Bellies: ‘A beautiful love story’ Irish Times

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Filled with warmth and heart, Bellies is a tender, beautiful and heartbreaking exploration of identity, growing up, and love in all its glorious forms. I can't wait to see what Nicola Dinan does next. Cecile Pin, author of Wandering Souls I’m not really someone who cries a lot, I wish I cried more. I often want to, but the tears just never flow. Yet when I finished an advance reading copy of Bellies by Nicola Dinan I had to sit down and let myself cry. Real tears. Not one singular tear to brush off, but embarrassing flood-gates-open crying tears. A loud crying in contrast to the quiet sadness of this book. 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. At its best, Bellies is as deep as it is chic, propelled by the good intentions dropped between different wavelengths, a sensitive study of the challenge of moving past judgment towards perception.

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 finished this book and wanted to tell everyone I met to read it. Quietly heartbreaking whilst tremendously sharp and funny. I couldn't stop reading. Travis Alabanza, author of None Of The Above

The London Magazine Newsletter

With a TV adaptation in the works, Nicola Dinan discusses her vivid, intimate début novel, Bellies. Doubleday is releasing Bellies in the U.K. in July 2023, followed by Hanover Square Press in the U.S. in August. It’s a long list, so I’ll just share a few. David Sedaris was a bit of a revelation when I read him as a teenager – not just because of how funny and beautifully crafted his essays were, but because of the way he wrote about his relationship. I tried to bring the combination of petty arguments, shared experiences and simple but sincere acts of love to my fictional relationships. And then there’s Norah Ephron, whose novels, essays and screenplays seem to be written off the cuff, but are in fact beautifully detailed and precise. The vast differences between those two reactions has shown me that the ways that art interacts with the world are so unpredictable, and I don’t want to be prescriptive with what people find in Bellies . More than anything, I’m just excited to see what people can get out of it.

You have to externalise so much of the novel which is internal, sometimes that’s through facial expressions and sometimes that’s through movement. But ultimately, there’s only so much you can do. A novel overspilling with care and affection for its characters.... The hype for her book is high i-D magazine A beautiful work of literature with fully realized, highly empathic characters; [Dinan's] treatment of Ming's transition is superbly and insightfully handled. An important contribution to the slender body of transgender literature . Booklist, Starred review It begins as your typical boy meets boy. While out with friends at a university drag night, Tom buys Ming a drink. 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. But, shortly after they move to London to start their next chapter, Ming announces her intention to transition. 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

Nicola Dinan

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. 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.”

From London to Kuala Lumpur, New York to Cologne, we follow Tom and Ming as they face tectonic shifts in their relationship and friend circle in the wake of Ming’s transition. Through a spiral of unforeseen crises—some personal, some professional, some life-altering—Tom and Ming are forced to confront the vastly different shapes their lives have taken since graduating, and each must answer the essential question: Is it worth losing a part of yourself to become who you are? While the central metaphor of vulnerability and intimacy is paramount, I could not help but notice how much of the title also derives from Dinan's exploration of hunger. Hunger for identity and a positive self-concept, yes, but also the literal hunger that influences it: Bellies is full of descriptions of food, and it also goes into detail into the relationships its various characters have with it, whether in terms of physical body image or a sense of cultural identity. All that food, particularly Malaysian food, is a necessary inclusion in the novel that very subtly illuminates Ming's experience as a trans woman of colour. While her perspective is presented to readers in fewer chapters compared to Tom, her character can be understood more fully through the ways in which her native cuisine is presented to us: it is a link, for her, between her past and a present in which she is more at home with herself but is also unable to go home to a place where her very existence is illegal. A beautiful book. Thoroughly enjoyed it even if it did make me cry several times (I'm very emotional). The most fantastic consequence of that, however, is all the messages I’ve had from people telling me how seen they felt in the novel, and not just readers from the east and south east Asian community it depicts, but anyone who has struggled to move to a new culture and felt displaced and in limbo. Knowing I’ve written something specific and yet universal is genuinely the highest praise I could have hoped for, especially as growing up I never really saw myself represented in the mainstream fiction space and this was always something I longed for. We were immediately absorbed and transported by the love story between Tom and Ming — and by Nicola’s writing, which is in equal parts hilarious and heart-breaking,” said Element Pictures’ Ed Guiney, Andrew Lowe and Chelsea Morgan Hoffmann, who will executive produce alongside Dinan. “We think the world is hungry for a love story like theirs — that authentically allows for the space and complexity of their changing dynamic, both as Ming transitions but also as the two of them grow into adulthood — while still honoring the excitement and intensity of first love. We are delighted to bring their story to the screen and couldn’t be happier that Nicola is adapting herself.”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. In terms of writing a book that lasts with someone, when I think of the books that have lasted with me, it's the ones that have me asking questions, or questioning the ethics and morality of decisions that the characters have made. The inspiration came from a friend telling me about two people he knew in an open relationship, one of whom was delighted with their way of life, while the other was fed up and longing to be exclusive. A year or so later, I was sketching out some ideas for a romantic comedy, and I felt like the story of one side of an open relationship had lots of potential for humour and a dose of drama.