They don’t have intergenerational affairs with B-list film stars.

The characters are, as the title might suggest, just normal people.

Normal People lacks the showiness of her older sister: no bougie gay anarchist best friend or elite artsy Dublin couple to gawk at. The two novels have a lot in common, both coming-of-age stories set at Trinity in Dublin. Sometimes a debut novelist will capitalize on her fame and rush to publish an inferior work, some old manuscript that had been shunted aside or buried deep on a hard drive.Īt 26, Sally Rooney took a conventional Victorian-esque love story and freshened it up, creating a literary phenomenon along the way.Īt first it seemed like this could have been the case. I was nervous when Normal People was announced so quickly after the success of Conversations with Friends. The iconic warm yellow cover (painted by Alex Katz) made a cameo on Sarah Jessica Parke r’s Instagram and was even seen in the hands of Shiv Roy on HBO’s “Succession.” At 26, Sally Rooney took a conventional Victorian-esque love story and freshened it up, creating a literary phenomenon along the way. We follow her as she navigates an awkward love square between herself, her best friend/former girlfriend/spoken word partner, and an illustrious older married couple, Melissa and Nick. The protagonist, Frances, a student at Trinity College in Dublin, is casually queer and communist, cerebral and self-indulgent. My crassly annotated copy made the rounds across boundaries of age, gender and location. I made my close college friends read it, lent it to my mom and my grandma, and passed it around with coworkers. It’s the kind of book that gets passed along generating interesting conversations among your own friends along the way. Rooney was marketed as Salinger for the Snapchat Generation, greeted as one of the first great millennial writers.Ĭonversations with Friends is a book about conversations between friends, often typed and texted. I picked it up off of the “future of fiction” table near the back register at the Strand bookstore in New York City. Rooney was marketed as Salinger for the Snapchat Generation, greeted as one of the first great millennial writers.

There was something very new and exciting about Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends when it came out in 2017.

The author’s name was a trending topic in New York City as different profiles celebrated, critiqued and criticized, continuing a conversation three years in the making. The night before the release of “Normal People,” Hulu’s adaptation of Sally Rooney’s second novel of the same name, literary Twitter was ablaze with hot takes.

Normal people sally rooney