In the warm kitchen of a bungalow just off a two-lane road in far-western Ireland, the novelist Sally Rooney, her mother, her sister, and her mother’s friend were contesting the issues of the day over a supper of pork loin, roasted potatoes, green beans, red peppers, and applesauce. The pace of the conversation was brisk, the threshold for entry high. You had to be careful with the prosecco.
“A Star Is Born” came up. The film’s lone advocate was quickly crushed with an analysis of its gender politics and time-line issues. The discussion turned to Brexit. We were in Castlebar, County Mayo, at the home of Rooney’s mother, Marie Farrell. Everyone was worried about what would happen to the Irish border if the United Kingdom left the European Union without an agreement in place. And what of the Labour Party? Rooney said that although she didn’t exactly love the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, she did want him to become Prime Minister.
I asked what she made of Corbyn’s lukewarm support for Europe in the run-up to the Brexit vote.
“I was Remain, like any sensible person,” she answered.
In “Even if You Beat Me,” the 2015 essay that launched her career, Rooney looked back on her time as the “number one competitive debater on the continent of Europe.” The essay is excellent, but Rooney now sort of wishes she hadn’t written it, seeing it as an inadvertent overshare. “I wrote it with a confident sense of my own anonymity,” she told me. An agent, Tracy Bohan, of the Wylie Agency, saw the piece and got in touch with Rooney. “I said, I know you write fiction as well. Do you have any material you’d like to share?” Bohan recalled. Rooney gave her a manuscript, which, a month later, Bohan sent to publishers. She received bids from seven of them.
Rooney’s fiction is largely concerned with the power dynamics of social groups. Maybe it’s unfair, then, to begin an article about her by citing a stray piece of personal nonfiction. But her acknowledgment, in the essay, of a “taste for ritualized, abstract interpersonal aggression” provides a better insight into her habits of mind than any I could manufacture. I can make a strong case for beginning with it. At the same time, I can imagine Rooney—who recalls having “nursed intense romantic obsessions for droll counterfactuals”—noting the unoriginality of invoking her collegiate debating record as evidence of her verbal precocity. She gets in your head like that.
Thomas Morris, a writer in Dublin, told me that his friendship with Rooney began at a university literary-society event, over a platter of Bakewell tarts. Morris said to Rooney that he’d rate the tarts an eight on a scale from one to ten. She was sure that they deserved a six. Then they started sparring over whether they were ranking the Bakewell tarts as Bakewell tarts or as food in general. “I naïvely, arrogantly thought because I was older that I would win the argument,” Morris said, at one of Rooney’s recent book events. “But you can guess how it went: Sally was right, and I was wrong. And I knew immediately that I wanted to be friends with this person who could so easily upend, and transform, my view of the world—and my ranking system for cakes.”
A lifelong Marxist, Rooney is particularly outspoken about issues that stir her social conscience. Shortly before the publication of “Conversations with Friends,” her first novel, in 2017, a piece about her appeared in the Irish Independent. It began:
Rooney’s voice is bright and crisp. There’s something autumnal about her. It’s hard to see how you could characterize her as shrieky, unless you believe that forthright and vigorous speech from women in their twenties necessarily constitutes shrieking. But her criticism of a national hero—and her assumption of the standing to do so—caused a small controversy. “Oh, my God, that was so ill-advised, trashing Yeats!” she told me, seeming more amused than chagrined. The piece made no mention of a scene in the book in which Frances, the narrator and one of a quartet of entangled friends, tells Nick, with whom she’s having an affair, that she recently slept with a guy she met on Tinder. Nick, chopping onions, asks what he was like. “He was awful,” Frances answers.
Rooney, with the spoken equivalent of a wink, told me, “I feel like you can really get away with putting a lot of your opinions—if you wanted to—in a novel.”
Rooney, who is twenty-seven, has written two of them. “Conversations with Friends” follows a pair of female college students, Bobbi and Frances—former lovers who are still best friends and collaborators on poetry performances—who become involved with Melissa and Nick, a thirtysomething married couple whose bourgeois life style they find alternately thrilling and pathetic. The book blew away many people, including Zadie Smith, who praised it as one of those “debuts where you just can’t believe that it was a debut,” and Sarah Jessica Parker, who wrote, on Instagram, “This book. This book. I read it in one day. I hear I’m not alone.” The marketing tagline, “Salinger for the Snapchat generation,” was apt in its evocation of freshness, but Rooney is too cool, in both senses of the word, for the description to fully work. Her characters are let down by the adult world, but intrigued, too, and maybe galvanized. Their default attitude is a raised eyebrow. They fear that they might be the biggest phonies of all. The book even looks cool: its bright-yellow cover features an Alex Katz painting of two stone-faced young women, one with red lips and the other in dark glasses.
Rooney’s second novel, “Normal People,” was nominated for the 2018 Man Booker Prize, and will be released in the United States in April. According to The Bookseller, it was the year’s most critically praised book in the United Kingdom. Like “Conversations with Friends,” it is basically a romantic tragicomedy. The point is not so much the plot as the characters, and the heady relationships in and out of which they move “like figure-skaters, improvising their discussions so adeptly and in such perfect synchronization that it surprises them.” In the opening chapters, Marianne, a smart and unpopular high-school student whose single mother is a lawyer, begins a secret relationship with Connell, a smart and popular high-school student whose single mother cleans Marianne’s family’s house. “She just acted the same as always, like it never happened, reading her book at the lockers as usual, getting into pointless arguments,” Rooney writes. One of the unusual pleasures of Rooney’s novels is watching young women engage in a casual intellectual hooliganism, demolishing every mediocrity that crosses their paths, just for the fun of it.
The quality of thought eliminates the need for pen-twirling rhetorical flourishes. Rooney’s most devastating lines are often her most affectless. In “Conversations with Friends,” a party at Melissa and Nick’s is “full of music and people wearing long necklaces.” Read that sentence and you may never want to wear jewelry again. In “Normal People,” Connell abandons Marianne, fearing the judgment of his peers if they find out about the relationship. He quickly moves on to the queen bee of the class, less out of enthusiasm than out of a passive acceptance of his social predestiny. “He and Rachel started seeing each other in July,” Rooney writes, in the close third person. “Everyone in school had known she liked him, and she seemed to view the attachment between them as a personal achievement on her part.” A mean girl is no match for an incandescently intelligent one.
Rooney pulls and twists sentences as though they were pieces of balloon art. Words are her superpower, but she is suspicious of them. In “Even if You Beat Me,” she writes about having to extemporize on “the secession of Republika Srpska from Bosnia and Herzegovina” in front of a group of Serbian debaters, and being unsettled by “the composed self-assurance with which we fabricated the history of their region.” She eventually quit debating, finding it “vaguely immoral.” She’s not much more convinced about the social value of the novelist. “There is a part of me that will never be happy knowing that I am just writing entertainment, making decorative aesthetic objects at a time of historical crisis,” she told the Irish Independent.
The day after the supper in Castlebar, Rooney and I took the train to Dublin, where she lives. We sat facing each other across a table. The night before, she had mused aloud about her attitude toward interviews. “There are two warring aspects of my personality,” she said. “One of which is a desire to be friendly and nice, because I know journalists don’t love you to give monosyllabic responses. The second is: don’t tell them anything.” Now she had a question for me. She asked it politely but seriously. Why did I think that a profile of her was worth writing? If this were a debate, the motion might have been: This house, while honored, fundamentally believes that we are wasting our time.
I said that I thought her books meant a lot to readers, who would understand them better by hearing what she had to say. I brought up something that she had written on Twitter, before she temporarily shut down her account: “novelists are given too much cultural prominence. I know you could point out they’re really not given a lot of prominence but . . . it’s still too much.” I didn’t necessarily agree, I said. I rambled a little.
Rooney leaves you with a lot to think about. Your esprit de l’escalier doesn’t kick in until you’re well out the door. When she was a teen-ager, she joined a writing group at a local arts center. One of its organizers, Ken Armstrong, said that, even then, there was “a thread of steel running through her.” I wanted to know where Rooney got her mettle, how a Marxist ended up writing a book that sits alongside body lotion and silk pajamas in GQ’s “30 Fail-Safe Gifts for Her” guide; how she upended the conventional wisdom that a writer should show and not tell, that characters shouldn’t say what they think, in the process creating some of the best dialogue I’ve read. There is a quiet but insistent sense of challenge in her writing. It makes you wonder whether you’re wearing the moral equivalent of a long necklace.
We are living in a great epistolary age, even if no one much acknowledges it. Our phones, by obviating phoning, have reëstablished the omnipresence of text. Think of the sheer profusion of messages, of all the things we once said—or didn’t say—that we now send. “You don’t have any news you’ve been waiting to tell me in person, do you?” Nathan, a software developer, asks Sukie, his much younger roommate, upon picking her up at the airport, in “Mr Salary,” a short story that Rooney published, in 2016, in Granta. “Do people do that?” she says. “You don’t have like a secret tattoo or anything?” he continues. “I would have attached it as a JPEG,” she replies. “Believe me.” Rooney told me, “A lot of critics have noticed that my books are basically nineteenth-century novels dressed up in contemporary clothing.”
The Internet isn’t Rooney’s subject, any more than the letter was Austen’s, but she has assimilated online communication into a new kind of prose. “She does it in a way that’s totally natural,” Bohan, her agent, told me. “Whereas, if it were someone in his or her forties or fifties, it’d sort of be, like, ‘I Am Writing a Novel About the Internet.’ ” Rooney told me that in “Conversations with Friends” she was interested in exploring “e-mail voice,” the way that Frances and her friends “curate their styles of communication online.” This isn’t a flashy conceptual move; it’s just that e-mails, texts, instant messages, and Facebook posts are an unquestioned part of her characters’ everyday routines. A novel without them would be like a novel without chairs. After an illicit kiss, Frances receives an e-mail from Nick, and forces herself to wait an hour before responding. “I watched some cartoons on the Internet and made a cup of coffee,” she recalls. “Then I read his e-mail again several times. I was relieved he had put the whole thing in lower case like he always did. It would have been dramatic to introduce capitalization at such a moment of tension.” Reading our lives, we are all New Critics.
Later, Frances and Bobbi try to watch the movie “Brazil,” but Bobbi falls asleep. “I didn’t feel like watching the film on my own,” Frances says, “so I switched it off and just read the Internet instead.” An older novelist might have written “surfed the Internet” or “looked at the Internet,” but “read the Internet” has the ring of native digital literacy. There’s also something current about the flatness of Rooney’s tone; like “breaking the Internet,” “reading the Internet” makes a little joke of the juxtaposition of a puny active verb and the vastness of the thing upon which it is acting. Rooney’s transposition of Internet voice to the page brings a certain tension to her narration. When Frances observes that “Melissa used a big professional camera and kept lots of different lenses in a special camera pouch,” it’s impossible to tell whether she’s impressed by Melissa or mocking her. As with a tweet, you might interpret the sentence either way.
Perhaps refreshingly, for an Irish writer, Rooney has been received as a voice more of her time than of her place. The Times called her “the first great millennial author.” She was born in Castlebar in 1991. Marie Farrell, her mother, taught math and science and spent two years volunteering in Lesotho in the eighties. Eventually, she became the director of the Linenhall, a community arts center in Castlebar. (“A lady with no airs but an abundance of graces Marie Farrell eschews the stereotype arty image betimes associated with the discipline,” a tribute in the local newspaper read.) Kieran Rooney, Sally’s father, worked as a technician for Ireland’s state-owned telecom company. (It was privatized in 1999.) He and Farrell took Sally and her two siblings to church, but they were more passionate about passing on socialist values. Marx’s dictum “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” was the household catechism. During the financial crisis, which ravaged Ireland’s economy, Kieran took an early-retirement package.
Farrell recalls Rooney as a quickly frustrated child who wouldn’t countenance anything that didn’t interest her. (Rooney says that the trait endures, and claims “excessive laziness at anything I’m not good at.”) High school, at St. Joseph’s Secondary School, an all-girls institution where Rooney had to wear a “blue sweater, gingham shirt, and lumpy gray pinafore, which I loathed,” was a particular trial. “I just found it kind of baffling, the whole institution of school,” Rooney said. “I was, like, Does no one see that this is repressive, and that there are more of us than there are of them?” She boycotted homework. “My parents were very much, like, Fight your own battles,” she recalled. She spent hours online, “more comfortable with text than with actual personal interactions.” She said, “I was someone who, in a very disorganized way, was thirsty for knowledge. I liked having access to anything I wanted to know. I still find myself using that aspect of the Internet a lot. I usually have ten open tabs on my phone browser, and they’ll all be, like, ‘What is the boiling point of gold?’ Or ‘frogfish chameleons.’ I saw a frogfish on a nature documentary, and I wanted to know if they are genetically related to chameleons, because they have similar facial characteristics. I don’t think I found anything conclusive.”
Rooney began writing stories as a teen-ager. She says that they were terrible (“possibly my understanding of human beings was just not that sophisticated”), but she was already drawn to certain scenarios. “Couples, triads,” she said. “If you took something I wrote when I was fifteen, it would be the same, plot-wise, as now.” At eighteen, she published two poems in The Stinging Fly, a Dublin literary journal, which she now edits. One of them, “Tírghrá,” began:
In 2009, Rooney moved to Dublin to attend Trinity College. She hoped to do a double major in sociology and English, but was accepted only into the latter program. She found herself in proximity to a social milieu that she hadn’t known existed: the classmates in “waxed hunting jackets and plum-coloured chinos,” as she writes in “Normal People,” whose parents had “not figuratively” caused the financial crisis that claimed her father’s job. “What I wasn’t prepared for was encountering the class of people who run the country,” she told me. “I had a feeling, on one hand, of being appalled, but on the other hand a real sense of wanting to prove myself to people, to prove I’m just as good as they are. I don’t know why—it would have made a lot more sense to just let them be—but it’s a fascination that’s not purely revulsion.”
In her third year at Trinity, Rooney fell in love with John Prasifka, who is now a high-school math teacher, and with whom she lives. “I didn’t write any good fiction until I met my partner,” she told me. She won a scholarship that gave her four years of tuition and room and board, and also ratified her sense of belonging. She spent a lot of time eating soup and writing: a master’s thesis on “Captain America” and post-9/11 politics, as well as various permutations of the story that would become “Conversations with Friends.” Like her “culchie” characters—milk-drinking provincials, in Dublin vocabulary—she was aware that her class status was in transition, that her intellectual and sexual capital was intersecting with real money in ways that were hard to make sense of.
“Almost no paths seem definitively closed to her, not even the path of marrying an oligarch,” Rooney writes, of Marianne. “When she goes out at night, men shout the most outrageously vulgar things at her on the street, so obviously they’re not ashamed to desire her, quite the contrary. And in college she often feels there’s no limit to what her brain can do, it can synthesise everything she puts into it, it’s like having a powerful machine inside her head. Really she has everything going for her. She has no idea what she’s going to do with her life.” Rooney has been compared to the novelist Rachel Cusk because of her cerebral first-person narration. She says that she admires Cusk, and was surprised that people read her recent review of Cusk’s “Faye” trilogy—“Sometimes I had the sense that the chatty characters who populate these novels were just gamely trying to amuse our austere narrator, who was guaranteed to miss the joke every time”—as critical-in-a-bad-way. She loves Sheila Heti and Ben Lerner. Her writing can occasionally bring to mind Michel Houellebecq’s in its deadpan deflation of consumer society and our helplessness in the face of its predations. Frances, never having “fantasized about a radiant future where I was paid to perform an economic role,” has decided that it’s ethically indefensible to make more than sixteen thousand one hundred dollars a year—the amount that you would get, according to her Wikipedia reading, if you divided the annual gross world product by the number of people on earth.
In the hierarchy of Rooney’s literary identities, millennial is greater than Irish, but post-recessionary may be greater than millennial. Her writing emanates anxiety about capitalism, which purports to be a meritocratic system but actually functions as a diabolical inversion of communism, redistributing wealth and privilege at the whim of the people who already have those things, “for whom surprise birthday parties are thrown and cushy jobs are procured out of nowhere.” If Rooney’s characters aren’t especially ambitious, if they have low stress thresholds, if they prefer foreign vacations to office jobs, forgive them. The game was over by the time they came of age. Rooney is writing novels of manners about an era in which the expectation of caring for others no longer obtains, in which it’s easier to wreck a home than to own one. “I’m trying to show the reality of a social condition as it is connected to broader systems,” she said. “You would hope that by trying to show those things in process you can say, It doesn’t have to be this way.”
Toward the middle of “Conversations with Friends,” Frances goes to see a doctor. She has been suffering for some time from an unexplained malady that leaves her underwear soaked with blood and “thick gray clots of what looked like skin tissue.” Even Frances’s pain seems like a class privilege. Her mother is solid—her “big warm plane” of a hand is “like something that could grow from the earth.” The doctor doesn’t look much older than Frances is. “He seemed to need a lot of blood,” Frances notes, “and a urine sample also, and he asked questions about my sexual history.” A while back, there had been a condom mishap with Nick. When the doctor asks Frances if she’s ever had unprotected sex, she says no, and then corrects herself: “Well, not fully.”
Rooney writes exquisitely about bodies. Her depiction of Frances and Nick’s sex is so intense (“The inside of my body was hot like oil”), so tender (“I had been so terribly noisy and theatrical all the way through that it was impossible now to act indifferent like I did in e-mails”), that the reader feels viscerally the doctor’s trespass, his spoliation of their private world. Sex is the I.R.L.-est thing there is. It provides a respite from a surveilling society, even as it exposes you to a single other soul. Given the novel’s sensuality, it feels odd that we learn nothing about the physical dimension of Frances and Bobbi’s relationship. When I asked Rooney why that is, she said, “Frances, in her narrative, is exercising a sort of mastery over the people she writes about. She has so much respect and adulation for Bobbi that it felt like she wouldn’t have done that to Bobbi, in some way.” Rooney’s depiction of the doctor is made especially pointed by the fact that he is Frances’s peer. The patriarchy has rarely seemed more banal and inescapable.
Frances, thinking she’s miscarrying, tells herself, “The pregnancy was already over, and I didn’t need to consider things like Irish constitutional law, the right to travel, my current bank balance, and so on.” When “Conversations with Friends” was published, abortion was illegal in Ireland. Last spring, the country held a referendum on whether to repeal the Eighth Amendment, which forbade abortion in all but the most extreme circumstances. Rooney went all out for the Yes cause. On Twitter, she was uncharacteristically undone (“if you haven’t already voted yes, do it now!!!!! now!!! we have just over an hour to go, please please don’t miss this chance”). In an essay for the London Review of Books, she unleashed her rhetorical gifts. “I was born in 1991, the same year a Virgin Megastore in Dublin was raided for selling condoms without a pharmacist present,” she wrote. “Two years before the decriminalisation of homosexuality. Four years before the legalisation of divorce. Twenty-seven years, I can only hope, before the repeal of the Eighth Amendment.” She told me, “When the referendum passed, I felt like the official institutions of the state were catching up to the country I had grown up in.”
Frances turns out to have endometriosis, but she feels strangely distraught over the baby that she didn’t want and that never existed. Her physical condition worsens. In one of the book’s most surprising moments, she seeks solace in reading the Gospels. One day, she finds herself staggering into a church. Frances has a wry approach to Christianity (“Jesus didn’t talk very much during Mark’s gospel, which made me more interested in reading the others”), but she seems to take it seriously. Sitting in a pew, filling her lungs with incense, for the first time since she was a child, she feels that she is connecting with something profound. “Am I myself or am I them?” she asks. “Is this me, Frances? No, it is not me. It is the others. Do I sometimes hurt and harm myself, do I abuse the unearned cultural privilege of whiteness, do I take the labor of others for granted, have I sometimes exploited a reductive iteration of gender theory to avoid serious moral engagement, do I have a troubled relationship with my body, yes. Do I want to be free of pain and therefore demand that others also live free of pain, the pain that is mine and therefore also theirs, yes, yes.” Then she passes out.
On the train, eating cookies, Rooney and I started talking about religion.
“Even though Christianity is the dominant Western moral framework, the whole idea of self-sacrificing slipped down somehow,” she said. “It’s not really a big part of the conversation about how we should behave. But I find it interesting.”
I said that I found it interesting, too, but that to really be a Christian you would have to live in a way that not many people are willing to live. I had a hard time reconciling materialism and religion. I didn’t see how anyone could call herself a Christian and have a computer.
“Right, because Christ calls us to give up our earthly belongings,” Rooney said. “But, then, another aspect of Christianity that I find increasingly compelling is that we’re all sinners, but there’s an acceptance that none of us ever lives up to Christ’s image. And so it’s about humility as well as self-sacrifice. It’s about realizing, ‘I’m not doing a very good job of this.’ ”
After fainting, Frances wakes up in the church. Her mouth tastes bad; she walks to a store and buys two packets of instant noodles and a flavorless chocolate cake. Her sense of spiritual revelation has deserted her. Rooney is alive to the ways that high-flown ideals are constantly punctured by everyday realities. (Even though “Normal People” can feel like a retread at times, Rooney made an intelligent decision in letting her characters work through their sometimes collegiate ideas in actual collegiate settings.) The debater in her is as deft at deflating arguments as she is at constructing them.
To love is to be radically poor in control, and, for Rooney’s characters, humility can tip into humiliation, even masochism. “Was I kind to others?” Frances asks. “It was hard to nail down an answer. I worried that if I did turn out to have a personality, it would be one of the unkind ones. Did I only worry about this question because as a woman I felt required to put the needs of others before my own? Was ‘kindness’ just another term for submission in the face of conflict?” The distinction can be hard to make, especially when altruism is so gendered that a man’s thoughtful act—“Listen, they don’t have red peppers, but is yellow ok?” Nick asks his wife, calling from the grocery store—might seem servile if performed by a woman. Women are often advised to avoid any whiff of abnegation or apologia. Don’t say “sorry”; at the next meeting, let someone else take notes. “I know that in the mid-twentieth century a lot of the goals of feminism were to do with women in the workplace,” Rooney said. “That means that there has been less focus paid to other parts of life.”
Rooney’s most dazzling argument, her riskiest proposition, is for a sort of transcendence through interdependence. At the end of “Conversations with Friends,” Frances decides to continue her relationship with Nick, despite its deficits. “You live through certain things before you understand them. You can’t always take the analytical position,” she asserts, abandoning herself to the generosity of trust. There is salvation, Rooney seems to be saying, in giving oneself over completely to another person. She is positing a world in which we might stop apologizing for apologizing, in which we might seek compromise and see vulnerability as a form of courage. We might stop protecting ourselves. We might love with bleeding, imperfect hearts. ♦
