Interview with Diana Reid (Love & Virtue)
Lucia Droga
(she/her)
Diana Reid (she/her) is the author of ‘Love & Virtue’. Whilst it being her debut novel, her writing has already been compared to the likes of Sally Rooney. In the book, feminism, power and sex play out through the eyes of young Australian students at residential college. Lucia Droga, editor and co-founder, got the honour of speaking to her about writing, the book’s main themes of morality and socialised behaviour, and the experience of college itself.
WARNING: This interview has some (semi) spoilers!
Lucia: Hi Diana! Firstly, I just wanted to say this is such an honour to have some of your time and to congratulate you on such a successful and impressive debut. I read your book ‘Love & Virtue’ about two months ago in a single sitting - I seriously could not put it down. It felt like such a fresh and honest take on the intense, detrimental and highly toxic culture that is formed at private university residential colleges - particularly in Sydney. I think everyone needs to read this book.
Lucia: My first question (although not really a question) is just for you to tell me a bit about yourself and how you got into writing.
Diana: I’m a Sydney-based writer who studied Philosophy and Law at the University of Sydney. I got into writing fiction in a very roundabout way.
At university I was very involved in student theatre: I wrote a lot of sketch comedy, and in my last year I co-wrote a musical-comedy version of Orwell’s 1984, which we put on at an independent theatre in Sydney. So I’d been writing for theatre as a hobby for a few years, and I planned to pursue that in the year after I graduated (2020). But then the pandemic happened and I found myself with literally nothing to do. I’d been a lifelong reader, and I’d always thought I’d like to try my hand at a novel so I thought: if I can’t do it during a lockdown when there are no other distractions, then it’s not something I’m capable of.
I guess the lesson in that (if there is one) is that reading widely is good training for writing fiction, and you don’t necessarily need to take a course, or have short stories published, or follow one set path to write a novel.
Lucia: Wow, what a turn of events - thank goodness it had a positive outcome. What would you say is your favourite novel?
Diana: Very hard to say. The Secret History (Donna Tartt) has been the most influential in my life and career: I drew a lot from it when I was writing Love & Virtue. But Middlemarch (George Eliot) is the novel that I can see myself returning to the most. When I finished it, I felt changed as if by an actual life experience. I’m not sure there’s more you could ask of a novel.
Lucia: Definitely going to give those a read!
Having gone to two separate Melbourne residential colleges myself (didn’t last more than six months at either!), I saw a lot of parallels between the experience of the narrator and my own. The social pressures, not fitting in, forced activities that, to be frank, made me anxious and left me feeling like more of an outsider.
Knowing a little bit about your background from research and the book itself, I wanted to know more about your experience at a Sydney residential college.
Would you say you related more to the perspective of the narrator, Michaela, or the perceived “antagonist”, Eve?
Diana: I was at university for six years, and a residential college for the first two, so attending college was part of (although not the defining part of) my university experience. Biographically, I’m closer to Eve than Michaela: I’ve lived in Sydney my whole life, and went to school here, so I didn’t enter college as an ‘outsider’ like Michaela. But in terms of their personalities, I imagine I’m like many authors—I put something of myself into all my characters, so it’s difficult to say which I identify with the most. I suspect Eve and Michaela represent two spheres of self-criticism.
Like Michaela, I struggle to think in black and white moral terms, which means I would find it difficult to take the kind of decisive (and, ultimately, extremely important) action that Eve does. On the other hand, Eve has an attention-seeking streak. Anyone who writes a whole novel and publishes it under their own name, and then tries to claim they don’t like attention is absolutely kidding themselves.
Lucia: Many of our peers have also had one, if not many, similar experiences to at least one of the characters in your novel. Many finally feel their experiences have been ‘seen’ after reading your book.
How does it make you feel, to have made such an impact on this demographic?
Diana: It’s difficult to describe. I’ll go with: incredibly moving. The events of the book are fictional: they’re all some combination of experiences adapted from my own life, or lifted from other books, or pure invention. To find that those events are true (in some cases, scarily true) accounts of people’s actual lives is very moving. Weirdly, it’s a kind of salve to our generation’s main-character-energy, insofar as it proves that our experiences aren’t that unique, and that things we think are special to us are in fact more generic.
I think that’s a really profound realisation: that we’re more connected than we realise. For example, it’s been particularly moving to hear about—not just people our age—but older people who relate to the book quite intensely. It makes me feel like I haven’t just written about generational issues, but human issues that affect everyone.
Lucia: Thats all very true.
Love & Virtue is also about the complexities of friendship, and the struggles of remaining true to yourself in the desire for social approval - such as the fear of ostracisation from victims of sexual assault.
What made you choose to write about this in particular, and what was the reaction you hoped for from the audience?
Diana: I always knew I wanted to write about morality. In particular, I wanted to write about how our perception of right and wrong is shaped by the social spaces we inhabit. With the sexual assault plotline, I set out to explore the way one incident could be perceived differently by people in different social groups, each with their own take on what constitutes an assault. For the victim, the way she chooses to perceive the incident is influenced by her desire to be included in a particular group. In order to be one of them, she has to adopt their way of seeing. I hoped that this plotline would help readers acknowledge the very uncomfortable reality that right and wrong isn’t always self-evident, and that it’s instead hugely influenced by our social setting.
Lucia: Definitely, that comes across so well in the novel!
I also read Elizabeth Broderick’s review into college culture at the University of Sydney - which was pretty shocking. This book gives similar insight from a really personal and thought-provoking perspective, showing the nuance in the social activities and almost mundaneness of the “private school boy” mentality. In conversations with my peers, we’ve felt Love & Virtue to be a perfect and digestible criticism of these same ideas.
Did you have the aim for this book to be such a influential socio-cultural commentary on the formidable hazing, sex and drinking culture of these institutions, or did it come as something of a surprise?
Diana: It wasn’t a surprise, so much as something that I consciously navigated while I was writing. On the one hand, residential colleges are the perfect settings to explore the idea that your ethics are shaped by your social environment. This is because closed institutions (especially old ones with a strong sense of identity and tradition) tend to develop their own moral codes over time. Behaviour can seem normal and acceptable within their walls, which wouldn’t elsewhere. So establishing a very specific college culture was pivotal to teasing out that theme in the book.
However, I was also conscious that residential colleges are very formative in a lot of people’s lives, such that they can take any criticism of the institution as a personal attack. I, therefore, didn’t want the book to read as a ‘takedown’ of these institutions, or the conversation around the book to be reduced to just arguing about whether I was ‘fair’. To that end, the colleges in my book are fictional, and the cultures represented are, I hope, emblematic of not just an Australian culture, but what happens more generally wherever there’s a combination of privilege, alcohol, and lots of young people living on top of each other. People have said, for example, that Love & Virtue reminded them of American novels like Prep (Curtis Sittenfeld).
Lucia: When I put the book down, I was so incredibly close to bursting into tears due to the way the story finishes, (semi spoiler), in which nothing is ever satisfyingly resolved for Michaela. Although I was desperate for a huge confrontation, I thought it was a very apt and honest ending - and so different from most pieces of literature.
Was this an intentional reflection on life itself, which doesn’t always have monumental moments of “wins”?
Diana: Yes, I’m so thrilled you said that (although sad you were reduced to tears!).
In my experience, good people don’t always get what they deserve, and bad people often prosper. That was another element of moral ambiguity that I wanted to explore in the book: that sometimes making the ‘right’ moral choice can have unsatisfying consequences, or conversely, betraying a friend or doing the ‘wrong’ thing can be very rewarding. So I hope the book resolves in a way that is satisfying for the reader without shying away from that difficult truth.
Lucia: What’s your best advice for young writers (who are definitely reading this article) or the best advice you’ve been given?
Diana: Don’t wait for permission! If I’d waited for someone to encourage me to write a novel, I would never have written Love & Virtue. If you feel the inclination to write, then write. Worry about whether it’s good later.
Lucia: Finally, do you have any plans for further books in the near future?
Diana: I’m working on a second novel for my publisher, Ultimo Press, at the moment. Hopefully we’ll have more news on that very soon.
