Sally Rooney Gets in Your Head

03/01/2019 Sally Rooney Gets in Your Head | The New Yorker
Life and Letters January 7, 2019 Issue
Sally Rooney Gets in Your Head

The Irish writer has been hailed as the rst great millennial novelist for her stories of love
and late capitalism.
By Lauren Collins
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/01/07/sally-rooney-gets-in-your-head 1/16
Rooney’s most devastating lines are often her most affectless. Illustration by Giulia Sagramola
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n 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
I 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 lm’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 con dent 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 ction 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 ction 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 non ction. 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 rst
novel, in 2017, a piece about her appeared in the Irish Independent. It began:
Sally Rooney is apoplectic. She

squirms in her seat, hands apping
in disgust, and doesn’t mince her
words.
“I hate Yeats!” she shrieks. “A lot of

his poems are not very good but
some are obviously okay. But how
has he become this sort of emblem
of literary Irishness when he was
this horrible man? He was a huge
fan of Mussolini, he was really into
fascism, he believed deeply in the
idea of a ‘noble class’ who are
superior by birth to the plebs. And
he was in the Senate.
“He wasn’t just this harmless

weirdo who wrote poetry. People
misinterpret him in this country,
and when we’re taught about him
in school, it’s just hagiography.”
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.
He told me he loved Yeats, can you

believe that? I practically had to
stop him reciting “The Lake Isle
of Innisfree” in the bar.
Wow, I feel terrible for you.
And the sex was bad.
No one who likes Yeats is capable

of human intimacy.
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.”
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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 nd 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
Normal People
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 gure-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 ourishes.
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 nd 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, nding 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 pro le 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.
e are living in a great epistolary age, even if no one much acknowledges it.
W 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.”
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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 fties, 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 ashy 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 lm 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 atness 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 rst 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 nancial 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 nd 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 ‘frog sh chameleons.’ I saw a frog sh 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 fteen, 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:
I sit in my grandmother’s living

room—
the patterned carpet, spools of

thread
the 1994 hunting trophy, dried
owers
china ornaments, a chipped ashtray
—
and she talks about her childhood.
I am dreaming of industry, art

galleries
of fashion, sex and cocaine
and the distance between you and
I
east across the colourless Irish Sea.
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 guratively” caused the nancial
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 ction
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 rati ed 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 de nitively 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
Rachel
the novelist Rachel Cusk
Cusk because of her cerebral rst-person narration. She says that
Rachel Cusk
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 de ation 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.”
oward the middle of “Conversations with Friends,” Frances goes to see a

T 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.”
Not fully unprotected? he said. I

don’t follow you.
I could feel my face get hot, but I

replied in as dry and unconcerned
a voice as possible.
No, I mean, not full sex, I said.
Right.
Then I looked at him and said: I

mean he didn’t come inside me, am
I not being clear? He looked back
down at his clipboard then. We
hated each other energetically, I
could see that. Before he went
away, he said they would test the
urine for pregnancy. Typically the
hCG levels would remain elevated
for up to ten days, that’s what he
said before he left.
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
essay
essay
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 nds 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, lling her lungs with incense, for the rst 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.
n the train, eating cookies, Rooney and I started talking about religion.
O
“Even though Christianity is the dominant Western moral framework, the whole
idea of self-sacri cing slipped down somehow,” she said. “It’s not really a big part of
the conversation about how we should behave. But I nd 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 nd 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-sacri ce. 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 avorless chocolate cake. Her
sense of spiritual revelation has deserted her. Rooney is alive to the ways that high-
own 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 de ating 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 con ict?” 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 de cits. “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. ♦
This article appears in the print edition of the January 7, 2019, issue, with the headline
“Post and Riposte.”
Lauren Collins began working at The New Yorker in 2003 and became a staff writer in
2008. She is the author of “When in French:
French: Love
Love in
in aa Second
Second Language
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Sally Rooney Gets in Your Head - The New Yorker

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Sally Rooney Gets in Your Head - The New Yorker

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03/01/2019 Sally Rooney Gets in Your Head | The New Yorker

Life and Letters January 7, 2019 Issue

“I was Remain, like any sensible person,” she answered.

Sally Rooney is apoplectic. She

“I hate Yeats!” she shrieks. “A lot of

“He wasn’t just this harmless

He told me he loved Yeats, can you

Wow, I feel terrible for you.

And the sex was bad.

No one who likes Yeats is capable

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perfect synchronization that it surprises them.” In the opening chapters, Marianne, a

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