This week, I’ve watched half of the 12-part television adaptation of Normal People, and so this column is an appreciation of Sally Rooney. I remember vividly how I felt when I first read her debut novel, Conversations With Friends, and then the exact emotions Normal People forced to the surface. When I turned its final page I was almost overwhelmed with a fear that somehow she had accessed the parts of my brain that even my friends are spared from.
I don’t think that she requires or demands anything from us as a writer, only that we accept that her characters are, at base level, versions of the people we all are. It was by reading Rooney that I was able to accept the overthinking, analytical, just-trying-to-get-through-the-day-carrying-a-load-of-emotions parts of myself that I didn’t know other people had.
The adaptation is sublime. You know that worry you have that a film or TV version won’t do a book justice? I didn’t have that, because Rooney herself has written the script, along with playwright and screenwriter Alice Birch. And I’ve sort of been broken by it, but in a way that I know we’re all a little bit broken when someone holds a mirror up to the fact that we are all just normal people, with fragile hearts that we do anything we can to protect.
