While Conversations With Friends was Sally Rooney’s debut novel, I actually read her sophomore novel Normal People first. I read it almost exactly a year ago, right before the BBC/Hulu adaptation aired. Having loved that novel and show, I was excited to see that there was an adaptation coming for Conversations With Friends as well and decided to pick this one up.
Set in Dublin, the story follows best friends (and ex-girlfriends) Frances and Bobbi, and their increasingly emotional and complicated relationships with an older married couple, Melissa and Nick. It explores friendship, love, wealth, class, sexuality, politics, and family with a brutal honesty that was actually really uncomfortable at times. While reading, there were definitely times when I had to physically put the book down because of how awkward some situations were (and I kind of loved that about it).
Rooney writes miscommunication extremely well. The story is told solely from Frances’ perspective so it’s pretty easy to understand her point of view as a reader. However, it was also interesting to see how she understood other people’s actions and compare that reaction to how I interpreted their actions. I found it incredibly frustrating to see how Frances perceived comments or actions from Nick, Bobbi, Melissa, and other characters as personal slights. Since Frances is a pretty emotionally closed-off person, her initial reaction to anyone that she perceived as negative towards her was just to push them away. Although frustrating, I think it was probably pretty realistic in terms of how people react in certain situations.
Another aspect that I loved about this book was that a decent amount of it occurred via email and text message as I felt that it helped ground the story in the modern era. Sometimes, I find that online correspondence doesn’t translate really well to books, but I think that Rooney did a good job of crafting believable text conversations. Also, seeing how Frances would overanalyze messages and stress over how to respond was just extremely relatable.
I was completely moved by Rooney’s way of conveying such complex and intense emotions in such a simple way. She has a very minimal writing style and doesn’t tend to over-describe things or add in a slew of pointless adjectives. I don’t always agree that less is more, however in this case I do agree. It leaves a lot open for interpretation, which could be a good or bad thing depending on what you like (I personally like it).
Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I found it compelling and thought-provoking, and it made me examine my own views on relationships, love, and marriage. I am genuinely so excited for the series, which is set to release sometime in 2022!