I can’t explain it more than that.’ Normality has totemic significance in Rooney’s writing: her characters either think of themselves as ‘special’ – that is, smart and sensitive but stranded among normal people – or they yearn to be normal rather than fucked up and damaged. I wasn’t in control of myself, I couldn’t live normally. She has a million euros in the bank and has just had a nervous breakdown, which left her in hospital for a few weeks: ‘I felt very out of control … I was just extremely angry and upset all the time. Alice Kelleher, a 29-year-old novelist, has come to the west coast of Ireland to live in a big borrowed house and get away from the international pageant of literary publicity (she takes planes, not trains). And since love in these books resolves into amicable polyamory or see-you-next-summer maybeness, it is incipient careerism that constitutes the actual vectors of progress and fulfilment.īeautiful World, Where Are You is set in the aftermath of a blockbuster success that sounds not unlike Rooney’s own. Connell’s acceptance to NYU occasions a break with Marianne, who says, ‘I’m sure you could get funding’ Frances’s use of material from Bobbi’s life leads to a feud, with Bobbi tearing the pages in half and moving out of their flat, though she admits: ‘It’s actually a good story.’ Sentiment comes second to writing, and to getting paid for writing. They are subplots, minor events set beside the young writers’ tumultuous, if somewhat bland, romantic travails and other difficulties (depression, self-harm, social ostracism, fainting spells, being broke, bad dads). These pictures of literary ascendance are presented as frictionless, almost involuntary. He saves two copies of the issue, stowing one under his childhood bed. Connell has similar luck with his first submission to a campus magazine. The story gets published and Frances gets €800 – not bad for a manuscript written in a single sitting and submitted uncorrected. Melissa introduces Frances to Valerie, a woman with money and publishing connections, who solicits a short story from her and passes it on to a literary magazine. Still undergraduates, they have already boarded the train of lit-biz publicity. In the first pages of Conversations with Friends, the performance poets Frances and Bobbi charm an older writer, Melissa, who promises to write a profile of them. Normal People begins with its protagonists, Marianne and Connell, comparing their grades at secondary school and ends with Connell getting onto a graduate creative writing programme. S ally Rooney’s emergence in recent years as the avatar of literary success and its online scapegoat is not unrelated to the content of her novels.
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