Last September, comedian Monica Heisey published her debut novel, Really Good Actually. It was a fictionalised account of becoming a divorcee in her late twenties. In reading Laura Dockrill’s debut adult fiction, I shared the same sort of feeling as I had in reading Heisey’s work. I wished both authors had simply written a memoir.
Dockrill’s novel follows the friendship and tentative romance of Ella and Lowe from their early teens to their mid-thirties. It is a “will they, won’t they, tale”, tinged with noughties nostalgia that draws closely from the author’s personal experience of the “pain and pleasure of first love”.
In many ways, I am Dockrill’s perfect reader; a single, thirtysomething millennial consumed by adolescent lust. I am a sucker for an against-all-odds love story and maintain an ability to pine like a 15-year-old who has just returned with their first heartbreak from the Gaeltacht.
When Lowe compliments Ella’s writing for being “alive”, he is spot on. The legacy of Dockrill’s young adult writing career is evident in chirpy prose that brims with exclamation marks, superlatives and capitalisations.
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“my body is pancake batter and with the heat of him, jeeezzzz, I’m cooking crepes over here. The chemistry is ... WHEW.”
But if this is the strength of her writing, it is also a weakness. Dockrill’s instinct to guide and protect her reader manifests as an overworking of metaphor, too much tell and not enough show.
“We are no longer silky smooth and unctuous. We are starting to catch to the bottom of the pan. To stick. To get stodgy. And it wouldn’t be long before we’d burn.”
What carries the prose is Dockrill’s evident affection for her characters (they represent after all, the author and her now husband). Hers is a tender portrayal of an enduring teenage love that never loses the spark of adolescent desire.
Fictionalising the truth can be done effectively, as in Michael Magee’s extraordinary novel Close to Home. What is important is that the writing still upholds the authenticity and complexity of real-world feelings. It seems, in this instance, that Dockrill’s choice may have been driven by an instinct to protect herself and her own story. The issue, therefore, does not lie in fictionalising the truth, but in withholding it.
