There is a scene in Annie\u00a0Lord\u2019s novel that\u00a0will be instantly familiar to any young person who has spent time at a pub or nightclub recently. Daisy\u00a0and Maya, two best friends in\u00a0their mid-20s, are\u00a0lamenting the paltry state of the\u00a0dating\u00a0market.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s just shit out there,\u201d Daisy says. \u201cEvery time we go out there\u2019s, like, one decent single guy and then about 40 gorgeous women with master\u2019s degrees and shag haircuts and what\u2019s even the point in trying.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThat so fits with my experience \u2026 dating is very bleak at the moment,\u201d Lord laughs, when we sit down in an east London cafe. \u201cSomething\u2019s got to give!\u201d The 30-year-old writer has built a career out of observing the intracacies and intimacies of modern dating.<\/p>\n
In her mid-20s, reeling from a breakup, Lord wrote an essay for Vice about it. The piece went viral, a book agent got in touch and the resulting memoir, Notes on Heartbreak, published in 2023, became a cult hit. Written with the brutal honesty and detail of a diary, it transformed her from a freelance journalist into one of the most recognisable chroniclers of millennial and gen Z dating. Then came her fortnightly British Vogue dating column, in which she documented situationships, romantic confusion and the increasingly surreal experience of trying to find love in London.<\/p>\n
\u201cI always say that us breaking up was one of the best things that could have happened to me,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u00a0was from that that so many things just snowballed.\u201d<\/p>\n
Now she has turned to fiction. Her debut novel, The Project, follows Daisy and Maya, two single women living in south-east London who, after years of wading through a sea of terrible dates with terrible men, come to a comical conclusion: if there are no decent men available, perhaps they should simply make one.<\/p>\n
Daisy decides to take an underwhelming but potentially salvageable male friend named James and give him a physical and emotional overhaul: buy him better clothes, encourage him to talk about his feelings, take him to feminist lectures. \u201cMaybe he wouldn\u2019t be that bad if he just got some female friends, went to therapy, got a nice-fitting white T-shirt and read some books,\u201d Daisy muses.<\/p>\n
The original spark for the novel came after Lord briefly got involved with a friend-of-a-friend who was \u201cquite laddy and a bit of a nightmare\u201d, but a sweetheart underneath. She was writing another book at the time, but her friend joked that her next book should be about the reinvention of her fling. James, she insists though, is not solely based on her friend. \u201cHe\u2019s a mishmash of loads of men I\u2019ve dated or known,\u201d Lord says. \u201cThe book is sort of a collage of my life.\u201d<\/p>\n
As with her nonfiction writing, in The Project Lord has an uncanny knack for turning the private observations of a group chat into compelling material. The novel captures the texture of contemporary dating with anthropological precision, in the way that Dolly Alderton, Helen Fielding or Nora Ephron did for previous generations of women.<\/p>\n
Beneath the comic makeover setup, Lord raises the question: why do so many intelligent, attractive women feel as though the dating market is fundamentally broken?<\/p>\n
double quotation markThere were a few things my ex wanted taken out of the book \u2013 I already knew what he\u2019d feel uncomfortable about<\/p>\n
Growing up on romcoms, Lord says she absorbed a vision of heterosexuality in which men competed for women, but the reality is very different. \u201cYou can feel desired all the time. Men catcall you, people tell you you\u2019re attractive. But then you\u2019re like, if I\u2019m so desirable, why is it so hard to actually meet someone?\u201d she continues. \u201cI\u00a0really hope that a lot of single women read the book and feel less alone.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lord grew up on the outskirts of Leeds, and has always had a penchant for confessional writing. At university, she had a column on sex and relationships in the student paper. \u201cI\u2019m not a very private person,\u201d she says cheerfully. \u201cI\u2019m an oversharer. I\u2019m not easily humiliated \u2013 I put my pain on show.\u201d<\/p>\n
That lack of embarrassment has become unexpectedly useful. For several years, Lord turned her romantic life into copy for her Vogue column, with articles such as Why Do I Get The Ick When Men Open Up to Me?, How Much of Yourself Is Too Much to Put into a Casual Hookup?, and Why Am I Suddenly Insecure in Bed?. It suited her natural tendency towards candour, but it came with complications.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere were definitely people I was\u00a0seeing where it made things weird,\u201d she says. \u201cPeople were sort of learning how I felt about something by reading it online.\u201d Eventually, she realised she\u00a0wanted a break from being the protagonist of her own work, and stopped writing the column in 2024. \u201cI\u00a0decided I wanted to prioritise my romantic life a bit more,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u00a0was really exposing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Exposure, however, had already become an occupational hazard. When writing Notes on Heartbreak, which she says started life as a \u201ccrazy, long, deranged letter to my ex\u201d, she had to navigate the fact that the central character of the book was not fictional.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere were a few things [my ex] wanted taken out,\u201d she says. \u201cI already knew what he\u2019d feel uncomfortable about … He\u2019s a way more private person than me. But it was never a book where I was trash-talking my ex.\u201d<\/p>\n
Even though The Project is a step away from the raw autobiographical territory of Notes on Heartbreak, there are moments of hilarious personal detail \u2013 Daisy finding a bit of toilet roll between her bum cheeks while she\u2019s in bed with James, for example. \u201cI actually think writing fiction is almost more honest for me, because there are things that even I might be too embarrassed to attribute to myself that I can just say,\u201d Lord says. \u201cI can write a sex scene and go into loads of detail because I don\u2019t have to worry about embarrassing someone or invading their privacy.\u201d<\/p>\n