Interview Sally Rooney
Feature Leila Slimani
FURTHER READING...
Sally Rooney’s Normal People was published by Faber in August 2018: in addition to its double Nibbies win, it was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Man Booker Prize,
and won the Costa Novel Award. It is being adapted for TV by the BBC, with Rooney writing the screenplay. Faber also published her first novel, Conversations with Friends, and most recently released a slimline volume of her Sunday Times/EFG Short Story Award-winning tale Mr Salary.
extensive think pieces or interviews about “what it means to be Sally Rooney”.
It has not been universal praise, however. In an interview with
[ROONEY HAS] A FIERCE DETERMINATION TO EXPLORE WITH REAL DEPTH AND BITE THE PSYCHOLOGICAL TRUTHS OF HER CHARACTERS
Andrew Holgate, literary editor, the Sunday Times
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the Times in April, novelist and occasional contrarian Will Self harrumphed that Rooney’s work was “very simple stuff with no literary ambition that I can see”—at least in comparison to Self’s own books, presumably. The sheer weight of the support for Rooney on social media and in the wider press immediately following showed that Self was very much in the minorit. (His argument of artistic integrit and pushing the boundaries of literature was perhaps undermined because he was doing the interview to plug some fortune cookies he was writing messages for, for posh Chinese restaurant Hakkasan). Self seems to be missing the point. Sunday Times literary editor Andrew Holgate, who awarded the Nibbie to Rooney on the night, says that her work features “a deceptively easy stle; a deep but generous and easy intelligence; a desire to put on paper, in as truthful a way as possible, the realities of everyday life for her young characters; and, above all, a fierce determination to explore with real depth and bite the psychological truths of her characters, and the sometimes terrifying uncertainties of their lives”.
B
oth of Rooney’s books are about relationships. Conversations with Friends is a complicated “ménage à quatre” between Frances and Bobbi—students at Trinit College, Dublin
(Rooney’s alma mater) who used to date, but are now just friends— and the older married actor/photographer couple Nick and Melissa. Normal People features Connell and Marianne, two people who grew
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