Megan Nolan is a writer of essays, criticism and fiction born in Ireland and based in London. She writes a fortnightly column for the New Statesman.
What makes Pet Semetary so uniquely awful is not an undead child – it’s the novel’s painfully precise portrait of grief, desperation, and madness.
Nabokov may be one of the Great White Males of literature, but Lolita doesn’t exploit victims of child abuse.
I used to marvel at the scale of the case and wonder how it could be treated so differently to the thousands of incidents where children go missing.
The bad decision made by a black person who is poor is has very different consequences to the bad decision made by a white person who is not.
What does being queer really mean? I’ve asked people who have studied queer theory, who know all the right definitions. But I still can’t describe what it is to be a queer person: how you know when you are one.
A woman can eroticise sexual violence not because she wants it deep down, but as a way to make it safe for herself.
It’s not liberal angst to admit that the boys who killed James Bulger are human, and were children when they killed him. It’s our moral responsibility.
