This impressive and charismatic debut novel revisits an actor and a director over various collaborations
The central characters of Frida Slattery As Herself, Ana Kinsella’s debut novel, are the eponymous Frida, 23 when the novel opens, and John Reddan, five years older. Both live in Dublin. Frida loves acting but has never had a significant role, and didn’t even get into drama school. John is a writer-director who has just had a play put on at a “real theatre”. What’s compelling about Frida is not necessarily what she says, thinks or does, but the way she is, and a large part of that lies in the physicality Kinsella writes into her. Frida, we learn, is “addicted” to the theatre. “Every time she came off stage she felt like a prizefighter. The curtain fell in the community theatre and there