True Story Of A 27-Year-Old Sally Rooney

Two years ago, Sally Rooney was an aspiring novelist recently out of Trinity College when her first book, Conversations With Friends, was bought in a seven-way auction by Faber. When it was published last May, it quickly became the word-of-mouth literary sensation of the summer – if you still haven’t read
it, you’re probably familiar with its cover, a stylish cartoon rendering of two young, fashionable women, which was plastered all over the holiday feeds of Instagram’s most cultured. Now 27, Rooney’s follow-up novel, Normal People, has earned her a place on the long-list for this year's Man Booker Prize and this week it was announced that it is being adapted for a BBC series.

But that is all still to come when we meet in the sunlit offices of her publisher in Bloomsbury. It is May, the day before the Irish referendum on abortion, and Rooney is feeling nervous. As a young woman from Ireland, living in Dublin, the matter is extraordinarily close to her heart. "It’s been tough trying to exercise appropriate restraint, because you don’t want to alienate people who might be sympathetic, you want to be open-minded and open-hearted as you can," she says, in a bright Irish accent. "But I do feel a lot of anger."

Compounding her nerves is the fact that this is her first interview for the highly-anticipated Normal People. Still, Rooney appears effortlessly poised, wearing a simple, fine knit sweater and skirt, her hair bobbed at the chin, as we chat easily over coffee about the success of her first book. Conversations With Friends followed the story of university student Francis and her on-off romantic relationship with her best friend and adulterous affair with an older married man. And deftly dealt with all the big ideas: love, fluid sexuality, friendship, success, jealousy. Add in a storyline about endometriosis and dialogue that could be lifted from a Whatsapp conversation and you can understand why every woman you know under 35 has either read it or been recommended it. Not that Rooney set out to deal with “millennial concerns… but that’s how it ended up playing out,” she says.

it is set in and around Dublin and focuses on the intricacies and intimacies of relationships. But, without the text speak, it feels more timeless. In fact, it is not a stretch to say it’s a classic coming-of-age love story; a highly relatable, highly literary ‘will they won't they’ tale.

The protagonists are Marianne and Connell, who first meet at high school, where they form an emotional and sexual bond that stretches like elastic during their subsequent university lives, pulled to near breaking point at times, before snapping back together again. Alongside love and sex (which is not in short supply), a dominant theme to emerge is class – wealthy Marianne lives in the ‘white mansion with the driveway’, which Connell’s mother cleans – and the impact that can have on relationships and success.

“It would be dishonest to say I set out wanting to write some kind of social realistic novel about class structures in Ireland – I didn’t at all,” says Rooney. “But, having decided that this was the novel I wanted to write, I had to think seriously about these issues. It was very important to me to get that right and to do justice to, on the one hand how all-consuming the class system is, and on the other hand how individuals are not reducible to one or the other identity group.”

Rooney speaks with the considered articulacy you would expect from a top debater – until her early twenties she was Europe’s No 1 student debater. However, I can’t resist telling her how much I fancied Connell. “Did you? Wow that’s so funny! I kind of wondered if I did sometimes. When I sit back from it I’m like, I’ve written this whole book about a man. I don’t know anything about men! While I was writing Connell he felt 100% real to me. But now it’s out in the world, there is that concern that maybe I’ve missed something about the male experience that I have no access to.”

Yet Rooney’s powers of observation, and talent for writing dialogue, are as good as any in her generation. Although she maintains that neither of her books are autobiographical, they must, inevitably, contain elements of her real life. Do her friends recognize themselves in her work? “No, it’s funny, never, and actually before Conversations came out, people were speculating like, ‘Who’s going to be in it?’ And now they’re like, ‘No-one’s in that book that we know’. My friendships all tend to be quite steady, so it’s really hard to novelise that stuff because it’s just boring. I mean there’s interesting conversations, but there’s no power struggle. And you can’t work with equilibrium, you have to work with something that’s just off, and then observe how it tries to correct itself.”

Growing up in Castlebar, County Mayo, Rooney was surrounded by books. Both her parents were big readers and her mother ran the local arts centre, meaning “we had no choice but to do cultural things together.” They weren’t however, “remotely success orientated. They were just happy for their kids to be happy, and if one of us wanted to be a literary novelist or whatever it was like, ‘Well, whatever makes you happy, darling. Pursue your dream.’”


Lucky that she did. Now, Rooney lives with her maths teacher boyfriend of six years in Dublin, where she is the editor of literary magazine The Stinging Fly. Though she hasn’t written an “official word” since last October. “I get quite demoralised when I think about it, because I enjoyed writing these books so much, and it would have been worth it regardless of whether they were published or if anyone read a word of them,” she says, adding: “I may never write another book again.” Something tells me she won’t be gone for long.