Millennial misery and Marianne’s haircut: Confessions of a Sally Rooney fangirl

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Paul Mescal as Connell and Daisy Edgar-Jones as Marianne in the TV adaptation of Normal People. Photo / Supplied

The author burst on to the literary scene in 2017 and garnered an army of young female fans. Now, in her new novel Intermezzo, the characters are growing up – and, says Laura Hackett, so
are we.

There are some novelists who capture a particular time in your life. And there are others with whom you grow up. In my early teens, for instance, I went through a phase of obsessively rereading the Harry Potter books, finishing Deathly Hallows and immediately returning to Philosopher’s Stone. Were I to read those books now, I’d be transported back to an age of debilitating crushes and bad skin. But I grew up with Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice is a romance when you’re 15 and a comedy after 21. It changes with you. And then, of course, there is Sally Rooney, whose novels have formed the fictional backdrop to my 20s.
On September 24, Sally Rooney’s fourth novel, Intermezzo, is published, and hordes of tote bag-toting, Rilke-quoting young literary types will swarm their local bookshops to nab a copy. They will dissect the literary references and debate her oeuvre’s increasing religiosity online, but salivate over the sex scenes and wonder in private how much of it is based on Rooney’s own life, knowing she would hate such speculation.
Most of these readers will be women, and many of them – like me – will have been carrying out the same ritual every two or so years when Rooney brings out a new book. And as much as they’ll notice how Rooney’s prose style has changed (in Intermezzo she tries out a different type of syntax, one sometimes approximating a Joycean stream of consciousness), they’ll probably also notice they themselves have changed since Conversations with Friends came out in 2017 and hit the literary world like a bomb.
The 33-year-old Irish author tapped into a generational shift with her writing: her characters communicated by email and phone, they had masses of cultural capital but frightening financial precarity, their relationships were complex, undefined and ever-changing. Rooney didn’t invent this millennial mode of being (although she is sometimes accused of doing so), but she represented it in a way that was new and compelling. She was deemed the voice of a generation, “Salinger for the Snapchat generation”. Young people, particularly young women, latched on to her work because it reflected something about their lives they hadn’t seen on the page before. And relating to a character is just one step on the road to emulating them.
I should know: I was the worst culprit. The first time I encountered a Sally Rooney novel was roughly 12 hours after I had been rather unceremoniously dumped from the most painful relationship of my life. I was 21 years old, a few weeks away from sitting my final exams (in English literature – I am a stereotype after all), and desperately searching for a book to keep me occupied on my flight back home from university to Ireland, where I planned to spend a fortnight rotting in bed. I just needed a book that would engross me to such a degree that I wouldn’t sob on the plane and look like a lunatic. Unfortunately, the book I chose was the will-they-won’t-they coming-of-age romance Normal People, Rooney’s second book, which was so good that it successfully distracted me from my own problems but still made me sob like a lunatic. When I got home the only time I left the house was to drive to my local bookshop and buy a copy of Conversations with Friends, which I loved even more.
I related to Marianne, the protagonist of Normal People, to an embarrassing degree. She, too, had grown up in a small town in Ireland and escaped to a university city. She, too, was often guilty of being pretentious and ever so slightly arrogant (“I’m smarter than everyone,” she quips literally on the second page). She was drawn to unequal and sometimes humiliating romantic relationships with men (bingo!). We both struggled to maintain close female friendships. We both responded to emotional distress by not eating. And it didn’t help that Marianne spent her disastrous year abroad in the same Swedish town my ex-boyfriend absconded to.
These aren’t positive comparisons, of course. Rooney’s female characters are invariably miserable, defined on the one hand by their frightening intelligence, but on the other by their vulnerability, even neediness. Frances from Conversations with Friends suffers from endometriosis and writes poetry “in which I figured my own body as an item of garbage, an empty wrapper or a half-eaten and discarded piece of fruit”. Marianne struggles with intimacy: “I don’t know why I can’t make people love me. I think there was something wrong with me when I was born.” Eileen from Beautiful World, Where Are You is floundering on the precipice of 30 and sobs: “Sometimes I think I’m being punished, like God is punishing me.”
I wonder why, despite their evident unhappiness, so many women – myself included – wanted desperately to be like them. We got the Marianne fringe or read The Golden Bowl like Eileen or bought a “navy linen dress, with buttons” like Frances. When I watched the TV adaptation of Normal People I had to get a linen dress like the one Daisy Edgar-Jones wears – except I could only find one several sizes too big, so I got my mum to take it in. Embarrassing maybe, but I’m sure I wasn’t alone in my quest for the “Rooney look”.
Five years on, my life is completely different. I’m living in an even bigger city, surrounded by people who are definitely smarter than me, engaged to maybe the kindest man in the world, with brilliant female friends and a much, much healthier appetite. Although, to be fair, I do still have that linen dress.
And now in Intermezzo Rooney’s characters have changed too. For the first time, she has written from the perspective of male protagonists: the brothers Peter and Ivan, who have just lost their father to cancer. Peter is a barrister in his early 30s whose life has been in free fall since his girlfriend, Sylvia, was injured in a car accident. He must choose between trying to patch things up with Sylvia and getting serious with Naomi, a college student he has been seeing (and giving money to) for a year. Ivan is a 22-year-old chess prodigy who begins a secret relationship with Margaret, an older divorced woman. The characters circle each other like planets, getting closer and closer to impact.

It’s a virtuoso work, full of fresh reflections on love and family and philosophy, dropped in so lightly you could easily skip over them. But notably, there is no one female protagonist to grasp on to and emulate. Where was my Marianne? Sylvia, Naomi and Margaret are all fascinating characters in their own right, but we never seem to get fully inside their heads. I found myself scouring the pages for details: the “high-necked sweaters, coloured silk shawls” that Sylvia wears, or Naomi’s “cropped cashmere top, thin gold necklace” (clothes are always important to Sally Rooney: the soft brush of wool against the skin, the thin strap falling off one’s shoulder). But each of them remains stubbornly out of reach, seen through the eyes of Peter and Ivan (with the exception of a few sections told from Margaret’s perspective).
Finally, I realised: maybe the fact that Intermezzo has no young female protagonist to emulate is simply proof that we don’t need one any more. Seven years after Rooney’s first book, perhaps her readers have grown up. Self-identifying as a “Sally Rooney girl” might be fun in your early 20s, but now my friends are getting married, having babies, writing plays, moving countries or charging ahead with their careers. We’re growing up. And Rooney’s books have grown up with us.
There’s a moment in Intermezzo when Peter’s barrister friends start talking about one Simon Costigan, presumably the same Simon Costigan from Rooney’s last book, Beautiful World, Where Are You. That novel had concluded with Eileen (our miserable female speaker) discovering she was pregnant and Simon raising the possibility of marriage. Now, a few years on, Peter’s friends are exchanging the news: “You know his wife’s pregnant again.” It almost brought a tear to my eye, as if I’d found out an actual friend was pregnant. In the Sally Rooney universe, her characters are growing up and settling down, and they seem to have finally swapped misery for simple happiness.
Written by: Laura Hackett
© The Times of London
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