The No campaign was largely funded by right-wing Christian groups in America, a dynamic that was seen again in the abortion referendum three years later. The 2015 same-sex marriage referendum in Ireland was “an intensely painful time to not be straight”, says Dolan, “because Dublin was plastered with posters telling us we weren’t fit to be parents”.

The 28-year-old was flagged as being on the spectrum aged 16, but “understood the whole thing so poorly that I thought everyone was on the spectrum line, which is completely untrue”. “As a kid, I was broadly pretty cool with being different, until I started school, then I hated it,” she tells me over Zoom from her parents’ attic in Dublin.

Dolan had just finished writing Exciting Times when she was formally diagnosed with autism, but she’d always known she wasn’t like most people. The comparisons may prove to be superficial, however. Four: like the adored BBC adaptation of Normal People, Exciting Times has just been snapped up to become a TV series. Three: not only are the characters in Exciting Times and Rooney’s debut Conversations with Friends young and liberal, with complicated sex lives, but both authors explore modern female self-loathing. Two: they were at Dublin’s Trinity College together. One: she’s Irish and has written one of the most talked-about novels of the year, Exciting Times. There are at least four good reasons why Naoise Dolan is certain to be described as “the new Sally Rooney” this summer.

Dolan naoise