In Disappoint Me, the spectre of failed relationships looms large over London’s millennial women. Like her debut Bellies, Nicola Dinan’s sophomore novel studies the emotional impact of such a haunting – in particular, on Max, a trans woman whose notion of romance is defined almost entirely by its shortcomings. “I’ve lost many friends to heteronormativity in the last couple of years,” she laments at a party while surveying its guests for castaways. When she meets her boyfriend, Vincent, she struggles to overcome the feeling that their fate is sealed. To complicate things further, Vincent is holding a secret from his past that could jeopardise their relationship, and bring Max closer to her fear that love is not worth pursuing.

Throughout the novel, Max’s narration is intertwined with Vincent’s perspective of a gap year in Thailand during 2012. Dinan may well be one of the first writers of our generation to explore the themes of (trans) love and intimacy with generous care and honest scrutiny of its male protagonist. Disappoint Me, as well as a cleverly seductive title, is the perfect statement to induce anxiety into these events; the reader cannot help but anticipate the stakes of each decision that Vincent makes, or the effect those choices could have on his and Max’s future. Can Max forgive Vincent for his past? Or is it Max who must learn to see others as capable of change, and most urgently, of love? 

Max seeks comfort from her anxiety about Vincent, leaning on her closest friends and family members for support, and encountering others whose relationship struggles leave them questioning their paths. One of her most enduring relationships, it could be argued, is with her best friend, Simone, whose breakup at the novel’s beginning positions her to be the steady anchor in Max’s life as they navigate weddings, awkward dinners and milestones in their friends’ lives. Their bond is a testament to the ability of female friendships to heal heartbreak and carve new routes, but also to demonstrate how the most intimate relationships are not always with the people we want to marry. “What if I never find someone?” Simone asks Max. “You’ll always have me,” she counters.

Here, we speak to Dinan about disappointment, the cynicism that plagues modern dating, and the importance of reconciling your past self with your present identity.

Let’s start with the most obvious theme: disappointment. The novel opens with a scene that reckons with that ordinary yet often hugely painful feeling: a party rolling into a tedious afters, where a weary Max muses on how anticlimactic her entire life has become. What drew you to writing about disappointment? It feels like a lens on something bigger, like identity or the modern age.

Nicola Dinan: I suppose I wanted to write about the ways in which we defend ourselves against negative things in life. A lot of what I was observing around me while writing the book was women experiencing chronic disappointment about romance. I was battling these worries about disappointment, not only in a romantic sense but also professionally. I wrote Disappoint Me while waiting for my first novel to be published. And when we meet Max at the start of the book, she’s a poet whose work has been poorly received. Her writing hasn’t manifested the life she’d hoped for, and so her perspective on most things, from romantic to professional, very much reflects an attitude of ‘well, of course this is what happens to me!’

In the novel, we get to see the world through the first-person perspective of Max, a mixed-race trans woman. Why did you choose to write from the perspective of her boyfriend, Vincent, too?

Nicola Dinan: The book has two timelines, one from Max’s perspective in 2023 and Vincent in 2012. I was drawn to writing from Vincent’s perspective partly because I had observed so many men around me change quite dramatically from when they were around 18. I’m 30 now, and when I think of the growth that has taken place in just over a decade, it’s quite tremendous. I think those same boys who could be our allies now might have thrown slurs at gay kids at school. While there has been so much rollback in the rights of trans people in recent years, I think what we’ve also seen is, in some areas of society, a certain willingness to accept the trans experience as a part of life. I wanted to construct a situation in which the reader is confronted with the change a man has experienced while forcing that very uncomfortable reality onto the reader, but also the characters. What does it mean to be confronted with the worst thing your partner has done? 

It’s a romantic comedy that challenges conventional ideas about the value of relationships and what love really is

I think that’s interesting because trans women are typically the party who try to hide their history in order to secure safety and acceptance. That’s the whole nature of needing to ‘pass’, right? 

Nicola Dinan: Absolutely. While I’m not sure I was conscious of this while writing the book, I think it’s refreshing to experience a story where the trans woman’s past isn’t on the table as a question of whether or not her relationship can go forward. As much as Max is consumed with questions about her own worth, she also doesn’t acknowledge for a significant period how Vincent’s personal history could make him unsuitable for a long-term relationship until it’s exposed.

The dominant narrative about modern dating suggests we’re in a state of crisis. Max’s initial cynicism about love captures that perfectly. Even after meeting Vincent, she shrugs it off as ‘a stab at good old-fashioned heteronormativity’. What’s interesting, though, is that Max’s struggle isn’t the inability to find love. Rather, it stems from the idea that her expectations exceed what men can offer. Do you think that’s an important distinction?

Nicola Dinan: I think you’re right that Max’s cynicism is born out of a reality that many women who are attracted to men experience fairly regularly. I also think it’s true that Max, deep down, does question her ability to find love because of who she is. She mistakes the fact that she cannot meet a man – or has not met a man – who has satisfied her expectations of care, as an indication of a defective self. We see that self-doubt effects her relationship with Vincent quite profoundly: she consistently finds reasons for why she can’t have what she clearly can have in a partner. In such a way, Max denies Vincent a fullness of being because she’s only assessing him by a certain standard and how he does not measure up to it.

We also see these problems play out in Max’s best friend, Simone. Both Simone and Max are bombarded by the strongest banners of heteronormativity – weddings, kids, and so on – which cause them to believe they’re doing life wrong. There was a survey in 2019 that showed that unmarried and childless women are the happiest subgroup. While some people might challenge the data, I do think it speaks to something that a lot of women just kind of know to be true, and yet we live in a world where we were made to pity Jennifer Aniston because she was divorced and didn’t have children. 

Speaking of Jennifer Aniston, Disappoint Me almost feels like a romantic comedy. It’s a story about love laced with jokes. But, unlike most of this category’s classics, it is hardly a celebration of monogamy. Not to mention Max’s transness, which opens up so many questions, possibilities, and problems that the genre’s conventional structure couldn’t do justice. Do you think Disappoint Me is in any way a rom-com?

Nicola Dinan: This is something I’ve thought about a lot. I enjoy writing novels that are slight inversions of genre in ways that dip into and depart from their main themes. My first book, Bellies, was in many ways a break-up novel, but at the same time, it subverted those expectations. Similarly, much of Disappoint Me follows the structure of a romantic comedy, and yet couldn’t be described as one, both in terms of the events I choose to leave ambiguous but also the extremity of the events which take place. If people are to read Disappoint Me as a romantic comedy, then it’s a romantic comedy that challenges conventional ideas about the value of relationships and what love really is.

One of the most compelling parts of the book is certainly the relationships between the characters, particularly Max and some of her bougie, problematic friends. How did you go about mapping Max’s social landscape?

Nicola Dinan: I draw a lot from life – should I be saying that?! I guess I wanted to capture through Max and Simone’s social lives the awkward straddling of worlds that queer and trans people experience. You see that with these two characters being enmeshed in a very queer, artist-led world in London, while at the same time, being thrust into the environments of their home friends, who are still, for instance, within a sort of 2015 rubric of feminism. There’s a scene where Max is sitting at a picnic sporting a floral, pink dress and she recognises a trans woman from the London club scene wearing a cunty outfit. Suddenly, having ‘cheated on queerness’, Max wants to hide what she’s wearing. I really wanted to get across that strange confrontation of universes that feels so familiar to queer people.

Near the end of the novel, Max states ‘there are a million ways in which I’m not the same person that I was ten years ago, and a million ways in which I’m the same, some parts get stuck and others move on.’ Do you think Max’s revelation speaks to the challenge many of us experience in accepting ourselves as whole people – the sides that are consistent, but also surprising?  

Nicola Dinan: I think it’s good to aim for some sense of consistent identity; or, at the very least, we shouldn’t lose our connection to who we’ve been, even if those are parts we’re ashamed of. Max, for instance, shouldn’t be ashamed of the years of her life she spent not presenting ‘as a woman’. And perhaps the same should be said of Vincent: should he be ashamed of his history as a young man? I think regardless of shame, both characters need to maintain some connection to the person who experienced those things from the past; it’s a necessary component of being able to assimilate those events into meaningful change in the future.

Disappoint Me by Nicola Dinan is published today.