Which Sally Rooney Book You Should Read Based on the Specific Moment in Your Life
Conversations with Friends
Conversations with Friends is a first person novel following a few months in Frances's life when she was twenty-one. Starting in the spring, we meet Frances and her best friend/ex-girlfriend, Bobbi, who perform spoken word poetry together. At one of their performances, they meet a famous writer named Melissa who introduces them to her husband, an actor named Nick. The girls get entangled with the couple, eventually vacationing in France with them. Frances has to navigate having a crush, the politics of cheating, and what it means to maintain unconventional relationships.
start here if...
- You're battling a terrible crush
- You love someone you shouldn't
- You're 21... enough said
- You're looking for a book that spotlights the reality of living with endometriosis/chronic pain
- You're intrigued by people who can be friends after dating
- You're looking for some glamour
- You like books that take place on holiday
why I like it...
Reading it now at exactly Frances's age, I like this book more than when I first read it. Despite the fact that I'm living a very different life than Frances, Rooney still so perfectly captures what it's like to be a particular type of young woman. As someone who also wants to be a writer more than anything, I enjoyed Frances's journey with her writing evolving and becoming more her own over time. I also have endometriosis, and that's what gave me a soft spot for this novel back when I wasn't a Rooney fan in the slightest. It was the first time I saw endo depicted in a novel, and it meant a lot to me. Rooney also just does a fantastic job writing about infatuation, crushes, and oddly shaped relationships that have no plausible happy conclusion—at least in a conventional sense. Rooney captures the reckless, young feeling of doing something just for the sake of it expertly.
skip this one if...
This novel is first person and extremely narrowly focused at that. We learn bits and pieces about Bobbi, Nick, Melissa, and Frances's parents, but they do exist mainly to serve her life and her story development. If you like a big, very developed cast, this isn't going to be the book for you. It's a very insular novel focused on one person, in one moment of her life navigating how to be human. If that's not your jam, there won't be much for you here.
Normal People
Normal People is Rooney's sophomore book written in third person following two main characters, Connell and Marianne, from their final year of high school through the end of their time at university. In school in Sligo, Connell has the upper hand. He's an athlete, in the popular crowd, and gifted in English class. Marianne is at the top of her class, but she's a total social outcast. When they go to college, though, everything shifts as Connell struggles to adjust to Dublin life and Marianne's financial privilege helps her excel and finally find the popularity she never did in Sligo. While there's an undeniable connection between Connell and Marianne, their deep rooted communication issues may prevent them from ever fully accepting the love they've found in one another.
start here if...
- You're terrible at telling your crush you like them
- You keep your feelings close to your chest
- You enjoy throwing books at the wall cause, "Why can't they just talk to each other!"
- You're okay with life's ambiguities
- You want a truly epic love story
- You believe that some people are just made for one another
- You love a coming of age novel written with a more reflective eye
why I like it...
In all honesty, reading Normal People for the first time as a teenager made me want to throw the book at the wall and forget about it halfway through. I couldn't understand why they couldn't just talk about their feelings. Their problems could be solved so easily! And then I got older and lived more life, and suddenly, I felt incredibly seen rereading this novel. I love that this book is about two people who are trying very hard to be good people but the complications of life and their histories sometimes makes that complicated. They both have plenty of flaws, but it's hard not to love them for how honestly human they are. I see myself in different ways in both Connell and Marianne, and I'm also a sucker for books about relationships that are incredibly important and defining whether they last forever or not.
skip this one if...
Miscommunication frustrates you (not in a fun way). This book will be agonizing in that case. Also, if you're not okay with ambiguity and loose ends, this novel will likely not be for you. That's not just a commentary on the ending but a sort of overall theme of the novel. Rooney sets out to capture the truly messy contours of life and being young here, and that leaves ample room for uncertainty.
Beautiful World Where Are You is a third person novel with two point of view characters, Eileen and Alice. They've been friends for a long time but have recently experienced a rift as Eileen has stayed in Dublin working a desk job in the literary world and Alice has moved to the countryside, living by the sea and pulling her mysterious famous author shtick. To bridge the distance, Alice and Eileen send each other email updates about their lives and their thoughts on random world happenings. Filling out their worlds are two men—Felix and Simon. Alice meets Felix on a dating app and they embark on a tentative romance challenged by how different the realities of their lives are. Eileen remains entangled with Simon, her childhood best friend, as they navigate adulthood in Dublin. This is Rooney's first novel that moves to the years just past university, at trying to establish a fully adult life.
start here if...
- You're looking to soothe the post-university freak-out
- You send long, esoteric emails to the people in your life
- You're a writer
- You're looking for older characters but want that quintessential Rooney voice
- You like books that experiment with form
- You're interested in contemplating Catholicism in modern day Ireland
- You want to run away to a big house by the sea
why I like it...
I'm a big believer that Beautiful World doesn't get enough love, even among Rooney fans. After Normal People, anything would be a difficult follow up. But as a novel on its own, this book has some fascinating tricks up its sleeve. Structurally, you'll love the book or you'll hate it. I've come to really appreciate it. Rooney tells the action of the novel from an extremely distant third person that almost feels like being someone in the audience of a play. There's no internal voice at all, just a dispassionate observer in the room that even miss casual whispered asides between characters every so often. Just when this coldness makes you wonder why you're even reading the novel, the book opens up to alternating emails sent by Alice and Eileen dissecting their inner worlds in complete monologue. This reads like living a night out and then running home to dissect it with friends, combing over all the little details for significance. While I'm a huge fan of characters' inner voices being on full display, I thought this technique presented an interesting opportunity as a reader to make up your own mind about a scenario before seeing the character spin it through their own lens.
skip this one if...
The emails are a very divisive attribute among reviewers. If you don't like sprawling, rambling pages of thoughts or are for some reason very deeply against email, this probably won't be the book for you. Also, while the book grapples with issues in the world brought down to a very individual level, the novel is primarily about Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon's lives and their relationships on the most micro of levels, so if a character study isn't appealing as a point of a novel, I would probably avoid this one.
Intermezzo is still fresh off the presses and in bookstore displays everywhere as Rooney's long awaited fourth book. Also told in third person, this time with three point of view characters, the novel follows two brothers and their various romantic entanglements with a handful of women. Ivan is a twenty-two year-old chess prodigy who's losing his edge as he casts around for what to do with his life post-uni. When he meets Margaret who runs a rural art center during one of his exhibition matches, his life starts to turn around. She's thirty-six, in the middle of a messy divorce, and a bit humiliated by the idea that she's fallen for such a young man. She also narrates small parts of the novel. Ivan's brother, Peter, is a decade older and appears to have it all figured out with his fancy law job. But Peter is stuck between Sylvia, his longtime love that broke up with him after she was in a terrible accident, and Naomi, a uni student his brother's age that doesn't believe in participating in the financial system. The brothers will have to figure out how to care for one another in the wake of their father's passing and how to navigate these complex romantic entanglements.
start here if...
- You haven't been a fan of Rooney's work but want to give it another try
- You like chess
- You have a sibling you're not particularly close to
- You're in an unconventional relationship and panicking
- You enjoy pondering the significance of age gaps
- You like dogs
why I like it...
Siblings is a new theme for Rooney, and one she tackles very well. What I found most compelling about this book is the icy start and begrudging connections between Ivan and Peter. They have a decade age gap and very little in common, and because they aren't effortlessly friends, they have to decide what being brothers is going to mean to them as adults. All of this felt very honest and captures a realistic dynamic that doesn't often come up in sibling narratives. The romantic relationships here are complex as ever, and they do dive into how other people have the surprising and somewhat remarkable capacity to heal parts of ourselves that need to be seen and acknowledged to move past.
skip this one if...
I have to be entirely honest; this is a tough book to get into. While I liked the ending quite a bit, I struggled for weeks to get past the beginning. Peter's chapters are written in choppy sentences that drop pronouns, nouns, and sometimes objects, I guess to create a stream of conscious feeling. It gets easier to read as the book goes on, but it does create real distance in the effortlessness of the reading experience. Rooney's books, to this point have a trademark fast, easy pace to them while still being literary. This book leans into esotericness in a way she hasn't before, and that can be off-putting.
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