Feb 5

Feb 5 Book Review : Sally Rooney - Conversation With Friends (2017)

Irish author Sally Rooney became super famous when her novel Normal People was adapted into a miniseries starring the internet's boyfriend Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar-Jones, but it wasn't her debut novel. That would be Conversation With Friends, also adapted into a less successful miniseries, which lead to the erroneous assumption that she was suffering from the sophomore slump. In fact, Sally Rooney is so good at writing, I would read the stories she writes in her college dorm gossip group chat.

There's a lot that to Conversation With Friends.

Conversation With Friends tell the story of Frances and Bobbi, two ex-lovers turned best friends who perform spoken word poetry together at open mic evening, like any self-respecting artsy-fartsy college students would. One night, an older woman named Melissa takes interest in them. She’s a writer and a photographer who wants to write a portrait of them. She invites them for dinner where she introduces them to her hunk actor husband Nick and it gets weird and sexual almost immediately.

It’s a novel about fucking (sort of)

So, this was quite different from Normal People as the protagonist doesn't obviously suffer from an undiagnosed metal health condition. One of the characters does (I’m not gonna tell you which), but Frances' main problem is that she's horny for a married man. Conversation With Friends is a novel about a young adult exploring the boundaries of her desire and the definition of what it means to "be with someone". Sexually, but also emotionally and spiritually. So people fuck and talk in this novel. That's basically it.

Oh, they drink wine too. But less so.

Because its characters are less broken, Conversation With Friends is a slightly less riveting read than Normal People, but it's different: it's sexy, sultry and understated like someone exchanging dirty looks with you at the other end of the bar. Frances is unsure of who she is and what she's looking for, but gravitates towards Nick because he finds her desirable. Nick finds her desirable because she offers him a concrete way out of a marriage he's being a burden to. Lots of people who do stuff for reasons they don’t understand.

I don’t know about you, but I find the idea of doing things for reasons you don’t understand quite relatable. Frances and Nick are trying to find something, but they don’t know what they’re looking for. I’m sure this describes you with at least one of your significant others you were ill-matched with, didn’t it? If their journey in self-knowledge takes shape so vividly in front of our eyes, it’s because they undertake it because of someone who really knows who she is and what she's looking for: Melissa.

#TeamMelissa

I have a love/hate relationship with how Sally Rooney portrayed Nick’s wife because she's barely present on the page and yet she's, in my opinion, the most important and interesting character in Conversation With Friends. Frances is obsessed with Melissa’s life: her confidence, her career as a published writer, her house, her husband. She’s a model, but Frances is also jealous of her situation as she doesn’t understand its nuances and the sacrifices it took her in order to earn a situation for herself..

Melissa barely talks in the novel, but when she does, she's automatically the most interesting person in the room. That lady has a chip on her shoulder and understands the costs associated to the life she earned for herself (and Nick is quite costly). Even when she isn’t on the page, almost every interaction between Frances and Nick is a response to something Melissa said or did. I love when characters are so important in their counterparts lives that they don’t need to be present, but I would’ve taken more.

Melissa rules.

Conversation With Friends doesn’t quite reaches the highs of intensity and complexity Normal People did, but it’s a different beast altogether. It’s a sultry little novel about the soft unraveling of a young artistic woman’s innocence. It’s quiet, subtle and it’s basically over before it begins. If you’ve been young and in love with someone secretly or not-so-secretly, Conversation With Friends is going to hit that nostalgic nerve and get that dopamine hit you’re looking for. It’s discreet, but efficient.