Bellies: ‘A beautiful love story’ Irish Times

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But, shortly after they move to London to start their next chapter, Ming announces her intention to transition. From London to Kuala Lumpur, New York to Cologne, we follow Tom and Ming as they face shifts in their relationship in the wake of Ming's transition. I read your interview with Torrey Peters for Detransition, Baby and I was proper laughing at the bit where you were saying your mate was like "I don't want cis people to read this because they'll know too much!" I was curious how that maybe could apply to Bellies. Do you think people will take different things away from it based on their gender identity? A poignant tale that explores the messy complexities of relationships, with recognisably imperfect characters at its core Sunday Times Style

Until it isn’t. After a while, Ming starts being distant from Tom and reveals that he is considering transitioning. Suddenly, the novel turns from boy-meets-boy romance to something much more interesting. Traversing the pitfalls of the gender transition novel, Dinan, who herself is trans, deftly weaves a compelling and compassionate narrative that feels totally unique in this year’s literary calendar. This begins as a boy-meets-boy love story, but when the couple leaves university to go to London, one goes through the process of transitioning and the story is about what happens to their relationship from that. It's a really beautiful, underrepresented love story in fiction. i, Debuts To Keep An Eye On In 2023 Dinan grants the reader privileged access to both sides of the relationship, telling the story in chapters written from Tom and Ming’s separate perspectives. What results is a wry, minutely observed coming-of-age that deftly captures the closeness, intensity and vulnerability of romantic love. This almost split-screen structural approach brings depth and complexity to the characters she has drawn. “I think by doing that it made it a lot easier to create two characters where neither was the good guy or the bad guy either. That moral complexity and dubiousness within each character was sort of necessary for the book. And not just Tom and Ming, I wanted the whole cast of characters to be equally fallible… I wanted a messiness within each character and I do think offering both perspectives, and offering both perspectives where one is critical of the other, is necessary and helpful in achieving that.” Confident and witty, a charming young playwright, Ming is the perfect antidote to Tom's awkward energy, and their connection is instant. Tom finds himself deeply and desperately drawn into Ming's orbit, and on the cusp of graduation, he's already mapped out their future together.

ND: It would have been easier to devote those resources to Ming, for sure. What’s interesting is that I think some would expect a book which has transitioning at its centre to entirely focus on the trans character, but while transitioning is an essential plotline of the novel, more than anything it’s a novel about relationships, love, how love transforms from one thing to another. Part of why I wanted to include Tom’s voice as well is to centre the relational aspect of the change that’s going on in Ming’s life; suddenly something that feels so obscure and specific to so many people, transitioning, becomes a little more universal. It becomes this thing that could be akin to a geographical move, or a bereavement, all these things that happen in our relationships that change how we relate to one another, and can, potentially, pull us apart.

With a TV adaptation in the works, Nicola Dinan discusses her vivid, intimate début novel, Bellies.Bellies, this glorious debut about the beautiful discomfort of being seen and known, hooked me from the very start. Nicola Dinan's prose is swift and immersive and the empathy with which she writes her characters' foibles, flaws, and faulty perceptions is boundless. Both tender and biting, Bellies has captured my whole heart. Ilana Masad, author of All My Mother’s Lovers

Doubleday is releasing Bellies in the U.K. in July 2023, followed by Hanover Square Press in the U.S. in August. The way Dinan writes about love, loss, growing up, transitioning and our bodies took my breath away. I can't wait for this novel to be published, so I can talk about it with everyone I know. Travis Alabanza, Guardian She said: “ Bellies has become a part of me, like an extra limb, or even a second belly. Bobby and the Doubleday team’s enthusiasm for the novel moved me so deeply—I can’t quite imagine a better home for it.” I’m also really interested in your move from the world of law into literature. What was that like for you, and how did Bellies come about?As a trans woman, Dinan has her own experience of transitioning. In Bellies, she was keen to look at something “which is seen as so personal” from the perspective of someone one step removed. “I was interested in what it meant to be on the outside of someone else’s experience—and an experience that is deeply personal to them, like someone’s transness.” It was also important to her to offer a more pluralised view of queer and trans identities which, at times in fiction, can be relatively one-note. “[Ming] does things and you think, ‘Oh my God, you’re awful’ or, ‘You’re being awful in this moment’. But at the same time, just like the rest of us she is allowed to be...” Elaborating, she says: “There’s an impetus to create this virtuous image of a trans person who can do no wrong. I find that very limiting…I want trans people to have the freedom to be a bit shit too.” Instead she advocates for fully fleshed-out, authentic, multitudinous representation. “If we truly want to aim for fiction being an effective way to raise empathy for disenfranchised and marginalised communities, we have to write characters that are fallible. It’s not actually helpful to the cause to have these perfect characters, because when you create a solely virtuous narrative around a group of people, people look for ways to prove that wrong.” Picture this What it really is is an opportunity to meet other contemporaries who are writing novels and aspiring novelists. I think being a novelist is quite an isolating profession and it’s also quite an isolating dream. Whilst lots of other people want to write a book, it’s hard to connect and find other people who are actually in that process. So, I did the course in 2021, and it was very valuable. Not that you need a course like that to give you the confidence to call yourself a writer, but I felt able to call myself one before I even had the first draft finished, and I think that’s quite a powerful thing. Bellies by Nicola Dinan is a beautifully bittersweet depiction of the seismic changes of early adulthood with unforgettably funny, spiky, believable main characters. Leon Craig, author of Parallel Hells I’m really interested in what the process of adapting Bellies to screen is like, especially as one of the most compelling things about Bellies is the interiority of Tom and Ming. I particularly loved the really vivid stream of consciousness style in her early chapters. Could you talk a bit about the processes of creating a distinctive voice for both of them? Firstly, Ming’s transition is bankrolled. She saves money because she and Tom move into Tom’s parents’ house in London after graduation. She also has an inheritance, as well as a well-off dad. She flies over the hurdles many trans people face: she has enough money for surgical intervention, and doesn’t have to bother with inhumanely long waiting times for HRT on the NHS. As a writer, it was refreshing to write queer experiences not mired by structural hurdles, choosing instead to focus on relationship dynamics existing outside of those challenges. I wanted to show that even when you’re holding a royal flush, big changes are hard to make, and new lives are hard to adjust to. In doing so, I think Bellies makes an experience as specific as transitioning feel a little bit more universal. On the other hand, those systemic barriers are the cruel reality for most trans people today.