Chalay Chalermkraivuth, SY ’20, Mariah Kreutter, BK ’20, and Eve Houghton, DC ’17, GRD ’24, have a roundtable discussion on Sally Rooney’s two acclaimed novels, Conversations With Friends and Normal People.
CC: So to start off: why are we talking about Sally Rooney’s two novels, Conversations with Friends and Normal People?
MK: So she is a very young novelist who’s gotten a lot of press and her books have been widely reviewed and read, which makes her “important.” But more specifically, what I find interesting is her status as a young female author writing about sex, power dynamics, the coming-of-age process. I think we are seeing a general cultural interest in some of these themes — Chalay brought up Cat Person [earlier], and there are lots of texts we could read in conversation with her.
CHALAY: So she’s really timely. What would you say, Eve?
EVE: Well, on a personal note, I just felt that this narrator Frances [in Conversations with Friends] is me. And that was a sort of painful recognition in some ways, with her hyper self-consciousness and habit of narrativizing her own life. But a lot of women seem to see themselves in these novels. Admittedly maybe women of a particular class and educational status, which we should talk about —
CHALAY: And race.
EVE: Right, exactly. But I think that is worth talking about: why is it that so many women seem to see themselves in these novels? And is “relatability” a metric of literary value that we find useful?
CHALAY: Yeah, let’s talk about that — relatability as an emerging metric of literary value.
MARIAH: There’s a long legacy within the English language novel of [female] bildungsromans, coming-of-age novels about young white women that often inspired a similar kind of reaction. Eve would know more about this than I do, but going back to the eighteenth century, looking at something like Pamela or Clarissa, the idea of identification with the protagonist has always been a part of it… But I think in the modern context, relatability is an interesting question because it’s something that relies on a kind of specificity that is inherently exclusive. I had the same reaction as Eve, I read this and thought, “Oh my god, I’m her.” That capacity to look at a text and see yourself — I think part of that is about emotional truth, but a lot of that is about detail. There are so many details in Sally Rooney’s novels about what her characters are reading, what kind of music they’re listening to, what kind of coffee they’re drinking. Which are all class markers and status markers; I mean, race is something that’s pretty much unexamined in her novels, but that’s part of it as well. I don’t know, I think it’s impossible for literature to be all things to all people, but it’s also not a neutral thing. What do you think, Chalay?
CHALAY: It’s interesting that you say that relatability has a longer history and trace it back to the eighteenth century. Because the bildungsroman does have a history of male authors, and you mention relatability as a pretty gendered metric… But it’s really only recently, in the twentieth century, that notions of situated knowledge and experience as a valuable way of interacting with a text have been accepted in more scholarly situations. Even though things like chick lit are still really denigrated. But the interesting thing about chick lit is that it’s about fantasy-fulfillment, whereas you’re saying that Sally Rooney is about relatability. So I’m wondering whether there’s a meaningful relationship between fantasy-fulfillment and relatability. Because to some extent Sally Rooney is about fantasy fulfillment… I mean, she writes about women who become very, very powerful.
EVE: I think the comparison with [Samuel] Richardson is interesting — I’m obsessed with Richardson, I can’t believe I finally got you to read Pamela, yes! I think both those novels, Pamela and Clarissa, are about sex, actually, in some fundamental ways. But they were also supposed to be morally edifying: the idea was that by reading these novels, young women would find models for how to live their lives. Which maybe connects to your point about the aspirational quality —
CHALAY: We’ll bookmark this, but I am interested in when relatability switched from being about moral uplift, edification, and became something else. Because I don’t think either of [Rooney’s] heroines are meant to be moral role models; I think anyone in her novels would literally scoff at the word “morality.”
EVE: But I do wonder if there’s something to say more broadly about the connections between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels and Sally Rooney. I mean, she’s self-consciously talked about that, critics have remarked on it, that she’s writing essentially novels of manners, comedies of manners, for the twenty-first century and for millennial culture. […]
CHALAY: I want to come back to the fantasy-fulfillment versus relatability thing, as well as the edification thing. What is the model of ethics in books about sex? I would say she’s pretty pessimistic, and what does that mean? And the other question is: how do forms like text and email shape our communication?
EVE: Yeah. Well, I wonder if those are related questions, in that I think what a lot of people seem to find powerful about Rooney’s sex scenes is the way they dramatize the clash between fantasy-fulfillment and reality. Her characters tend to construct themselves quite artfully in prose — I’m thinking of the emails that Frances writes, where she performs a kind of cool disengagement, and the way she finds herself unable in her sex life to maintain that detachment. So the books are interested in the confluence of those two questions, I think.
MARIAH: Definitely. In Conversations with Friends, which I’ve just been re-reading, Frances goes through her life imagining new identifies: she imagines herself looking like her friend Bobbie, she imagines what other people are thinking of her. She has that kind of hyper self-consciousness. And in the first sex scene, there’s the line: “I had been so terribly noisy and theatrical all the way through that it was impossible now to act indifferent like I did in emails.” And my question is, to what extent do these sex scenes actually reveal things, and to what extent is it another layer of…a power struggle, deception, the characters concealing things from each other?
EVE: And what I love about that line is that she says she’s being “noisy and theatrical,” but theatrical means performative…so she’s acting as if she’s disclosed something, but actually, as you say, it’s another layer of performance.
MARIAH: I think she’s disclosed the fact that she cares enough to perform. […] But I wanted to talk about the first question you raised, about fantasy, which of course relates back to sex. Something I think is relevant too, though, is that in Conversations with Friends, her protagonist Frances and in Normal People her protagonist Connell are both characters from working-class backgrounds who end up at an elite university surrounded by rich people. To what extent are the “fantasy elements” around culture, wealth, the scenes of going to literary readings or to France with this older couple, about being thrust into this new world in which cultural capital and literary capital are…?
CHALAY: Profoundly intertwined.
EVE: So I think that the fantasy-fulfillment is that you might be valued, not for your actual capital, but for your cultural capital. And that’s the kind of get-out-of-jail-free card. To me at least, that’s the fantasy the book is proffering: that you might be just so interesting, so engaging in conversation, that people would invite you to their dinner parties in France…so that you could partake of that culture and that lifestyle without feeling soiled by it.
CHALAY: You’re so right. […] And also the way that cultural capital can potentially be completely free of actual capital. They’re “communists.” Boo! Bullshit. What it means here to be a champagne socialist is that [you believe] you can genuinely pull [cultural capital and economic capital] apart. … I’m not in any meaningful [material] way a Marxist but I generally subscribe to the idea that you can’t have cultural capital without being supported by capital, you can’t have the production of art without the means of production. But I’ve heard people express the notion that art would be so much better without money behind it. So basically: can you be a Marxist and have nice things?
MARIAH: That’s a very contentious question at Yale.
CHALAY: Which is a silly question, right, because surely the answer is no? But I think for Sally Rooney, to some degree, the answer is yes.
MARIAH: Well, I think also her characters pretty blatantly lack moral authority, which is one thing I really enjoy about the books. Like, they all proclaim that they’re socialists, but they all know they’re hypocrites…it just is what it is, which I find really refreshing.
CHALAY: Yeah, I dislike that, but you like it.
MARIAH: Well, I don’t approve of it morally, but I think it’s a realistic representation of how a certain group of people thinks about things, both at Trinity College [in Dublin], where Normal People is set, or at Yale. I’m interested in fiction that represents reality.
[…]
MARIAH: I’d like to talk about email and texts, and even Tinder, which makes an appearance late in Conversation with Friends. I think there’s an interesting relationship, as Eve has stated, to the epistolary form. But I also think the instantaneousness of communication is quite relevant. There’s a lot of waiting a suitable amount of time to text back, a lot about whether you use capital letters or not…I mean, I think the treatment of electronic communication in the text is very concerned with performance and self-narrativizing. It’s a way for the characters to write about themselves, and it conceals and reveals in equal measure.
CHALAY: And it’s a new kind of reflexivity, an immediate form of reflexivity that maybe isn’t possible in other media.
EVE: What interests me about it, in part, is the commitment to artlessness as a literary effect … the kind of strategic use of the double exclamation point, for instance, or non-capitalization. And there’s a sense that these are literary forms that are coded and understood within particular circles, but require effort like any other form of literary production. And so I’m wondering if that resonated with you in your own writing habits, in writing to your friends, and what sort of effort or artfulness do we think is happening here?
CHALAY: I also think that the idea of artlessness is interesting to compare with “Cat Person,” because people thought that Kristen Roupenian was artless, that she was just writing something strictly autobiographical. But in her interview with The New Yorker, she said, I worked really hard on that. I’m 36 years old. I had to work really hard to create the interiority of a 20-year-old. So artlessness is gendered, basically. But let’s go back to this whole idea of commitment to artlessness in text and email…
EVE: Right. And maybe there’s a sense that that in that sex scene with Nick, what Frances feels self-conscious about is that the performance of artlessness has slipped, as you say, but it seems just into another sort of performance, not into authenticity. That mode of performativity is embarrassing because too obviously oriented towards pleasing him. And I think that’s really interesting, that to be seen to perform too effortfully seems to makes her feel contemptible…and I’m wondering whether that resonates with you at all, that to be seen to try too hard is exposing. […]
MARIAH: Yeah. Something I think is interesting is that Frances is Conversations with Friends is a poet, Connell in Normal People is a writer. We never see their poems and short stories (although we know that they’re good), but we do see quite a lot of their texting and email and that sort of literary output. And maybe that’s just because as an author it’s hard to stand behind something and say “this is good.” But I wonder also if texting and that sort of communication has almost become more expressive in that there’s a whole extra layer of punctuation, and capitalization, and abbreviation…
CHALAY: I wouldn’t call it an extra layer, but I would call it, like, different conventions.
EVE: I mean, I would even say it’s intrinsic to the medium itself, that you can’t un-imbricate form from content in this sense. I’m thinking about the way that, for instance, you might send multiple text messages instead of one, which is actually a formal literary choice. Because there’s a sense that to send a text that was a paragraph would seem…overly serious?
MARIAH: Desperate?
EVE: Right. And I mean — I can’t believe I’m admitting this in a Yale publication — but I actually would often compose texts as a paragraph, and then copy-and-paste them individually into four or five different messages if it’s a sort of high-stakes texting interaction, like if I were texting a boy that I liked.
CHALAY: That’s amazing! And obviously the only output we see is their text and email, which is highly, highly mediated, and part of the whole commitment to artlessness —
MARIAH: And that’s the performance of spontaneity, pretending that you’re just typing this out as you’re thinking.
[…]
EVECC: Are the sex scenes in this book erotic? Before we answer that question we should talk about what we mean by erotic in this context.
MK: I was thinking, like, “arousing.” Are they aspirational? Are they hot? Is this something people could potentially masturbate to? I guess that’s what I mean when I ask “are these erotic?”
CC: Let’s all raise our hands, and it won’t be captured on audio, who’s masturbated to these sex scenes?
MK: I have not but I could.
CC: You were supposed to not say anything. I wanted it to be a hilarious pause.
MK: I needed more, I needed language to express what I was thinking. […] I think what I find erotic about sex in these books is the intensity of desire. Which I think is revealed by its attempt to conceal itself. Like Frances’ sort of inner dialogue about how she cares so much about what Nick thinks of her, what he’s perceiving her as, and she cares so much about the experience. It’s written in a way that is complex and nuanced and not necessarily stereotypically sexy, but…
EH: And I think that’s to a certain extent the dynamic between Marianne and Connell too. And Connell is in fact disturbed by the strength of Marianne’s desire for him at times, in the sense that he feels he could hurt her without repercussion. Her desire to be with him is so strong that he’s aware of the power imbalance in the relationship.
CC: That’s not the only reason he feels like he could hurt her without repercussion. You can desire someone really, really strongly and feel like you cannot hurt me by any means, that’s a feature of Marianne.
MK: We should talk about sex and power. Especially in Normal People, that’s such an important theme.
EH: I guess one starting point might be to ask: does excessive desire as a woman make you less powerful? Because I think we can agree that usually excessive desire in men is figured as powerful — at least now, although that hasn’t been the case necessarily throughout all of literary history, needless to say. But I think that Rooney is interested in interrogating women’s desire. And at least Frances, certainly, seems to be afraid that her desire will abase her in some way. […] I think [women] still find ways to punish [themselves] for feeling desire. I think I’ve experienced that. I’ve found myself feeling self doubt or recrimination.
MK: I agree. I think that’s also why we see these characters trying to conceal their desire through text based communication. The whole thing of not texting back for several hours, I think that also relates to the attempt to conceal the strength of one’s desire, whether emotional or sexual. I think when women desire too much the idea is that they will be hurt. Because, within the heterosexual norm, which is mainly what these books are about —
CC: Entirely, I would say. There’s no queer sex.
MK: Yeah. Well —
CC: Oh, shit, there’s Bobbi.
MK: Do she and Frances actually have sex?
EH: I think your omission there is actually helpful, in that the erotic side of their relationship is really never described or depicted, which is interesting.
MK: I also never got a strong sense from the novel that Frances felt a really deep sexual desire for Bobbi.
CC: Like, can you be passively bi?
MK: She did strike me as passively bi! The flashback to when they got together was Bobbi saying to Frances, “Do you like girls?” and Frances saying “‘Sure,’ because Bobbi made it easy to go along with things” or something like that. Which also is an interesting question, of what kind of desires are privileged in this text.
CC: I think the sex and power question is one that preoccupies feminist and queer theory. […] As far as I’m aware of the history, on the one hand you have Catherine Mackinnon being like, “Sex is about domination and subordination, and that’s always bad, and we have to eradicate any domination and subordination whatsoever, because that’s a sign of a patriarchal power structure.” Then you have on the other hand most of queer theory, which is like, “That’s silly, sex needs power, and that’s why we have tops and bottoms. People want to let go. People want to subordinate themselves sometimes, and some people want to lead, and you can lead in a way that doesn’t exploit the other person, you can lead in a way that privileges their pleasure.” I think the difficult thing about reading Normal People for me is that it talks about BDSM in heterosexual terms. In one of Chris Kraus’ books —
EH: The patron saint of desiring female subjects.
CC: Also the patron saint of like, straight women who potentially misuse queer theory.
EH: Fair.
CC: I think she’s a narcissistic straight woman who misuses a lot of theory. […] She takes BDSM and her whole notion of BDSM is like, “It’s just a replication of patriarchal power in sex that is always present in straight sex, where you’re just clear on what’s happening.” It’s just taking what’s always there and making it deliberate. And therefore, in some way, the woman has some sense of control, because she knows exactly what she’s doing. And so that kind of pushes the power out into the open, and that’s what she finds so exciting. And with Sally Rooney, in Normal People anyway, there’s a parallel thing where BDSM exists within the constraints of straight sex, and it takes the patriarchal abuse that Marianne experiences and [acts as] a recapitulation of her trauma. […] By the end of the novel she would still let Connell walk over her, or do anything, but she knows that Connell would never do that. And that’s the redemption. And that’s interesting too, because that’s not BDSM. Like Catharine Mackinnon was wrong, right, you can’t get rid of power in sex, and maybe that would make sex not sex as we know it today, so how, knowing that, can you deal with it, especially if you’re a straight woman? […] And Normal People is in that sense, that somewhat limited sense, optimistic, because you just find someone who would just never ever ever abuse their power over you. Only ever for your pleasure. That’s really beautiful actually.
[…]
MK: I think historically excessive desire on the part of a man has been seen as a power to hurt. […] So is Connell a wish fulfillment of, like, the one good man?
[CC: Can we maybe talk about her writing from Connell’s perspective? Not from Connell’s perspective full stop, because it’s all in third person. She alternates between writing very close to Marianne and writing very close to Connell. I think she does an amazing job.
EH: Yeah, whereas CWF is just Frances, right? And is first person. […] When I say NP is a romantic novel, that’s what I mean — that it’s interested in the potential for healing and connection between two people.
CC: Yeah, because when you have two perspectives, there’s no possibility of something being miscommunicated to the reader. You can have those two people miscommunicating with each other, but at least everything is laid bare and there’s some hope that in spite all of this we can come together. Whereas, because it happens to a single person, there isn’t the same kind of redemptive…. There’s something about the omniscient narrator that is kind of redemptive.]
[…]
EH: I think the open-endedness of the ending might imply that we have to keep having sex under patriarchy? I mean, we don’t have to. But for those of us who would like to have sex, it’s going to be under patriarchy.
CC: Unless you’re queer. I mean, maybe even then. I won’t venture.
EH: I think that’s what might associate her with a later generation of feminist theorists than someone like Catharine Mackinnon. I think that stance is very typical of women of our age, and how we tend to think about these things. Which is to say, yes, we can talk about these power dynamics, we can interrogate them, but you have to keep connecting with others, physically and emotionally. And that, for me, is the optimism of this ending.
CC: I think these two novels ask a very very very timely question, which is “What do we do about heterosexuality?”
EH: Can it be saved?
CC: Can it be saved. What happens to those of us who stay on the sinking ship? And for Normal People the answer is to find the one good man. And for Conversations With Friends the answer is, like, polygamy.
MK: Is that the answer?
CC: I don’t think so. … The other thing I was gonna say is I think there’s a really interesting relationship between submissiveness and morality. That’s part of what Conversations with Friends is all about, about Frances and Nick not accepting any responsibility for their actions, like, “Oh, I didn’t instigate this, I’m submissive in this dynamic, everything just happened to me.” Those are thought patterns that I have had myself, where I’ll sort of perform everything up until the very last moment, and only at the very last moment, when I know there’s no way for any other outcome to occur — this was at my heterosexual peak — I pretend to forget, I put all the work in the back of my head, and have the… “object” of my pursuit perform the last action. And once I thought this through I called it manic vulnerability. I know other women who do this, and without exception they have some kind of power — cultural capital, sexual capital. … So part of what I’m saying is, how as a submissive partner can you not abdicate responsibility? How do you not let your submissiveness seep through everything and be like “Oh, I wasn’t responsible”? Like, submissiveness should never be an excuse for moral laxity. […] Should we talk about sexual capital maybe? Whatever that means.
MK: What does sexual capital mean? Like just being hot?
CC: Well, desirability. Is that a better way to put it?
MK: Both Marianne and Frances are generally presented as the thing that novels always do, where they’re thin and white, but —
EH: But she doesn’t know she’s pretty.
MK: Right, she’s not as pretty as Bobbi, she’s not as pretty as whatshername.
CC: She’s just so bored!
MK: Which I think is… a trope that I don’t love.
[…]
MK: Something I’m interested in is I’m looking at the blurb of this paperback copy of Conversations With Friends and there’s the New Yorker and the Paris Review and the millions and there’s also The Cut and BuzzFeed and Sarah Jessica Parker.
CC: From Sarah Jessica Parker’s Instagram! [Editor’s note: Sarah Jessica Parker posted a picture of Conversations with Friends on Instagram with the caption: “This book. This book. I read it in one day. I know I’m not alone.” This caption was quoted in the selected reviews within the book.] That itself is about the self construction of the book is a “millennial” book. It’s a cohesive object: everything that’s happening in the book is also happening on [the book] and as part of the way the book is publicized and constructs itself.
EH: I love your idea of the millennial book as a category that we might include in thinking about, say, different kinds of digital mediations. […] The codex format, the book as a physical object, is actually encompassing these various kinds of digital spaces. […] So, you’re finding a textual way of representing Instagram, text messaging conversations, that feels very seamless and fluid. I really like the point in the recent New Yorker profile where the writer points out that Rooney writes, “She read the internet.” And that an older novelist would write, “She surfed the internet.” There’s a kind of fluency with different forms of communication that might make this also a millennial book.
CC: [A final question:] How has this book informed your sexual practices?
MK: I think my experience is more like, “Oh my God, I definitely do that, I should stop doing it.”
CC But you haven’t stopped doing it?
MK: I don’t think I’ve stopped being manically vulnerable; I think I’m still manically vulnerable in general. Has it informed your sex practices, Chalay?
CC: I haven’t had any sex since reading these books. [laughs]
MK: We’ll table that for now.
CC: Well, I think this was very much in line with conversations I was having with myself and my one-time partner and my friends, especially my queer friends, I guess, about heterosexuality and its ills and woes, and the fact that I’d like to be finished with it. And that’s still true; I definitely read Conversations with Friends and was like, “Wow, I’m never going back,” you know, whereas like I said, Normal People still feels a little more redemptive to me.
MK: interesting. I mean, yeah I do think Normal People is more redemptive. But also reading Conversations with Friends i was kind of like, I have the reaction of like heterosexuality is fucked but —
EH: We’ve got to keep fucking?
MK: Yeah.
CC: [screeches] Heterosexuality is fucked but we’ve got to keep fucking. [END]
A Conversation with Friends was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.