Sally Rooney on the hell of fame: It doesnt seem to work in any real way for anyone – Irish Examiner

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, Ive encountered people in their bedrooms and home offices, in front of bookcases 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 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. Now, after exchanging greetings, I mention the singularity of the naked white walls and she laughs and says merely, Yes.

There are some good reasons for the 30-year-olds 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. (Early on in Conversations With Friends, Frances, the heroine, sleeps with Nick, a married man, and taking the bus home afterwards, sits at the back near the window, where the sun bore down on my face like a drill and the cloth of the seat felt sensationally tactile against my bare skin. Rooneys 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 generations coming of age. I dont 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 who, as Alice, the heroine of her new novel, says of herself, goes around accusing everyone of having the wrong opinions. In fact, over the course of our two conversations, by Zoom and by email in which we will discuss her journey from champion teenage debater to novelist, whether shes sufficiently working class to be allowed to use the word Marxist and the new novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You Rooney is nothing but obliging, though her sensitivities to intrusion are occasionally triggered to amusing effect. How do you know Im married? she says, taken aback when I mention John, her husband, a maths teacher with whom shes been since college. I point out she thanks him in the books acknowledgements.

Like the other two novels, Beautiful World, Where Are You is set in Ireland, where Rooney grew up and still lives. It features a set of recognisably Roonian characters: Alice, a successful writer, is dating Felix, who works in a warehouse; her best friend Eileen, an editor at a literary magazine, is obsessed with Simon, a childhood friend who works in politics. (She also spends a lot of time Googling her ex-boyfriend.) These four people, all approaching 30, are, to one or another degree, lost: too successful, not successful enough, carrying various wounds of their childhoods and, in spite of endlessly analysing their own reactions to things, unable to identify what they want.

The book first presented itself to me as a four-person story, Rooney says, a story about a friendship between two women, and their respective relationships with two men. But it took me a relatively long time and a lot of trial and error to figure out how to tell that story. The friendship between the two women is unconventionally told. Interspersing the narrative are long, wordy emails exchanged between Alice and Eileen. (Sample from Alice: I suppose you think this is all extremely rudimentary and maybe even that Im un-dialectical. But these are just the abstract thoughts I had, which I needed to write down, and of which you find yourself the (willing or unwilling) recipient.) They discuss aspects of history, philosophy, psychology and politics, as well as their love lives and the deteriorating state of their friendship. I was interested in the interaction between their friendship and their intellectual lives, Rooney says. How their ideas inform the relationship, and how the particularities of their dynamic inform the development of their ideas. The intellectual friendship between two women is an unusual focus for fiction, and it helps explain why Rooneys young female fans feel such passion for her work: she takes seriously something so little represented, some might imagine it doesnt exist.

There is something else, too; Rooneys heroines are, without fail, always the smartest people in the room. They are also pretentious, priggish, self-absorbed and superior, condescending and driven by insecurity. They put me in mind, occasionally, of people I remember from university, those students who hung around outside the union on election day, shouting, Apathy led to the rise of Hitler! at politically disengaged students as they passed.

Their cleverness is mocking and, to casual readers, one imagines, vaguely threatening: typical responses to young, smart women that have been deflected on to Rooney herself. She was 27 when Normal People was published and her experience of being in the spotlight is worked into the new novel through Alice who, after writing two successful novels, has fled to a remote house in rural Ireland. When I submitted the first book, I just wanted to make enough money to finish the next one, writes Alice in an email to Eileen. I never advertised myself as a psychologically robust person, capable of withstanding extensive public inquiries into my personality and upbringing. Literary fame, Alice writes, has been so thoroughly unpleasant and unnerving that, in her opinion, people who intentionally become famous I mean people who, after a little taste of fame, want more and more of it are, and I honestly believe this, deeply psychologically ill.

If you dont want to read novels about writers, or women, or Irish people, dont read my novels. I wont mind

Rooney is at pains to point out shes not Alice. I have no appetite for writing about myself and things that have actually happened to me, she says, instead casting her experiences as a mental library she may draw from when creating her fiction. This seems a complicated way of preserving her privacy, but in any case, as it turns out, Alices horror of the publicity process is one Rooney wholeheartedly shares. I mention that I recalled her saying it would be graceless to complain about fame, and shell have none of it. I dont remember saying that. And actually, I dont think that at all. Quite the opposite, in fact. As far as I can make out, the way that celebrity works in our present cultural moment is that particular people enter very rapidly, with little or no preparation, into public life, becoming objects of widespread public discourse, debate and critique. Its irrelevant whether or not fame was part of their plan. They just randomly happen to be skilled or gifted in some particular way, and its in the interests of profit-driven industries to exploit those gifts and to turn the gifted person into a kind of commodity.

After Normal People, the story of Marianne and Connells bleak romance, was longlisted for the 2018 Booker and awarded novel of the year at the Costa book awards, Rooneys writing was spoken of as a mystic portal into the minds of young people, with the inevitable backlash when it failed to represent all of them. The hell of fame, Rooney says now, is that of a person enduring variably serious invasions of their privacy from the media, from obsessive fans, and from people motivated by obsessive hatred.

She stopped posting on and eventually looking at Twitter, something she misses (Twitter can be very funny). And she averted her eyes from as much of the coverage as she could. I dont read reviews or profiles, and back when I used social media, I actually muted my own name to try and avoid seeing things accidentally. None of it worked. The world does have a way of intruding. Coverage of the Normal People television show was so ubiquitous that I really could not avoid encountering it even when I tried. And of course, people approach me in public now and then, almost always in a very friendly and pleasant way, and I get letters and emails and things like that. Nonetheless it has been unpleasant, and she can only see one, very unattractive way out. Of course, that person could stop doing whatever it is theyre good at, in order to be allowed to retire from public life, but that seems to me like a big sacrifice on their part and an exercise in cultural self-destruction for the rest of us, forcing talented people either to endure hell or keep their talents to themselves. So no, she says, I dont think it is graceless for people in those positions to speak out about how poisonous this system is. It doesnt seem to work in any real way for anyone, except presumably some shareholders somewhere.

These anxieties are present in Beautiful World, Where Are You, a novel that has the impossible task of following up on a book as successful as Normal People and tackles it by featuring a protagonist worrying about the impossible task of how to follow up on her successful first novels. Alice rakes compulsively over her first two books, trying to figure out how she did it. She goes on a rant about how dishonest writers are when they write novels that seek to obscure the reality of life as a successful novelist. They come home from their weekend in Berlin, she writes, after four newspaper interviews, three photoshoots, two sold-out events, three long leisurely dinners where everyone complained about bad reviews, and they open up the old MacBook to write a beautifully observed little novel about real life. I dont say this lightly: it makes me want to be sick. Rooney is well aware this storyline is vulnerable to criticism who cares about a novelist self-indulgently fretting about her next novel? and is bullish about it.

For a start, she says, the people making these complaints like to read novels, presumably, but they dont like to be reminded that novelists are necessary for the production of the novels they like to read. Isnt that odd? Almost like attending a football game and complaining that everyone on the pitch is a professional footballer. Their job is to play football, not to reflect your life experiences. Furthermore, she says, Its not my job to populate my books with particular types of characters that I imagine other people might find relatable. Its my job to write about whatever comes into my head, to the best of my ability. If as a reader you want to exercise control over the kinds of things that are depicted in novels, try writing one. Thats what I did and it worked for me. If, on the other hand, you just dont want to read novels about writers, or women, or Irish people, whatever, thats OK a very Roonian moment, this dont read my novels. I wont mind.

Rooney is not from a family of writers. She grew up in Castlebar, County Mayo, where her father worked as a technician for the national telecoms company and her mother, after training as a teacher, worked in a local arts centre. It was not, she says, a very wealthy background and leftwing politics were frequently discussed at the dinner table. Her family Rooney has an older brother and a younger sister were on the mostly cheerfully noisy and argumentative side, which I dont think they will mind me saying. Without a doubt this contributed to the kind of person I became, and the kind of writer I am.

She is fond of polemic, in other words, and what she once characterised, in an essay for the Dublin Review about her career as a college debater, as a taste for ritualised, abstract interpersonal aggression. Rooney wasnt competitive at school. The popularity race didnt interest her and she opted out, not only socially but academically, doing the bare minimum required to achieve the desired results. The only place she exhibited any ambition was at a local writing class. It wasnt a class! she says, at mention of it; it was a writing group that she joined at the age of 16, in which everyone read aloud their work and invited feedback from others. It sounds like a daunting environment for a kid of that age but, Rooney says, it just wouldnt have occurred to me to be nervous about reading my work aloud to a group. I dont have a natural fear of public speaking. After winning a place to read English at Trinity College, Dublin, she started sending out fiction and poetry to small literary magazines, and eventually started writing a novel.

Rooney is the precise opposite of the popular image of the novelist as mumbling and haphazard, speech punctuated by bursts of agonised silence. Her rhetorical style has been shaped by the experience of her early 20s when, as she puts it in the Dublin Review essay, she became the number one competitive debater on the continent of Europe. Rooney wasnt a good debater when she joined the college team, but she understood the rules of the game, and that with practice, she could excel. The essay was published in 2015, and it seems like the last time she shared, without inhibition, her feelings in a non-fiction format. I was 19 when I started debating competitively, she wrote, and its probably fair to say that most things I did when I was 19 were motivated by a desperation to be liked. I wasnt only willing to lose debates: I was willing to tell all my secrets, to lend money when I couldnt afford to and to date anyone who showed an interest in me, no matter how dull or aggressive. I had low self-esteem and a predilection for hero-worship, and I was extremely determined.

As a description, it sounds very much like Rooneys beloved characters. Why suddenly become competitive in this way? I wasnt good enough at anything to be meaningfully competitive about it before, she says. With debating I found something I was pretty good at, and pursued it with the aim of becoming the best. And when I felt I had become the best, I lost interest in it and gave up. Getting really good at something is a fun challenge, but once everyone agrees youre very good at it, theres more pressure and less fun, at least for me. I dont think I have the right mentality to compete in any field at a very high level for very long, even if I was talented enough to do that, which Im not.

The fun aspect of being recognised as good at something seems absent, too, from the way Rooney talks about writing. In the essay, she writes about giving up debating because it seemed empty and vaguely offensive; adopting positions you dont believe in, about things war in the Balkans; the Arab Spring with deadly consequences for real people. An agent read it, asked if she had anything else, and Rooney sent her the manuscript of a novel shed been working on, Conversations With Friends, featuring two college-age women: Frances, who was lonely and felt unworthy of real friendship, and Bobbi, her more freewheeling friend, who also suffered from various social inadequacies.

Frances and Bobbi take part in spirited political discussions, just as Marianne and Connell, and Alice and Eileen, do in her subsequent novels. The dialogue in these sections echoes the principles of college debating to the extent that the speakers, one eye on their audience, jam through words at a rate that forestalls interruption, digestion, or even much in the way of introspection, and via which, despite Rooneys obvious comic outlook, an element of mirthlessness creeps in. Her characters talk about what it means to be working class, the shortcomings of social movements Bobbi goes off on one about pay gap feminism while mocking themselves for being the sorts of people to do so.

As Rooneys fame grew, inevitably commentators online targeted her own background for being insufficiently pure. At the end of Normal People, Connell, a working-class boy, goes off to New York to take up a place on a creative writing course at NYU, an ending mocked by critics as being bourgeois. Short of offering to show these people my dads paycheck, Rooney says, there is not a lot one can do to satisfy this kind of criticism not least, she says, because most of it misunderstands its own terminology. From the Marxist point of view, people who work for a living rather than making money from capital are workers, members of the working class. But in contemporary colloquial use, the term working class is used much more restrictively, applied only to particular communities or workers in particular industries. These uses of the term are really not interchangeable at all, Rooney says. They mean very different things. So of course, when we try to talk about class using this terminology, we run into confusion and disagreement. In the new novel, an argument in the pub takes off around whether Eileen, a poorly paid editor at a small literary magazine, qualifies as working class.

On the one hand, all workers have some basic political goals in common, and recognising those commonalities could help to build class solidarity, Rooney says. On the other hand, relatively wealthy and privileged workers, say, software developers at major tech companies or successful novelists have very different lives from more obviously underpaid and exploited workers. Does it make sense to say both kinds of workers belong to the same class? I dont know. Maybe the answer is both yes and no. Its complicated.

I no longer feel so completely confident about the line that divides abusive people from the rest of us

The bigger issue for Rooney is around personalisation. In any industry, it helps to know where people come from to fix issues around under-representation but equally, she says, why should someone have to disclose facts about their upbringing and family life to the public, just because theyve written a novel? Shouldnt they be allowed to maintain a dignified silence about their personal life? The privacy of the individual seems to come up against the wider demands of the culture here. And its not an easy thing to resolve, or at least I dont think so.

The way most people in the public eye resolve this issue is, I suspect, simply by giving it less thought than she does. For Rooney, the injury is less the invasion of privacy itself very little has to be shared to satisfy the superficial needs of publicity than the assumption that it is owed in the first place.

She says, I dont think many people could reasonably conclude that my upbringing was so privileged as to disqualify me from writing books. But there is still a part of me that feels like these facts about my family life are nobodys business in the first place. My parents presumably did not conduct their lives in the expectation that their jobs and incomes would be dissected by strangers on the internet one day. It seems bizarre, and actually wrong. I understand and accept that I have become to some degree an object of scrutiny because of my work. But I find it very hard to accept that other people in my life should have to endure that. Theyve done nothing to deserve it. So yes, I think the discourse around representation in cultural fields is valuable, and even broadly necessary. And at the same time, I find it intrusive and difficult, and I dont know how to reconcile those positions. This is all true, and fair, but if Rooneys structural analysis of fame has a shortcoming, its a failure to recognise that, with no bad faith intended, most people simply want to know more about those they admire.

And readers love Rooney. They love her for her wit, and her readability, but mostly they love her for the story of Marianne and Connell; the shy, awkward, dowdy-but-brilliant girl and the equally brilliant, beautiful boy. When we meet Marianne as a teenager, she is being violently bullied by her horrible brother and mother, wealthy people with power in and outside of the home. Rooney says it didnt interest her to put the violence centre stage. I used to believe that abusers (and in particular, men who abuse women) were boring. And I still think theres some truth in that, and I still find our cultural fixation with men who rape and murder women very tiring. But I no longer feel so completely confident about the line that divides abusive people from the rest of us. And the novel maybe interrogates that division at times. I am probably never going to write a book from the perspective of a serial killer, but I do believe that many decent people have done things they now consider deeply wrong.

She is more interested in the echo of trauma this comes up in the new novel, too than the event itself, because the aftermath is what so many of us experience as life itself. If we are lucky, we spend relatively little actual time in deeply traumatic situations. But the aftermath of those experiences is a lifetime. That interests me very much. How do people who have endured certain kinds of violence, trauma or psychological breakdown carry on afterwards? These dont have to be extreme or out of the ordinary. It seems to me like almost everyone has endured some kind of pain or suffering that has changed their life. That change can take the form of damage, or of learning and growth, or some combination of the two an ability to adapt better in certain ways and worse in others. Naturally, when I ask what has informed her own understanding of these dynamics, she declines to answer personally.

Naming Rooney as the ultimate millennial voice is, of course, too generalised to be meaningful. And being labelled the voice of a generation, if it even made sense, always ends up being used against the voice in question; just ask Lena Dunham. Identity, Rooney says, can be very productive and useful when we want to talk about things like gender, race and sexuality. But is millennial an identity category? she wonders. In what way? And how is it useful politically, psychologically, socially?

Its the type of enquiry Rooney loves getting stuck into, and that can make it easy to forget something else: she is still very young, just 30. At the end of the call, I mention with incredulity that the essay that started her career was published a mere six years ago, a fact she agrees is amazing. Such a long time, right? she says, briefly ditching the intellectual register, to take it up again later by email. I am left with her sentences, thoughtful, abstract, generous in length, occupying an almost entirely theoretical plane. Just as she wants it.

Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney is published by Faber & Faber on 7 September

- The Guardian

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Sally Rooney on the hell of fame: It doesnt seem to work in any real way for anyone - Irish Examiner