‘It Was Like I’d Never Done It Before’: How Sally Rooney Wrote Again

Her first two books, “Conversations With Friends” and “Normal People,” made her more famous than she liked.

“Every day I wonder why my life has turned out this way,” a millionaire novelist named Alice writes to her friend Eileen in “Beautiful World, Where Are You,” out from Farrar, Straus & Giroux on Sept.

“This sounds terrible, but I’m trying not to have a meltdown about doing more publicity,” she said during a video interview in July from a hotel room in Dublin.

She has been called, for example, the first great millennial novelist, and “Salinger for the Snapchat generation.” She drew such a large audience to a Brooklyn reading in 2019 that it was relocated from a bookstore to a nearby church.

Rooney wrote Alice, who’s recently been hospitalized for a psychiatric break after doing publicity for her two novels, as a way of working through a level of attention the author herself found difficult to endure.

That said, she didn’t intend to make the jaded millionaire the story’s center of gravity.

Rooney knows how many writers would kill to be in her position.

Financially speaking, the Celebrity Industrial Complex is benefiting Rooney handsomely.

“It almost terrifies me, looking back, how little I knew about what I was getting myself in for,” she said of co-writing the television adaptation, and of the “overwhelming” discourse that attended it.

On Alice’s first date with Felix, he has no idea who she is.

By the time she got to New York, the pressures had accumulated, and she worried she’d buckle under them, never write again.

She struggled with those relations, in New York and when she came back home, at the start of the pandemic in March 2020, writing version after version, in first person, in close third, purely epistolary.

It sounded like the difference between a child organically learning to walk and an adult re-evaluating every musculoskeletal movement involved in putting one foot in front of the other.

To figure it out, she read.

The New Yorker once called her dialogue “casual intellectual hooliganism,” as if her characters were merely volleying knowledge like the college debaters of Rooney’s earlier life: recklessly, for no other reason than because they can.

Perhaps the most obvious manifestation of her insatiable reading, the emails in “Beautiful World” between Alice and Eileen — about Late Bronze Age civilization, babies, Édouard Manet and organized religion — are no contrivance.

With her closest friends, she’ll exchange ideas about climate change, economic inequality and who broke up with whom, all in the same breath.

For Rooney, the intimate and the ideological go hand in hand.

Rooney thinks it’s a “cop-out” to say she writes simply because she’s not good at anything else.

What it comes down to, for her — and for Henry James and the Victorians, and even Felix — is some inherent, transformative value in aesthetic experience.

In “Beautiful World,” one evening, Eileen narrates an arousing scene to Simon over the phone in which an imaginary wife takes off all his clothes, and he has sex with her.

Both characters, on either end of the line, are left flushed, breathing hard; perhaps the reader even feels something too.

…Read the full story