‘The world has a way of intruding’
SALLY ROONEY APPEARS before a stark, white background, stripped of even the most incidental feature. It makes me laugh: in 18 months of Zoom meetings, I’ve encountered people in their bedrooms and home offices, in front of book cases and windows – situations that, no matter how bland or contrived, still betray some minor, contextualising detail. The empty staging today is, evidently, something that Rooney, after two hit novels and the rapid onset of an unwelcome fame, clearly wishes might extend further than a video call. Later in our conversation she will tell me celebrity is a condition that, in many cases, “happens without meaningful consent – the famous person never even wanted to become famous”.
There are some good reasons for the 30-year-old’s reticence. Her first two novels – Conversations With Friends and Normal People – were published in quick succession to the sort of acclaim that put Rooney in a category of exposure more consistent with actors than novelists. The books featured characters in late adolescence and early adulthood struggling through first relationships while starting to organise their thoughts about the world. They were erudite and self-assured, written with a dry, flat affect that was often very funny, and contained the kinds of fleeting, well-wrought descriptions that infused every scene with a casual virtuosity. Rooney’s ability to unpack a thought or feeling without forfeiting economy is one of the great strengths of her writing.
Normal People sold a million copies and was turned into a megahit TV show starring Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal. More trenchantly, it became the sort of talismanic novel made to represent an entire generation’s coming of age. “I don’t think of my novels as ‘millennial novels’ any more than I think of them as ‘female novels’,” Rooney says. Nonetheless, that is how they are perceived.
It all seems a lot to hang on the shoulders of a very slight young woman, hair grown long during the pandemic so that it falls in sheets on either side of her face. Rooney is assumed to be difficult in the vein of her characters – a spiky, awkward, intellectual woman
