Frida Slattery as Herself by Ana Kinsella: ‘I could talk to you forever’

Ana Kinsella’s affectionate portrayal of London life, Look Here, was my non-fiction read for April 2025’s Snapshot of My Reading. I enjoyed her collection of short pieces so much I was delighted to spot Frida Slattery as Herself on NetGalley. Kinsella’s first novel is a two-hander following Frida from her early acting days, and John who had begun to make a name for himself as a director by the time they meet in 2006.

Sometimes when Frida left the room on Capel Street, stepping out into the dark evening, she found she could walk for streets and streets before she remembered who she was, or where she was going.

Frida enjoys the buzz of coming off stage as much as the performance. She’s acted since she was twelve, continuing through university, not quite good enough to bag lead parts. John has met with some success, staging a Julius Ceasar that was picked up by the press. She knows how to present herself; he’s a moody introvert, driven and given to drink. Eleven years after John first saw Frida perform, something he’s forgotten, they’re introduced by a mutual friend beginning a connection which will shape their lives, both professional and personal. She listens to his ideas, contributing many of her own and helping to mould them into something that she will perform beginning with Bird, based on John’s parents’ marital breakdown. Over the next seventeen years, lines will blur in their creative relationship which becomes something else, one will walk away from the other, events in the outside world intervene, and success will be attained then fade before a massive risk is taken by one of them, leaving the power balance upended.

She had thought that the thing that linked them after all this time was gossamer thin, delicate as silk. John was treating it like the heavy coil of rope that kept the ocean liner attached to the dock.  

At nearly 500 pages, Kinsella’s novel is a doorstopper but I raced through it, engrossed in this story of two people whose relationship is difficult, uneven, unbalanced yet seemingly essential to both of them. Frida and John’s narratives alternate so that we see both versions of their partnership, each subtly – and not so subtly – different from the other as Kinsella explores creativity, love, ambition and family through two smartly drawn characters with the same acute observation and wit which added so much to my enjoyment of Look Here. Hard not to see this one in performance, although it would need some skilful editing to get it down to the planned seventy minutes of the titular play. Smart, funny and deeply immersive, it’s a novel to savour, and the ending is a masterstroke. Looking forward to whatever Kinsella comes up with next, fiction or non-fiction.

Scribner: London 9781398549227 496 pages Hardback