The first thing you’ll notice when opening a book by Sally Rooney is her surprising lack of quotation marks. After getting over this – and it doesn’t take long – you’ll be struck by Rooney’s insightful understanding of life and love in the age of the internet.
Unless you’ve been living under a literary rock, you’ve probably heard of Rooney, an Irish writer lauded by everyone from Sarah Jessica Parker to President Obama. Rooney’s novels Normal People and Conversations with Friends are the first books I recommend when a friend asks me what she should read next. Normal People (her most recent novel) is being made into a Hulu mini-series, set to be released this spring.
Normal People is a love story spanning the secondary school and university years of Irish students Connell and Marianne. “All these years they’ve been like two little plants sharing the same plot of soil, growing around one another, contorting to make room, taking certain unlikely positions,” Rooney writes. Their relationship is as complex, raw, and heartbreaking as one would expect of love in the 2010s. Character’s inabilities to communicate with one another or say how they really feel peppers Rooney’s work – her words are not comforting, but they are recognizable.
What makes Rooney’s work such a compelling read is her uncanny ability to write what many have felt but never found the words for. Case in point: “Their feelings were suppressed so carefully in everyday life, forced into smaller and smaller spaces, until seemingly minor events took on insane and frightening significance.” Her storytelling is simple while dealing with complex, timely issues. She has an understanding of the modern subconscious mind like no other writer.
My only complaint is this: now that I’ve gobbled up her entire bibliography, short stories and all (I highly recommend “Mr. Salary,” available via the Irish Times), I need another book.