And her refusal to tie things up neatly or offer definite solutions.
“Sally’s mind is just so brilliant,” he says, “testing the boundaries of how we love, how we are able to love, how we are able – or not – to function within structures that we have been taught. “She is so lovely and so incredibly intelligent.” Joe Alwyn, the British star of the forthcoming adaptation of Conversations, is similarly smitten.
“I want to consume everything Sally Rooney forever!” says Edgar-Jones from the set of her latest film, in New Orleans. The subsequent BBC adaptation has been streamed more than 62 million times and made overnight household names of its two newcomer stars, Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal, who naturally adore her. “Salinger for the Snapchat generation” is how she was introduced to the world (“I remember thinking at the time,” Rooney guiltily recalls, “what is Snapchat?”), and expectations for her follow-up were reaching fever pitch.įast-forward to 2021 and that second novel, Normal People, a will-they-won’t-they tale for the millennial era about two students, Marianne and Connell, has to date sold more than three million copies worldwide, been praised by everyone from Barack Obama to Taylor Swift, and translated into 46 languages.
Her debut, Conversations with Friends – a story of two best friends, and the adulterous relationship one of them has with an older married man – had been out for a year, and already Rooney was haloed by a cult status: a literary novelist who had broken the mainstream. Three years ago, on an early summer’s afternoon in leafy Bloomsbury, a 27-year-old Sally Rooney and I were sitting in the grand offices of her British publisher, Faber, discussing her forthcoming second novel.
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