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INTERVIEW SALLY ROONEY
24.03.17
www.thebookseller.com
A precocious young Irish writer whose début was at the heart of a seven-way auction has produced a novel that belies its creator’s years, reckons Alice O’Keeffe
Sally Rooney
Conversations with Friends (Faber, June). A delight from the first page to the last, it is a coming-of-age tale told by a young woman who is finding out who she is—and who she loves. It is narrated by Frances, a bright 21-year-old
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university student who lives in Dublin. She is also a poet who performs at spoken word nights with her best friend from school, the beautiful and self-assured Bobbi, who was once suspended from their secondary school for scrawling “fuck the patriarchy” on a wall near an image of the crucifixion. Bobbi used to be Frances’ girlfriend and although they have split up, they seem as close as ever. It is at a poetry night that Frances and Bobbi meet Melissa, a well-known photographer and journalist. After the bar closes, she invites them back to the house she shares with her handsome husband Nick, an actor, for a drink. That night is the first encounter of many as Frances and Bobbi are slowly drawn in to the orbit of the older, more glamorous couple. Frances, by nature one of life’s observers, initially holds herself aloof and slightly apart, but she gradually becomes closer and closer to Nick, and they begin an affair that will have consequences for every relationship in Frances’ life.
FOUR CORNERS When we meet at her publisher’s central London office, Rooney—who has flown over from her home in Dublin and proves to be a thoroughly engaging and articulate interviewee—explains that she began with an interest in exploring the dynamic between two close female friends who were previously lovers, and an older married couple, and “the various relationships that can exist within that. I mean between four people—it is incredible how many different dynamics there are.” When I observe that the relationships between the
four central characters don’t fall into neat categories, and that one would have to use so many words to describe precisely what and who they are to each other, Rooney is delighted. “It’s fascinating that you use that exact phrase, that you’d have to use so many words to describe who they were, because I think I had to use the whole book. If you really wanted to understand the relationship between even Frances and Bobbi alone, you’d have to read the whole book because [their relationship] really is that layered and complex,” she says. “I don’t mean that in a self-flattering way, I think honestly that everyone’s relationship with everyone else becomes so its own thing, so separate from every other relationship, that it’s impossible to comprehend without really getting into it very deeply.” Conversations with Friends is also a novel that asks what it really means to be intimate with another person. As Rooney says, there are people in the book with whom Frances is sexually intimate but not at all
PHOTOGRAPHY: JONNY L DAVIES
nyone who is concerned that conversation is a dying art among the young needs to read Sally Rooney’s
astonishingly assured début
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