Sally Rooney - Conversations with friends (2017)

Published in 2017, Conversations with friends is the first novel by Irish author Sally Rooney who defines herself as a Marxist writer. Born in 1991 she has already published 4 novels which all turned into bestsellers. All of them focus on complex interpersonal relationships in present day Ireland with characters from different social-economic backgrounds.

Conversations with friends is, essentially, a novel about love - love between best friends, lovers (hetero and homosexuals), marriage, parents, children and for oneself. Now, that sounds cheesy but the novel is not. We have Frances, our main character and her now best friend and ex-girlfriend, the self-confident Bobbi. They get to know an older couple, Melissa, a journalist, and Nick, an actor, both in their 30’s. They all feel mutually attracted and start visiting each other and going out together, mostly to literary events. While Bobbi is drawn to Melissa, Frances develops a crush on Nick and starts getting close to him. In the beginning the plot takes off quite quickly and when Francis takes initiative and kisses Nick, we start turning over the pages to get to the spicy details. We get a hint that their marriage doesn't go well but they all handle it like adults, keeping appearances as the couple is not willing to divorce and Melissa is currently writing a feature about France's and Bobbi's spoken word performance for a magazine. We live through intense feelings with Frances as she keeps her affair secret from her best friend and navigates Nick's quite passive character. But it's not all just about love affairs, we are presented with very smart young women, college educated, who observe the world around them and question the social order. As human beings they also face health issues, financial troubles and parents who are separating. When Nick and Melissa invite the girls over to France to spend a vacation with them and other friends in a literary patron's house on the beach, things get beautifully interwoven and a bit messed up, too.

I also had some reservations about the novel. I disliked the fact that in spite of being a writer who studies her characters profoundly, we don't get to know Melissa closely and we also don't get a sample of Bobbi and Francis's poetry performance.

Conversations with friends struck me as very similar to Caroline O'Donoghue's The Rachel Incident (2023) featuring the city of Dublin, English literature students, older men whose wives work in publishing, gay best friends, and financial troubles. Last year, I read Sally Rooney's second novel, Normal People (2018), and didn't like it very much; only okay, I thought. I had picked it up randomly off a book exchange shelf in a park. I didn't know anything about the author or how popular the novel was (There has been a BBC series made out of it).

Some books you simply have to read in your 20's to be able to absorb the magic of them, otherwise you are likely to get bored and can't understand why everyone is talking about them. For me, the most prominent example for these kinds of novels are the ones by Japanese author Haruki Murakami. With Rooney's novels though, I think they are interesting for older readers as well. Even though the first person narrator in Conversations with friends is a 21-year-old and we watch her fall in love and get jealous, or sometimes spontaneously act out of spite, we, as readers, don't feel that we have outgrown these topics because Rooney does a good job making the journey relatable.

According to Wikipedia, Conversations with Friends was subject to a seven-party auction for its publishing rights, which were eventually sold in 12 countries. The novel won the 2017 Sunday Times/Peters Fraser & Dunlop Young Writer of the Year Award.