'I just thought it would be so self-indulgent': Diana Reid on the agony of putting her first book, Love and Virtue, into the world

"I gave it to him with all these sort of caveats, and I said, 'I hope you still want to be friends with me once you finish reading it', because I really thought it was that embarrassing," she says.

The book in question, Love and Virtue, came out in October, 2021, to rave reviews. Last month, it was named the Australian Book Industry Awards book of the year, and Reid was named one of the country's best young novelists by the Sydney Morning Herald.

And no one could be more surprised than Reid herself, who wrote the book during the first COVID lockdown in 2020.

She was 24 and had just finished a law degree at Sydney University, and had already secured a job at a commercial law firm.

"I deferred for a year because I wanted to try and work in theatre, and then COVID canned all that, so then I was actually just living with my parents," she says.

"I was in this very remarkable position where I had literally nothing else to do."

With no job or study on the horizon, she sat down and started writing. Love and Virtue took her five months to complete. At the end, when lockdown had ended, she had to go out and find a job.

"I just got a job at a startup, and I worked there for about six months. And then I sold the book and my life changed," she says.

It is, on the face of it, a classic coming-of-age novel in the mould of Sally Rooney - a college drama exploring issues of power, ambition and consent.

Set in a residential college of a fancy Sydney university, the book follows Michaela, a bright young scholarship student, who befriends the dazzling Eve, in the dorm room next door, during their first year.

Michaela is smart and gutsy, but hesitant, still finding herself. Eve, on the other hand, is self-assured, popular and beautiful, a star who lights up those in her orbit. It's the kind of light that dazzles, until you step away from the glare and see how it can make those around her disappear.

A drunken, humiliating encounter during O-week, between Michaela and a male student, becomes the catalyst for the drama that unfolds. There are questions of consent and power, but also friendship and betrayal, all played out in the heightened atmosphere of drunken partying, intellectual debate and the pursuit of knowledge - both carnal and intimate, as well as academic and philosophical.

So far, so Gen Z. But Love and Virtue is also a nuanced take on the self-conscious process of self-discovery that takes place in the early years of adulthood - the halting, insecure, self-aggrandising, unforgiving and judgemental way we view ourselves and others. But it's also tender and reflective, as the protagonist looks back on events a few years into the future.

And it's worth getting the most obvious point out of the way - it is, Reid says, in no way autobiographical. Although she did attend Sydney University and spend her first two years there in a residential college, there has never been any fear, she says, of anyone recognising either her or themselves in the narrative. It's all made up.

Despite this, or perhaps because of it, she was mortified once she handed the manuscript to her friend to read.

"I just thought it would be so self-indulgent to have spent so much time writing a whole book," she says.

"So the fact that people were interested in reading it at all and that agents and publishers thought that it might have a wider readership was amazing to me initially.

"And then since it's been published, I've been surprised actually how much it's resonated with an older generation as well."

It's perhaps because the protagonist is narrating the story from a distance, with a sense of appraisal and self-criticism and self-forgiveness that appeals.

But there's something to be said for a good university drama - something universal, or at least universally recognisable. There's all the fumbling for friendships and a sense of belonging; Michaela is caught between her fun-loving, rich mates who love to party, and the mind-bending discourse of her first-year philosophy lectures.

"I did study philosophy, [but] I'm always a bit sort of shy about those bits in the book because it's very first-year entry-level," she says.

"I couldn't I couldn't sustain a sequel where they go on to do a higher level of philosophy - 101 was all I was capable of recreating."

Still, Michaela falling for her lecturer seems inevitable, their subsequent affair more of a stretch. Except that he's not that old either, and is not objectively physically confident or attractive. Somehow, this makes it more believable.

"I thought that was important because his position and his intellectual stature gives him enough capital or enough power in her mind that he doesn't need to also be physically attractive," she says.

Reid admits readily to reading the reviews of her book - she can't imagine anyone, let alone her, having the sort of self-control that would be required not to - and she's been particularly interested in how readers have responded to the relationship between Michaela and Paul, her lecturer.

"I suppose that point about him not being attractive is interesting, because I think that when you write a novel, you can make anything possible," she says.

"They can be as attractive as you like. I sort of did that with Eve - she's impossibly beautiful. And so that's I guess an interesting challenge for a writer, to have restraint and to not always go for the most obvious or the most easily explainable option, because anything is available to you."

"People are really weird, and they do make decisions that are, I guess, internally consistent, but from an objective viewpoint don't initially make sense.

"And I think they're always the things that are more interesting to write about."

Eve, the book's villain - her transgressions are hinted at from the very first page - is another study in female envy, over-confidence and self-centredness. Many readers, she says, have told her they know an Eve, somewhere in their lives.

All this from the fevered imagination of her panicked, lock-down self, and she already has another book, Seeing Other People, coming out in October.

It's tempting to stand back and marvel at the notion of a 24-year-old thrashing out an award-winning debut novel in five months. The first lockdown was, in many ways, a fascinating social experiment, one that, as we now know, would expose the many faultlines within existing cultural, class, demographic and health structures. And it represented entirely different experiences for people even within the same structure. For some, it was a period of ironic boredom, for others, it was a period of unimaginable stress and pressure.

Reid sees her own experience with a sardonic, self-critical eye.

"For me at least, it kind of is a scary insight into how extreme the conditions needed to be before I was writing a novel," she says.

"If the whole world hadn't shut down, then I don't think I ever would have done it."