization came to me at the same time. I had this idea that someone’s story would be stolen, but then put to good use. I wanted the narrative to exemplify questions about what it means to be a good person and whether doing good in a performative way could ever be the same as doing good for altruistic reasons.

Shelby Heitner: In the book, Eve steals the story of her friend Michaela’s sexual assault and passes it off as her own in order to galvanize support against their campus’ rape culture. I did get the sense that Michaela is upset by what Eve did – their friendship is clearly over – but also that Michaela considers it possible that Eve may have done the right thing, morally. You never really give us an answer as to whether the characters think a story can be stolen if it’s put to good use.

Diana Reid: In my experience, the more you think about moral questions, the more complexities come to light and the harder it can be to form a clear judgment. In Michaela’s case, I think she can confidently say that Eve is a bad friend, but I also think Michaela realizes that just because Eve is a bad friend that doesn’t mean that she’s holistically a bad person. We all have so many different modes of relationships and sometimes they conflict. I wanted to present those tensions to the reader and let them decide. 

Shelby Heitner: Another central plotline in Love & Virtue is Michaela’s romantic relationship with her philosophy professor Paul, which also deals with shades of consent since there’s such a big age gap and unequal power dynamic. When you were working on the book, did these two relationships develop in tandem or did one grow from the other?

Diana Reid: The two relationships were always the twin threads of the book. From the start, I knew I wanted to write a campus novel with a character like Eve, who would like to think she’s a very moral person. She thinks about what’s right and wrong a lot and she’s highly politicized as well. 

Eve finds it very easy to say that Michaela’s relationship with their professor is wrong because it fits nearly within our stereotype of a power imbalance. Eve can say well, he’s the man and you’re the woman; he’s the teacher and you’re his student, so because patriarchy, it’s wrong. But Eve is also incapable of seeing the way that she behaves wrongly when she betrays Michaela because it doesn’t code easily into any existing meta-narratives. 

I knew I wanted to have a kind of cliché stereotypical transgression in the book, so that we could get the contrast between how easy it is to recognize the wrongness of something that has an existing narrative attached to it as opposed to a more unusual one and see the difference in the characters’ moral reasoning process.

Shelby Heitner: I found it really striking that after Michaela’s assault, she never really considers herself a victim even though other people do. She even says at one point in the book, “sex is sex is sex.” This isn’t usually the narrative we hear about sexual assault, which because of our culture of misogyny and skepticism, victims are usually the ones trying to convince others of their pain. Can you tell me more about your decision to address sexual assault in this way?

Diana Reid: Yeah, I know it’s a bit…. yeah. [Laughs] I didn’t write the book for publication. I wrote it during the pandemic when I was bored. After I found out it was gonna be published I was like, God, is that a really problematic argument that I’ve just put into the mouth of a character? 

Essentially, Michaela has a sexual encounter where there wasn’t consent because she’s too drunk to remember it. Since she doesn’t feel traumatized by it, she decides to repress it. Even though Michaela finds that she’s able to get on with her life and not think about it too much, her friends still insist that she’s a victim.

I was interested in looking at consent more broadly than just in a sexual context. In Michaela’s case, her consent is violated in the bodily way, but then again by her friends when they insist upon their interpretation of events. Not that they’re equivalent, but it is, in a way, another violation of a different kind of consent. 

When I was writing, I was trying to get in the mind of the kind of people who don’t understand why there’s so much fuss at the moment about sexual encounters. I thought that if they could understand a violation for a more abstracted conception of consent, then they must understand why it’s important in the more sexually situated one.

Shelby Heitner: You mention writing during the pandemic – your second novel, Seeing Other People, was the first time I’d read a post-pandemic story that felt current, with characters that are dealing with the fall out of their relationships and careers after lockdown.

Correct me if I get the timeline wrong, but since you started Seeing Other People before Love & Virtue came out in 2021, then you were probably writing a post-pandemic novel while we were still in the middle of the pandemic. Can you tell me about your decision to address the pandemic as something in the past?

Diana Reid: The problem when you’re trying to write contemporary fiction is that there’s always a lag between when you come up with an idea and when it gets into the reader’s hands. It’ll take you a minimum of a year to write, another year to edit, and then more time before it’s published, so if you want it to be contemporary for the reader, you have to write in the near future. 

For Seeing Other People, I knew I didn’t want the pandemic to go unacknowledged. I could have set it before the pandemic, which then effectively dates the book quite a few years because then readers in 2023 will have a novel that’s set in 2019. I could have set it during the pandemic, but that was just so boring and dramatically uninteresting. It’s very hard to get characters to interact when they are literally not allowed to see each other. 

When I started writing the book in 2020 before the second wave of lockdowns, I was convinced that COVID wouldn’t be a thing anymore by the time the book came out. But then we did have another year of lockdowns. I remember I had this calendar on my wall that marked when all the fictional events in Seeing Other People would take place. The first event is a play, which means the characters would need to be able to congregate a big group. Time passed and suddenly in real time it was October and the book was starting in November. I remember thinking, “Okay, well, lockdown really needs to end now so my fictional characters can go to a play.”

Shelby Heitner: I love that. It’s aspirational date setting.

Diana Reid: Yeah, I think that was the other part of it. I was writing it in lockdown. It was very seductive to me to have this imaginary world, where people were going to parties and having a normal life.

Shelby Heitner: Talk to me about your choice of point of view in Seeing Other People. Was it a challenge to switch to third-person after writing your first novel in first-person?

Diana Reid: It was really hard. I see each book as an opportunity to challenge myself and stretch what I’m capable of. For Seeing Other People, the way that I chose to challenge myself was writing in a different voice. I also thought that it complemented the story I was trying to tell, which is essentially a conflict between two sisters. I really wanted the reader to feel like they could empathize with both of them and understand their motivations even when they were directly in conflict; third-person is really the only way to achieve that effect. 

In terms of how I did it, I only read novels in the third person throughout that year and rewrote it so many times. It was very important to me that the perspective switching wouldn’t be formulaic, so I didn’t say, for example, create a rule where every second chapter would be from a different character. I wrote it randomly and then afterwards I had to reverse engineer it and check that it was balanced. 

Shelby Heitner: The central conflict in the book is between two sisters, Charlie and Eleanor, who go behind each other’s backs and get involved with each other’s partners, Helen and Mark. We get three, but not all four perspectives of those involved. I’m curious why you chose not to include Mark’s point-of-view in the narrative?

Diana Reid: I chose not to include Mark for principled reasons, though I don’t know if I’m proud of that decision. Normally I think that you should write in a way that best serves the story and not let your own ideological impulses come into it. 

Basically, I didn’t want this love triangle to descend into a trope where two sisters define themselves and each other in relation to this man. What was really interesting to me was having a queer love triangle that was all women and the women were so important in each other’s lives that they didn’t define themselves by the men around them. So even though Mark moves the drama along, I thought omitting his point-of-view was a good way to dramatize his unimportance to these women’s sense of themselves.

Shelby Heitner: I would love to talk to you more about queerness in Seeing Other People. It was so refreshing to read a queer novel that doesn’t make coming out the central conflict for the protagonists, even though one of your characters, Eleanor, is entering into her first same-sex relationship. 

Diana Reid: Yeah, I was very conscious of the fact that I didn’t want to tell a coming out story.  While coming out narratives are really important and there’s a reason they get told over and over again, I think genre stories like that, which already exist in such an established structure, can be reductive. Forcing all queer stories into these strict narratives often fails to contain the extraordinary vastness of what it is to be queer. 

In Sydney, which is the setting of Seeing Other People, I didn’t think that queerness in that social setting would be situated as something to be overcome. I was very inspired by Call Me By Your Name, where queerness is a facet of the story, but the obstacles to Elio and Oliver’s relationship comes from their individual personalities rather than external obstacles related to their sexuality. 

Shelby Heitner: In some of the press on Seeing Other People you mention that the central conflict of the novel is what happens when prioritizing self-care conflicts with the desire to be a good person. This reminds me a lot of Aristotle’s idea that prioritizing human flourishing or eudaimonia is the key to a life well lived. Can you tell me about the philosophy you considered when crafting Seeing Other People? 

Diana Reid: When I started the book, I definitely had this instinct that the contemporary notion of self care is toxic. I was very frustrated with the capitalist exaltations to “look after yourself” and “take care of yourself,” but after reading more into it, I came around to the idea that it isn’t necessarily corrupting in principle. It’s just that the version of self-care we encounter when people are trying to sell our stuff is a limited and reductive view.

What clarified my thinking was an essay by Harry Frankfurt called Reasons of Love, where he argues that true self-love is being aligned with your values. Since we can’t help what we care about, the best we can do in this life to maximize our flourishing is to identify what we happen to care about and then devote ourselves to that wholeheartedly. I think that that’s a really lovely idea. It also means self-care doesn’t need to be at odds with selflessness because some people might really care about being a good person and that’s how they derive their self worth.

In Eleanor’s case, her growth was learning to accept the consequences of living in line with her values. Throughout the course of the book, she often runs into trouble because she isn’t honest with herself. Although Eleanor desires to be the type of person who’s motivated by looking after her sister, what she really wants most of all is to be with Helen, her sister’s ex. 

Sometimes the thing that we want isn’t the thing that we want to want.