Sally Rooney Sees Right Through You

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Photo: Courtesy of Faber

Sally Rooney wrote Conversations With Friends over three months while studying for a master’s in American literature at Trinity College in Dublin. A short year later, she found herself caught in the middle of a seven-way tussle between publishers vying for the rights. (It should go without saying that this is a remarkable situation for any novelist, let alone a 26-year-old who had only recently finished her thesis.) Faber emerged from the battle victorious, and since the release of her book, which came out late May in the U.K., and earlier this month in the States, Rooney’s writing has been compared to that of Sheila Heti and Edna O’Brien, described by Kazuo Ishiguro as a “moment of real significance,” and, in a uniquely zeitgeist-y turn-of-phrase, she was dubbed no less than the “Salinger of the Snapchat generation.”

Set firmly in the digital age, Conversations With Friends thankfully veers away from the easily labored territory of Snapchat and selfies, and instead follows Frances, a student at Trinity who moonlights as a spoken-word poet alongside her best friend and ex-girlfriend, the abrasive and magnetic Bobbi. When the pair are profiled for a distinguished magazine by Melissa, a celebrated writer and photographer, they fall into the older woman’s alluring sphere, populated by glamorous creative types, and soon, Frances starts an affair with Nick, Melissa’s faintly famous 32-year-old actor husband. Trying to play their romantic assignations outside the hackneyed cliché (the older man, the younger girl), Nick and Frances find themselves flailing and failing to convey what they actually mean to each other. “They are armed with all this feminist theory, and they are kind of conscientious people who obviously don’t want to be oppressing each other. It takes them both some time to actually see past the superficial power disparity between them and try and negotiate what they are actually going through as individual people,” says Rooney, on the phone from her parents’ house in Mayo, Ireland, and the novel knits together the various ways we communicate in the novel, as the characters’ conversations slip seamlessly across face-to-face, email, text, and instant messenger, meshing together the series of tangled, overlapping relationships that color the plot.

There is often a weighted assumption that young, female writers mirror their own lives in their work (see Jami Attenberg’s essay, “Stop Reading My Fiction as the Story of My Life”), and while Conversations With Friends is certainly not autobiographical, it does draw upon Rooney’s experience as a competitive debater while at Trinity, which the author recalls as an introduction to an elite and unfamiliar world. “I thought, I have to very quickly now absorb the norms and the social behavior and the etiquette that will make me socially acceptable,” says Rooney. “And that certainly informed the novel. That’s how Frances feels with Melissa and their friends: I want these people to accept me. How do I do that? How do I observe them closely enough that I can fool them into thinking I can belong?” The book becomes a treatise about not just the complexities of desire in the modern era, but also the complexities of being a young woman in the world, with all of the potential heights and hazards that follow along.

Vogue spoke with Rooney about the changing face of Ireland, what good dialogue and sex scenes have in common, and whether the Internet is a good or bad thing, below.

Photo: Jonny L. Davies

You are from Mayo, and you lived there until you went to Trinity. How much of the novel did you draw from your life and experiences?

Frances is actually from Dublin. Her parents are from Mayo, and they move back there, but she actually grows up in Dublin. There are certainly elements of the social world that I inhabited growing up and then in college that I draw from. I mean, obviously, I studied English in Trinity, and I think the book is very much about observing a social milieu as much as anything else, and obviously I chose to write about social circles that I felt I had an understanding of the norms and manners. So in that sense, absolutely there are autobiographical elements, and it’s written about a city that I have lived in for eight years and that I know pretty well, but, in terms of the actual substance of the book, it’s not drawn from my real life.

It strikes me that the novel seems to be about Dublin very much as it is now. I moved to Dublin in 2010, and it was in the middle of the crash, and it has changed so much.

Yes, it’s certainly set [today]. . . I think the economic situation of the characters reflects contemporary Dublin, which is kind of slowly grappling with recovery from the crash, and I think the last sector recovering is that millennial class, who have never really had an experience of properly waged work. People think the book is about extraordinarily privileged people, but it’s not really. At one stage, Frances has got so little money that she can’t feed herself, and she has an unpaid internship at one point, and a minimum wage job, and she makes reference to several other minimum wage jobs she has had. . . . [There’s this culture in creative fields of] constantly being shuffled around very low paid unsatisfying work that you have to do to get by, and that to have any prospect of having a satisfying career you are expected to do loads of unpaid work. I think it’s miserable.

The fact that people come away from the book thinking it portrays a really privileged lifestyle is really confusing to me. The characters read a lot and are very culturally literate, but they are not really privileged people. Nick and Melissa have a nice house, but they are not predatory capitalists or anything. . . they certainly occupy a cultural position that people associate with privilege, in that they are artists that lead a bohemian lifestyle.

I know you debated at Trinity. What impact did that have on your use of language, and your ability to construct plot and narrative?

One thing debating did was bring me in contact with a whole social world that I had never experienced before. It’s sort of a very international, very niche hobby. . . and once you rise to a certain level, you find yourself constantly taking flights to faraway countries and you’re seeing all the same faces everywhere you go, and it wasn’t very unlike being on the festival circuit as a young writer. It was an introduction to a world I was previously unfamiliar with, and I thought I have to very quickly now absorb the norms and the social behavior and the etiquette that will make me socially acceptable in this world. And that certainly informed the novel. It’s very much that world—that’s how Frances feels with Melissa and their friends. I want these people to accept me. How do I do that? How do I observe them closely enough that I can fool them into thinking I can belong? So that was part of my experience at college that I definitely encountered in debating. But as for use of language, I don’t know, that was that one of the reasons I was drawn to debating was that I probably already was drawn to language, and politics and stuff in a way that probably comes through in the novel as well.

Sex is notoriously difficult for authors to write about well. It comes up a fair amount in this book.

I think the whole idea of “a sex scene” is strange, because we would never say “a dialogue scene;” that scene is defined by the content of what happens in the dialogue. Similarly, a sex scene where the two characters end up crying in a bed is not going to be substantially similar to a sex scene where they have just started their affair and are obsessed with each other. A lot of what my characters encounter in their dialogues—trying to express themselves and trying to connect but also trying to guard themselves against feeling vulnerable—those are the same issues that came up in their sex scenes, too.

I wonder if the way you approach and have structured the relationship and the fluid sexualities in the book—Frances is bisexual, Bobbi is a lesbian, other characters seem sort of open. . . is that something that would have been written or well received say, five, six years ago, even? Do you feel like there is a moment of tangible change in Ireland in terms of social progress?

Five, six years ago, maybe. 10 years ago, I’m not sure. 20 years ago, almost certainly not. So there definitely is now the idea that you can write about these characters and their realities without delving into the oppression that they have faced, the difficulties they may have had in coming out. It’s like, now let’s just get to the interesting part of them being adults and working their lives out without having to explain how they got to that situation.

I was talking to my Mum about this, actually, and she definitely has [witnessed progress firsthand]. Ireland now is so different even from the Ireland of the early 1990s. You know, gay pride went through Castlebar yesterday afternoon. It’s accepted that there is a vibrant gay community in small towns, and that is a massive change. We still haven’t had the emergence of a left-wing movement. And I think that is something that would mark a real sort of landmark shift in Irish political life, if that was to happen. When I was at university I was quite active in the Repeal the 8th [pro-choice] movement. Since leaving university I go to protests and rallies, I’m not involved in any activist groups, but I must get involved now, because I know there is going to be a referendum next year, over the next few months probably. It’s something that any young Irish woman can’t be unaware of.

Irish writing is having a big “moment,” and I have read that you don’t necessarily perceive yourself as “an Irish writer.”

I saw this as well, but I think it’s been misinterpreted. I definitely do see myself as an Irish writer, and I see myself as part of a community of Irish writers, and I am really excited about the writing that is coming out of Ireland at the moment. I guess it’s the whole idea of richness and nationality, I’m increasingly not really sure what it means. In the past, we obviously had a national identity that was defined by opposition to British imperialism, and that is all very well and in the past, now. And our new national identity is just seems to be a way of justifying our privileged position in the world and protecting ourselves at the expense of others. You know, deporting people, refusing to admit asylum seekers. Is that now what Irishness really means? Is that a protective gesture against open borders and this idea that we have a national identity that we quote unquote have to protect? That is not something that I am interested in participating in at all. But I think generally most Irish writers aren’t and Irish literature is not really a part of that project, and certainly I don’t want to think that it is. But I definitely identify as an Irish writer, but when it comes to the question of what Irishness is and what is Irish writing, I definitely don’t have a convincing answer to any of those questions.

The way that we communicate has changed so much, and so much of it is online. A lot of communication in the book is through digital means. But I don’t feel like it has pervaded literature enough.

It’s funny because the forms of novel have often been associated with changes in technological forms. If you look at the history of the letter in the novel, small changes in the British postal service became really significant because of how quickly people are suddenly able to communicate, and letters actually arrive at the intended time, and they arrive to the correct recipient. All of this is really important to a plot. It seems really natural that when our forms of communication change as rapidly as they have over the last 20 years that the form of our fiction should be changing rapidly too. And I couldn’t imagine how these characters would live their lives without constantly sending texts and emails and or without having instant messgage conversations, or looking back on their old conversations, or looking at videos or clips of each other. In the beginning, when Frances finds out that Melissa is married to Nick, obviously the first thing she does is put his name in the Internet and look at pictures of him. I wasn’t trying to write a commentary on our use of Google Images, I was just trying to think: What would I do? I would want to know what the guy looks like.

All those forms of experience dictate so much of how we relate to one another, and particularly I think if you meet people who are of a certain status in society, they have a presence that precedes you meeting them because that presence is maintained on the Internet. It would be really difficult for me to imagine how you would go about navigating that without recourse to the technology that supplies how much of how we communicate now. I wasn’t trying to do it in any way as a commentary on the use of the Internet. I don’t have any answers as to whether the Internet is a good or a bad thing, but it’s certainly an important thing for the novel because novels are so much about communication, and when communication changes, the novel has to change.

Something I related to was the idea of constructing a dry, wry version of yourself online, with someone you are in a relationship with, and how this gap between that person and how you are really feeling can form.

Certainly, and Frances will use any possibility she can to protect herself from vulnerability. She finds it very difficult to open up about her emotional life. The Internet is just one of many tools she will use for the purpose of trying to protect herself from the difficult aspects of intimacy with other people, but certainly the Internet gives her an ability. . . . You can spend an hour drafting an email and it will look like you’ve written it in 10 seconds. In real life, your body language will communicate what you may not want the other person to know. You may not have the same control over yourself like you do over text and that makes sense for Frances, she is a writer.

I felt that the book brought up this question of the divergence between how you may think of yourself and who you actually are. At one point, Nick refers to himself as “oppressive white male.” He can’t help being a white man. So how does he operate past that?

That is one of the central questions of the book. When people mean well and they want to do the right thing and they really think about it and they seriously put some thought into power structures and how do we actually live that out on a individual level, and how do we actually ask of ourselves, and how much can we give to ourselves to other people in service of trying to live a good life. I mean, I obviously have no answers to any of those questions. But I think that’s what the book is trying to analyze.

This interview has been condensed and edited.