![]() If her first two novels were about the transition from adolescence to adulthood, Beautiful World is about the next phase, “when you realize some of the doors have closed behind you.” Much of the novel is concerned with what makes for a successful, meaningful life-whom does the culture value and whom does it dismiss?-questions newly pertinent in the age of coronavirus and its essential workers. I guess what a novel can do is take you to a particular social world and particular relationship dynamics that play out in a way that makes you feel like you’re standing in the doorway, looking in and observing exactly what’s happening.” “But I care about very much if they’re in a Jane Austen novel or a George Eliot. What is it about Rooney’s novels that get under the skin? “When I look at my own reading life, the books that I’ve felt completely swept away by are set among the landed gentry in 19th-century Britain, which I really don’t identify with at all,” says Rooney, considering why her work resonates, its ability to traverse age and nationality. “There’s a level at which I’m using the book in some way to explore emotions that I may not even be aware that I’m going through” How long, in reality, did the uncertainty last? “About three months,” she says, laughing. “Did I say that?” she exclaims today, her lively County Mayo accent rising an octave. But on that afternoon three years ago, none the wiser about what lay ahead, Rooney felt “uncertain.” In fact, she thought maybe she didn’t have another book in her. Suffice it to say, if people were excited for Normal People, they are positively frothing at the mouth for Rooney’s latest, Beautiful World, Where Are You, published this September. 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 actor set to star in the upcoming 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 and Hulu TV adaptation has been streamed more than 62 million times on BBC iPlayer alone 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 anticipation for her follow-up was 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 been translated into 46 languages. Her debut, Conversations With Friends-the story of two best friends and one’s adulterous relationship 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, London, a 27-year-old Sally Rooney and I were sitting in the grand offices of her British publisher, Faber, discussing her upcoming second novel.
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