Can you regret love?

Roxy Dunn on the biological clock, writing romantic connections, and why novels are her favourite form of writing

“‘Do you regret any of them?’

You’ve been asking yourself this same question. Until now you’d always pictured them like stepping stones: each man since you were seventeen leading you closer to your ultimate end point. So how did you get here?”

Debut author, Roxy Dunn looks to answer the above question in her latest novel, As Young as This. Told in a rousing, second person narrative, we follow Margot, an actor, through eleven stages of her relationship history: each chapter a new man who brings something different to her life. The book accurately and heart-achingly encapsulates the way in which love makes us, shapes us and breaks us. Through beautiful writing and astute observations, Dunn truthfully depicts the inevitability of heartbreak and the big decisions many women make when their relationship plans don’t quite lead where their younger selves predicted. As someone single in their thirties who has completed two rounds of egg-freezing and is aware of her rapidly depleting fertility, this book struck both a joyful chord and a painful nerve. It’s both entertaining and empowering; funny and moving. 

I chatted to Roxy about this book in person not long after its hardback publication. She welcomed me with open arms into her beautiful home and through our engaging conversation, let me inside her wonderful brain. To mark the paperback publication this week, I’m sharing the highlights of our chat. We discussed everything from the language we use around fertility and female bodies, to ageing defining what we want romantically, and the important question of whether men and women can be friends after they’ve dated. With a unique voice, a distinct structure and unparalleled emotional intelligence, Dunn proves that whilst her debut coming-of-age story is titled, As Young as This, her masterful storytelling positions her as a break-through voice, wise beyond her years. 

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Michaella: Congratulations on publishing your first book. It’s absolutely brilliant! How did you find the process? 

Roxy: Very few things live up to your adult expectations and this one sort of has. The majority of that is people finally reading the book, partly strangers, but partly, it’s been this real re-connector. I’ve had people in my life who I haven’t spoken to in over a decade get back in touch to say: “Oh hi, I read your book!”. How the book has connected me to people has been my favourite part of it all. Whether that’s people I previously knew or people like you, who are now sitting in my living room because you’ve read the book and as result, we’ve made this connection.

You were already a writer, with sell-out Edinburgh Fringe shows and many scripts of yours optioned for television. Where did the decision come to write a novel? Did you always want to write a book or was that something that evolved overtime? 

I absolutely didn’t always want to write a novel. It wasn’t something I grew up wanting to do. I don’t think it ever occurred to me until much later in life. I trained as an actor, took shows to the Edinburgh fringe and started writing my own plays. Off the back of that I started writing television scripts, pitching them in meetings, chatting to producers. Then, I was getting to this stage where I felt stuck in a rut; things were optioned but I couldn’t get full scripts commissioned. It was around that time, I took stock and realised I wasn’t watching much television. I was reading all the time. I thought: ‘D’you know what? I’m going to try writing a novel.’ Now I have written a book, I think it’s most suited to my personality out of all the different forms of writing I’ve done.

Really! Why is that? What is it about the novel or the writing process that you love?

I think it’s a few things. I am a collaborative person at a certain part of the process, but I think I’m less collaborative early on, so I love when my editor comes in and helps me make it better, but before that, I really like the solitary act of writing for five hours by myself. Then the other thing is that I love the tangibility of it. I love that it exists! After working on shows and plays that disappear after a particular moment, I like the idea of being able to take the book in my hand and show that I made it.

What about the structure with each chapters for the different men? It’s such a great concept, I’m really interested to know how this took shape. 

The bit I knew I was going to have from the beginning was each chapter for a different man. I had this opening line that I heard initially which was: ‘you have kissed boys before and been out with them for several weeks at a time’ but the original plot was slightly different. It was a woman who gathered all her exes in the function room of the pub in the prologue. It had different chapters for the men a bit like it is today, although, the supporting female characters weren’t in it at all. Then the ‘Act 2’ (i.e. the epilogue) was going to be her revealing to all of them she was pregnant via immaculate conception. It was called ‘The Last Supper.’ I spoke to a writer friend who said “I think you’ve got half a really great book but lose the magical realism. What are you trying to say? What is the simplest way of showing that?” What I wanted to say is that as a woman you don’t need a man to have a child and even though my protagonist held on to that narrative, there is another way of doing it. So, the way I could show that was someone becoming a single mother by choice. The simplest ideas usually end up becoming the most powerful. 

And without giving too much away, it is really powerful. So, let’s talk about the men! 

Oooh, yes, the men. [Roxy flashes a cheeky smirk]. Did you have favourite? 

I absolutely loved reading the marital affair ‘Wren’ chapter. Did you have a favourite when writing? 

I knew from the beginning if I was going to write a book with eleven men in it, one of them was going to be an affair. I don’t think anybody can help but be interested in reading about affairs. Even though there’s an inevitability to them in terms of how they’ll play out, they’re still so compulsive to read. So, yes, Wren and Frank win for the most drama and the most fun when writing. Then Oliver is my favourite as a character. I often think “If only he and Margot had worked out.”

I really liked the different flirting mechanics! I think it’s very hard to write flirtation well and it’s something you do brilliantly. Particularly in the affair chapter…all their emails! A LOT of reading between the lines going on!

It was fun to write! With email, there’s more length to play with but I also think there’s something about it being a formal medium and trying to be provocative within that framework instead of WhatsApp which feels casual and easy but also potentially less sexy as a result.

So to your favourite; the first long-term love interest, Oliver. Margot and Oliver stay friends when everybody else she dates disappears from her life. Why was it important to keep a friendship between these characters? Do you believe that men and women can be friends after they’ve dated? 

Yes, I do absolutely believe that. I wanted the eleven relationships to reflect as many facets of love as possible. In the same way it would have been a missed opportunity for drama to not have had one of the eleven relationships be an affair, it also would have felt like a missed opportunity to not have shown one of these relationships evolve into a friendship, because I think that’s a beautiful outcome of the ending of a romantic relationship. On top of that, as a narrative device, it allows for continuity. So, Oliver keeps popping up as a friend in later chapters. It’s a classic thing I was taught years ago: you set something up and then you bring it back, so the reader or audience member comes along for the ride with you. 

I love that! And with each chapter there is a slight comparison to the previous love interest. Margot often picks the next who has all the things that she was lacking in the previous lover. Did you plot the men purposefully that way? 

Yes! She even has a line where she says: ‘it seems that every man you go out with is a direct reaction to the man who preceded him.’ This has certainly been true of my own experience of dating, and I think it’s true for a lot of women. It also conveniently works for the book; if you were planning a meal, you wouldn’t give your guests the same taste for each course. Having contrasting characters acts as a bit of a palette cleanser for the reader too. 

There’s a lovely moment in the book when Oliver under-promises and over-delivers. They’re still in their mid-twenties so it’s normal for people to be bad at communicating, a bit passive, or walk away from one another and back-track, but, you talk about this later in the book, there’s a chance she might not be so forgiving in her thirties for the same kind of mistake, miscommunication or inactivity. Can you talk a bit more about that?

Exactly. There are a few men towards the end of the book where that happens to her. At that point, she just snaps and decides it’s time to move on. I think if she’d met some of the earlier men later in the book, she wouldn’t have spent half as much time with them, but I think that’s a natural progression: defining what you want as you age.  

Talking of ageing, let’s talk about the end of the book. Margot is left with a really big decision at the end. You mentioned earlier that a woman having a baby alone was part of your original premise. Why did you decide on this ending? 

The bit I knew I wanted from the start was this woman in her early thirties who found herself single unexpectedly. I wanted her to be someone who had strategically dated —knowing she wanted children from a young age. This was something I didn't think I'd read much about. I’d read so many books with hot, messy protagonists who had woken up, like: “Oh shit! I've been drunk for a decade —now I think I might want a baby” but there was something about having a protagonist who was clear from the off about wanting to be a parent and had actively done things to try and get there that was really interesting to me. Perhaps, they didn’t play life hyper-conventionally; they didn't get married at twenty-five or anything, but they were ‘together’, single-minded in their pursuit of romantic love and confident it would lead to motherhood. In a way, Margot’s togetherness, her thinking she can control everything is her biggest flaw. The main crux of the book is: ‘you can't control things; life is more random than that’. So, I wanted the dramatic question not to be: ‘will she or won’t she have the baby?’ but ‘how did she get here when she worked so hard not to end up at this point?’

The ending is so powerful that I went back and re-read it a few times. What I love so much about this story is that while it is about having a child without the help of a man and we see some of that process, it’s more about motherhood as a decision-making process weaved through a person’s existence.

With writing about becoming a single mother by choice, I knew I needed to do enough research and drop it into the book to make the reader aware that it was an informed decision on Margot’s part, but I was most interested in how she’d got to that place where her assumed narrative – that she’d be parenting with a partner – had veered off course. So, I was light with injecting fertility elements into the story so they didn’t take over from the main question I wanted to explore which was how she’d got to this point, rather than will or won’t she go ahead with becoming a single parent. 

And anything to do with fertility and the biological clock is obviously quite a sensitive topic. How did you go about researching it? 

I really wanted to make sure that if a single parent picked up this book there was nothing that was incorrect or offensive or too incongruous with their own experience, even if it wasn’t their exact story that I was telling. I met with a single mother by choice, she chatted to me at length and did a sensitivity read of the final draft. A lot of it was online research. I read lots of forums and books about single parenting by choice. The thing that struck me the most in these forums was people writing: ‘the hardest thing was letting go of the narrative that I would be doing this with somebody else’. That was the part that I wanted to dramatically show through the narrative structure of the book and the ending. I can’t really talk about how I’ve done it without giving away spoilers, though! 

Well, everyone will just have to read it! On the topic of fertility and the female body, you point out the language we use around women’s bodies and fertility in the book. Margot reflects on the news her ovarian reserve is ‘non-renewable’ and sees ‘her eggs in wheelbarrow being tossed into a coal mine’. At one point you reference a ‘Health MOT’ too. It got me thinking more generally about how we refer to female bodies as some kind of commodities to be traded. Was this language choice intentional? 

A lot of that came from research — things like ‘Health MOT’ definitely did. The ‘non-renewable part’, I think I just made up! Perhaps it’s a phrase I’d heard before that had seeped into my subconscious. That language has almost become accepted to a point where you have to step back and realise how weird it is we refer to women’s bodies like this. We’re not cars or bits of industrial machinery; it’s almost become standard to hear these terms thrown around and not flinch.

It’s really powerful. So, how have you found the business of self-promotion as an author and talking to people about the topics in this book.

I’ve often had to do my own self-promotion – in terms of my Edinburgh shows in particular – so it's been novel and fantastic coming at it from having the support of Penguin, but also knowing there’s still things I can do to supplement their marketing – like being on social media. The way I see it is that the odds of being published and suddenly becoming Sally Rooney are infinitesimal, so you've still got to work to push your book yourself even if you've got the support of one of the big publishing houses behind you. And if I wasn’t on Instagram, I would have missed all this amazing feedback and response from readers which has been such a delight to see. That said, I'm trying to write my second book now, so I've got to put my phone on aeroplane mode if I want to get into the headspace to do this. I see the self-promotional stuff and the writing as different sides of the brain, so I am having to compartmentalise them a bit.  

Ooh you mentioned the new book! Are you able to tell us anything about it?

It’s for a similar readership. It's about a woman in her thirties who comes out of a long-term relationship and starts dating again. She matches with someone who is polyamorous, and they end up in an open relationship. The book is about how she manages within that experience, having previously wanted monogamy, what that looks like for her and how it changes her. 

That sounds amazing. Would love to read that! So finally, my last question. Do you think you can regret love? 

My instinct is to say no. What do you think? 

I don’t think you can regret being IN love but you can (and will) regret holding on for too long when it’s disappeared.

Both Margot and I, would agree with you on that. 

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With enormous thanks to the wonderfully warm, utterly talented, Roxy Dunn for this interview. ‘As Young as This’ published in paperback on 20th March and is available now from all your favourite book retailers.