Normal People was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and won the Costa Novel Award. Sally Rooney discusses her sophomore novel, a coming-of-age story set in contemporary Ireland. An exploration of mutual fascination, friendship and love, Normal People takes us from the first conversation to the years beyond, in the company of two people who try to stay apart but find that they can’t. She is heard in conversation with bestselling and critically acclaimed author, Sheila Heti. Sally Rooney was born in the west of Ireland in 1991. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta and The London Review of Books. Winner of the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, she is the author of Conversations with Friends. In 2019, she was named to the inaugural Time 100 Next list and she is the current editor of The Stinging Fly. Her latest novel, Normal People was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and won the Costa Book Award, making her the youngest ever recipient of the award. Sheila Heti is the author of eight books, including the novels Motherhood, How Should a Person Be?, Ticknor, and the story collection, The Middle Stories. She was named one of "The New Vanguard" by The New York Times; a list of fifteen women writers from around the world who are "shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century." Her books have been translated into twenty-two languages. She has spoken at the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern, the New Yorker Festival, the 92nd Street Y, the Hammer Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and at universities across North America, and festivals internationally.
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Book by Sally Rooney
Books by Sheila Heti
Books by authors Sheila talks about in this interview
The Glorious Heresies by Lisa McInerney
Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry
Beatlebone by Kevin Barry
The Wig my Father Wore by Anne Enright
Actress by Anne Enright
Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín
Nora Webster by Colm Tóibín
Live Mic: Best of TPL Conversations features curated discussions and interviews with some of today’s best-known and yet-to-be-known writers, thinkers and artists, recorded on stage at one of Toronto Public Library's 100 branches.
Episodes are produced by Natalie Kertes, Jorge Amigo, and Gregory McCormick. Technical support by Michelle De Marco and George Panayotou. AV support by Jennifer Kasper and Mesfin Bayssassew. Marketing support by Tanya Oleksuik.
Music is by The Worst Pop Band Ever.
Live Mic: Best of TPL Conversations
Sally Rooney: Normal People
[OPENING MUSIC]
Gregory McCormick (GM): Welcome to Live Mic: Best of TPL Conversations, our regular Toronto Public Library podcast series featuring curated discussions and interviews with some of today’s best-known and yet-to-be-known writers, thinkers and artists, recorded on stage at one of Toronto Public Library’s 100 branches.
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[music]
Sheila Heti (SH): We're so happy to have you here. I guess I've got a bunch of questions. But maybe I'll just start off with an easy one. I'm curious, you're the editor of a literary review in Dublin, could you tell me about what you look for when you are looking for a fiction for the magazine and who do you publish and what's your vision for the magazine?
Sally Rooney (SR): Yeah, so The Stinging Fly is a magazine in Dublin, it's been around for 20 years. I just came on as editor at the beginning of last year, 2018, and we put out two issues a year, so I've put out two issues under my editorship, both in 2018. And the first issue that we published, so, I suppose The Stinging Fly really made its name, publishing new Irish writing. So we take submissions internationally, and we do publish international writing. But I guess what's unique about The Stinging Fly is its sort of its predominance in the new wave of Irish writing that's emerged in the last sort of 10 years or so, The Stinging Fly has really been at the center of that and I can say that 'cause I wasn't involved at all then. So we've published a lot of the names that are associated with that new generation in Irish writing, Kevin Barry, Lisa McInerney, Collin Barrish writers like that coming through The Stinging Fly. And so, we're very committed to publishing writers who have never been published before publishing new writing both Irish and international and we have open submissions obviously, and we get a lot of submissions as you can imagine.
SR: And my first issue as editor, I read 750 stories. Yeah, which was like a lot, [laughter] but I really enjoyed it and it made me think a lot about the question that you've just asked, like what am I looking for? And it's a question that you obviously bring to the table as soon as you begin reading the stories. You read the first 10 and you're already asking, What am I looking for? But by the time you've read 500 you're asking the question in a new way. [laughter] And I really started thinking a lot about, like what is a short story, why am I reading so many of them, and what is the form of the short story, and what makes that form work and what makes it not work? What I'm really interested in, and obviously I just bring my own subjective tastes and preferences, and that's all anyone can do I guess in that situation, what I'm really interested in is writing that speaks to the sort of present historical cultural moment, so work that's in dialogue with other contemporary work and work that feels fresh and new.
SR:That obviously doesn't mean every story that I wanna read has to be set now in 2019 and have a lot of social media in it or anything like that, but I am interested in work that I feel is speaking to the present moment as it unfolds. And that can happen in a lot of different ways. I'm also interested in stories where things happen. A lot of the stories we get on submission are stories in which nothing happens. Those can be interesting too but it takes a really masterful writer to make nothing happening interesting, whereas even a writer like myself can make it interesting, if something happens. So yeah, I tend to be interested in stories that have a sense of change or development embedded inside the text of the story, that like when we meet whatever the characters at the beginning of the story they're slightly different in some way, by the time we leave them in a way that feels plausible. So I guess that's kind of what I ended up looking for. And I'm sure I had lots of other little quirks and preferences in terms of the style that I was attracted to, and the kinds of thematic content that I was most drawn to, as an editor, but those were the kind of enduring principles that I found myself returning to as I read all those stories.
SH: And when you are talking about new Irish writing, do you consider the, or is it considered that the work that you do is part of this new wave and how do you see it, like how is it defined in contrast to, well, who is it in contrast to, is it in contrast to the great Irish writers or is it in contrast to what was going on 40 years ago?
SR: Right. That's I think a really interesting question because in Ireland we talk kind of a lot self-consciously about the new wave of Irish writing. And so there's definitely a recognition that there is a kind of boom of Irish writing happening at the moment, and I guess I would date that from about 2008 onwards. And I think the reason that date is significant is because of the financial crisis. So that changed Irish society in a few really important ways and I think those aftershocks are still being felt in Irish society now. And so, during a period of rapid economic and social development, the literature that emerged with that has felt different from what preceded it, but not in a sense that there was a really definitive break because writers like Calum Tobene, like Ann Enright, Sebastian Barry are obviously writing now, and were writing before 2008 and writing work that certainly is in conversation with the stuff that's the new generation that's happening now.
SR: So I don't think it was like we hit pause for a couple of years, and no one was doing anything and then we came back after 2008, and started writing good books again, but I think there was, there was like a change in the kinds of literary conversations that were going on after that. And I suppose the book that the change that probably is most symbolic of that change for me is a collection of short stories by writer called Kevin Barry, and the stories the book is called, There Are Little Kingdoms. And that book, I think, was enormously significant in the sense that it was very influential on the wave of Irish writers that came behind, including myself, and because it was doing something that felt like... Just intrinsically slightly different from what had preceded it, in the Irish literary landscape. And so, I think that Kevin Barry book and then the books that came after it, both Kevin Barry's and the work of other writers who were influenced by him, and in conversation with his work, I think have changed Irish publishing and writing. Yeah.
SH: So you were studying, you did an MA in American literature, who are some of the writers that you read, that you would say, taught you how to write, if I could put it that way, or influence the kind of work that you are doing now, was there because you have this sort of very spare style was that something that you were interested in I mean that's a very American kind of...
SR: I'm conscious of that. I think growing up, my idea of good writing or interesting writing was heavily Americanized and the kind of writers that I was drawn to reading were North American. When I was a teenager I read the JD Salinger's book, Franny and Zooey, and that for me was like a touchstone of like that is the kind of book that I wanna grow up and be able to write, like, that is the book. And so, that's written in not really a spare style, but in a sort of colloquial and, and also a lot of the book revolves around dialogue and conversation and it's a real interest in human speech throughout that book and throughout a lot of Salinger's work.
SR: So that was sort of what I thought of as being the most interesting and weirdly, the most modern or contemporary because I just haven't read a lot. I guess my cultural references were small, and it was like I didn't have a very systemic way of thinking about literature as a teenager, and I would just kind of randomly find books. And then think, "Oh yeah, this is it, the perfect book. So that was what I did with Franny and Zooey it took me a long time going to university, and studying literature in a slightly more serious way. To think about historical movements and schools in literature and stuff like that and then finally developing an idea of voice and style within that context. But certainly in my early development as a reader, I just thought Americans were cool and I wanted to be like them.
SR: Yeah, and maybe that's partly what drew me to studying American literature at masters level as well as I have always had a fascination for American writing and still do.
SH: So that must be very gratifying to have American critics and readers so interested in your book.
SR: I never thought about that. Yeah, I guess that is pretty gratifying.
[laughter]
SH: So your new book is called Normal People, and re-reading both your books this week, I saw that the phrase normal people actually comes up a lot in both books. So in conversations with friends for example, there's four or five times, came up one was “when I couldn't make friends as a child I fantasize that I was smarter than all my teachers, smarter than any other students who had ever been in the school before. A genius hidden among normal people.” We all feel that way. I'm just curious, how was that phrase “normal people” useful to you?
SR: Yeah, it used to be really useful to me. And then I called my book that... And now it's immediately fallen out of my every day vocabulary. Because I can't use it in normal conversation anymore, which is wounding. I never intended that, that phrase to be the title of the book. When I was working on what would later become Normal People, I didn't have a first novel. I had no... Nobody had ever read conversations with friends. It was sitting on my laptop, unread and I started working on this new project about these two new characters, and I thought the working title for that second long work of prose was "Scenes From a Friendship", and then obviously Conversations with Friends developed into a proper novel and was published.
SH: So you worked on them simultaneously, more or less?
SR: Yeah, I came up with the idea for the first one first and sort of worked it nearly to completion and then started writing, the second one, and then later got a book deal, so...
SH: And then finished the first one, and then finished the second one.
SR: Exactly.
SH: How many years was that whole process?
SR: The whole process. What do you mean the whole process?
SH: Well, from starting writing, what became Conversations with Friends, to handing in your manuscript? And for Normal People.
SR: That was almost exactly three years.
SH: Okay.
SR: Yeah, so started writing Conversations with Friends 2014... Late 2014, I wanna say like October 2014, and handed in my manuscript for Normal people, October 2017. So that's three years.
SH: Perfectly three years. Yeah okay.
SR: Yeah if my maths is right.
SH: And how old were you at that time... What were the...
SR: I guess I was 20... I can definitely work this out 'cause I know what year I was born. I was 23 when I began writing Conversations with Friends, and add three years on I was 26 when I handed in Normal People.
SH: Okay. Alright. Did you have titles for them, when you were working on them?
SR: Yeah, so I had the first novel was always called Conversations with Friends, but I didn't know that it would ever be published. I just saved it under that title on my documents. And then kept it there and then started writing something new when it was sort of still in draft form, so had I had written the first draft, maybe written a second or third draft and then put it away for a bit and then started work on this new project which I called Scenes From a Friendship. And then I kept working on that and later on, of course, the publishing world became involved and Conversations with Friends went out into the world and was an object for selling shops. And then at that point, I had to think of a new title that didn't send him so much like the title of my now existing first book. And I went through a lot of different ones. None of them really worked.
SR: And I'm not necessarily persuaded that this one works either. But it's the one that I'm stuck with. And so it means that I have to think about what is this piece of text that has attached itself to the body of my novel. I don't really know, I guess I'm saying that the characters are normal people and... Or that they're not, but it's funny because in conversation, I do tend to use the phrase 'normal people.' It has occurred, obviously, in my first book as you pointed out. And I like it and I like to describe myself as normal in conversation like, "Oh, I wouldn't do that. I'm normal." And so I find the word "normal" so much more appealing and attractive to me than words like "ordinary" or "regular" or "usual." I just think there's something about the word "normal" that I like, and so I'm kind of sad that I gave the word away to the book, 'cause I can't use it anymore.
SH: We're used to that word.
SR: I know, exactly.
SH: The title of your book.
SR: Yeah. Exactly.
SH: I really like the title, and I think it does work 'cause you think, is the title saying that these are normal people, or that they're not normal people? It works in an interesting way, that title. I know that you're a big Henry James fan and among other 19th century novelists, and you've said in interviews that you feel frustrated with the limitations of the 19th century novel. What limitations do you see there that when you're writing, you think, "No, I can't exactly do what I love in those books," because what does the 19th century novel not let you or not let one do?
SR: Yeah, that's a really interesting question. So I'm interested in how the novel emerged as a form and sort of what historical and cultural pressures created the novel. And I see the emergence of novel in the late in the English language, 'cause I'm not really familiar with any other traditions of the novel, emerging in the late 18th, early 19th century kind of as a product of the industrial capitalism that was beginning to emerge at that time also. And acting in a way as a philosophical reflection of or potentially as a sort of philosophical help mate to that kind of capitalism, which was a new way of organizing society, and the novel reflected back that new way in a sort of philosophical sense. And gave people a way of thinking about and understanding the new social forms that were emerging at that time. And so the novel is a deeply individualistic way of telling stories. Like it differs from story-telling, forms that preceded it. I think not exclusively, but largely because it focuses on individuals, the psychology of individuals. And obviously part of the reason that's still so compelling to us is because we're still stuck in the capitalist phase, we haven't moved beyond that. And in terms of our material relations so it kind of makes sense, we haven't moved beyond in terms of our cultural products, so we're still stuck with the novel.
SR: And that's fine. I like novels, but I do feel they are a product of particular historical and material circumstances. So there are some things that I feel concerned by. When I find myself doing things that work in a novel. Why do they work, do they work because they reproduce particular ideas that I don't actually want to be reproducing. Do they work 'cause they're echoing the status quo in a way that feels satisfying, but not actually confronting the status quo sort of meaningfully. And I think like in the 19th century novel, you can also say that that that's true of gender in a big way like female characters who are really subversive, who really offer a challenge to the patriarchal living conditions of women in the 19th century, a lot of the time end up dead in the 19th century novel. And including in Henry James and obviously in Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, in The Idiot, these women who really managed to subvert and transcend those sort of confining rules of society end up under the train. So I do... I do find that fascinating that those women cannot be confined by the limits of the novel, that they cannot actually survive their insertion into the form of the novel. I do find that really fascinating and I think we've overcome that now, we don't have to... We don't have to kill those characters anymore, and that's a big win.
SR: But I do, but I do wonder I mean... I do think in other senses. Thank you so much. That the novel hasn't really managed to go beyond the boundaries that... The kind of limited formal plot boundaries that were sketched out for it in the teleology of the sort of 19th century novel. And that concerns me a bit, 'cause I'm not always aware of what I'm replicating when I'm writing a novel 'cause I'm not necessarily able to get the critical distance from it while I'm doing it.
SH: Well, one thing that seems different to me, which seems like not... I don't know if it's not a replication or if it's the opposite, or something, but I feel like the novels that you're talking about the problems for lovers in those novels is that there are these institutions and they have to break them in order to experience love. They have to have affairs or whatever. Whereas in your novels, it sort of seems like those institutions don't even exist. And the characters in some sense are struggling to love in the absence of any institutions. And in some ways that seems like that's an opportunity for them to experience true love, but also in many cases, there's this drop, and then there's no love. Because the institution does provide some kind of continuity. Do you see that there's something... And I don't know if that's because they're young, or because it's this moment in history or if it's because how you feel about the novel that that happens in both books.
SR: Yeah, I think there has been... And I know, speaking from an Irish context, and apologies if I'm repeating myself, but there have been obviously these huge social cultural developments. And one of the institutional forms that's no longer applicable in the way that it would have once been historically is obviously the institutional power of the Catholic church. So that's deteriorated hugely in its power over Irish society, and the texture of everyday life in Ireland is no longer structured by the church in most meaningful ways. And so then I think what my characters are confronting to some extent is like, what has replaced that value system? I think most of us would agree that that set of institutions was incredibly repressive and of course violently abusive in many cases, but as an organized body of philosophy what came to replace it when it's sort of just attenuated out of existence? And I think that those are the... Yeah, those are probably some of the questions, my characters are confronting. What is the philosophical answer?
SR: We no longer have religious dogma. And we have a very individuated capitalist and social framework which doesn't really provide a moral ethos or a philosophical set of answers or even really a philosophical set of questions. So I think, yeah, my characters are probably navigating a social world in which the dominant moral frameworks have fallen away and haven't necessarily been replaced by equally philosophically complex solutions and like... And I think that's definitely yeah, that's definitely a concern for me in the abstract, but I often think, my abstract concerns do end up in the books, even when I don't necessarily intend to put them in there like I end up circling around the questions that occupy me, even though my fiction takes place on such a small scale like in intimate relationships, between people in a series of rooms. But I think that the questions that preoccupy me as a person in my normal life, also sort of bleed into the novels in one way or another.
SH: Yeah, and how could they not. When you're editing... So I know with Conversations with Friends, there was a 100,000 words or something after your first... After you got it all out. Any process of editing is in moving towards something. What are you trying to move towards? I find your novels, very suspenseful. There's a lot of other qualities, there's a strange quality in which rooms, you said they happen in rooms but rooms don't seem very important to you.
[chuckle]
SH: Dialogue does, the characters trying to understand what they're thinking is very important. When you're taking a 100,000 words to 60,000 words, is it that you see the final book in your mind, and you're trying to make it that shape or what are you doing?
SR: Yeah, most of the time my drafting consists of like I begin a draft when I meet these characters and usually they'll have some kind of little intriguing dynamic that will interest me and I want to know more about the dynamic between them or they'll be meeting each other for the first time, in which case, I wanna know how do they get to know each other in what direction does their relationship sort of spin-off. And most of my editing takes the form of having sent the characters down the wrong routes. So I'll just make a decision to have them get together or not get together or fall out or have some conflict and then I'll write 40,000 more words on the basis of that and then realize they never should have had that conflict to begin with. So then I have to go, way all the way back, delete the 40,000 words, meet them back at the point where I made the wrong decision and then send them into sort of another room as it were, and follow them somewhere else instead. So that's what the editing mostly is for me, it's almost never a case of trying to cut down words or reshape things, it's just a case of having made the wrong decision at some point and trying to find out where I made the wrong decision, so I can unravel everything, I did after that and just go back to that point.
SH: And what makes it the wrong decision, what makes it the wrong direction?
SR: It's that it gets less good after it.
[laughter]
SR: It's like I'm reading the draft and I'm like, "This is pretty good." And then I get to a point and I go, "It's just not good anymore." So where did it go wrong? And sometimes what's really annoying, is you have to cut stuff that is good because what comes after it, doesn't work, so you can give your characters a really interesting from my perspective as the writer but interesting for me, argument where you can give them an interesting confrontation or you can put them in an interesting situation they've never encountered before and that can work, but what it does is unbalance their equilibrium in a way that makes the rest of the novel, not work. So you have to go back and take it out and find some other direction to send them in.
SR: So it is, it's very much a case of being prepared to delete a lot of what I do, and I delete more than half of what I do. So for both of the books I kept, a deleted scenes file, and in both cases, the deleted scene file was longer than the actual work. So I have to just be prepared to do that and not be precious about it, just be ready to delete basically everything all the time, and not to allow it to demoralize me, and that can be a challenge as well, 'cause it is demoralizing deleting. I assume some of you in the audience are writers. Deleting 40,000 words if any of you are writers, that's a lot to be deleting.
[chuckle]
SR: So that can be demoralizing. But yeah, so it's just a case of... And keeping the faith that I can find something to make these characters do that will unlock whatever I'm trying to learn about them.
SH: Right. And that's how you feel like that writing the novel is a process of trying to learn who these characters are?
SR: Yes, yes, and I guess to be honest with myself also to make them learn something about who they are. So it's not enough for me simply to meet them and follow them around for a couple of days, where not much is going on in their lives, and then leave thinking, "I know those people really well now."
[chuckle]
SR: Something has to happen to them that makes them learn something about themselves or each other. I have to have a sense that something has changed for them. And I don't know why I have to have that sense, sometimes I kinda blame myself on it because I think a lot of the writers that I really love reading, they're not constantly chasing the sense of change and development, they're not always looking for the moment of revelation or epiphany. They're able to just write about the stasis in people's lives. And that's an interesting thing to read about. So I don't know why I'm always chasing after change and development, it's like I feel I need to be doing it and I don't know why I need that, but it is what I do and I do judge myself by that standard, rightly or wrongly, most of the scenes that I write I'm interested in whether they've actually changed anything and if the scene hasn't changed anything, usually it's not working for me as a scene. So that's kind of my method which I'm attached to, because it's what I do, but I'm not attached to it philosophically. I think, I could probably find other better ways of working, but that's the one that I use at the moment.
SH: It's interesting 'cause you keep coming back to this questioning of your motives and you... Or your philosophical position, which is your instinct really.
SR: Yeah.
SH: And you wrote this interesting essay, was it in the Irish Times? Yes. Sally wrote this really interesting essay in the Irish Times where she was talking about... It was sort of like an apology for writing her novels. And you basically... I wanna quote you because it's... You wrote a good piece.
SR: Thank you.
SH: You said, "There's a part of me that will never be happy knowing that I'm just writing entertainment, making decorative aesthetic objects at a time of historical crisis."
SR: I would agree with myself there, yeah.
[chuckle]
SH: It's like what's wrong with that? So, the question that comes up for me there, is there a way to write books that moves them beyond being simply decorative aesthetic objects? Novels, I don't mean any kind of books I mean specifically, novels. Can you see that in the future... Future books or...
SR: Yeah, well, I ask myself this question a lot. And I think if my aim was to intervene in political discourse then I would write works that straightforwardly attempt to make that intervention and just lay my case out, because I have a lot of trust in people, and if I want to make a point I would make it. I wouldn't make it by telling a complicated story in which fictional people move through rooms a lot of the time. I would just say whatever I wanted to say and see if people agreed with me or there were counterarguments that I could respond to, that's the kind of... That's the kind of way I would go about it if my intention was simply to make an intervention in a particular form of discourse.
SR: I don't know that I have anything to add to discourse in that way. I think all my beliefs are just taken from things I've read written by people who are smarter and have thought a lot more about these issues than I have. And so most of the... Most of... And I have, I have what I would describe as strong convictions. But I don't think that they're new, so I don't know that I have much to add to... I don't think I have many interesting interventions to make in the discourse in that way. What I do have are ideas for novels and then I write them and then I castigate myself for not having made more sophisticated interventions in political discourse, but it's...
SR: But it's... And I do think that it's a serious question, like what is the point of making art that may be obliquely political or maybe what I would say attentive to political circumstances which is the sort of least that I would ask of myself in the work that I do.
SR: But what is the point of doing that when we're at a time of crisis? And I don't know what the answer to the question is, and I don't think that the answer is necessarily in the novel for all the reasons that we've discussed and also because if you're writing a novel for that reason, you should be writing something other than a novel. And I think that does make a question. I guess one answer might be that it's easy for a lot of us, to see what we're struggling against, but it's not always so easy to remember what we're struggling for. What is the meaning of human life, why even go on with all this. Why are we caught up in a struggle if there's nothing pleasurable in our lives, nothing that gives us joy, and for me and certainly not for everyone, novels, are one of the things that make life worth going on with. And so I suppose that that means I have to believe at some level that it's worth somebody writing them and if I can be one of the people who writes them and so much the better for me, I don't know. So I guess that's the answer that I have to persuade myself off, and I don't know that I have persuaded myself.
SH: There's something that the humans are suspicious, I feel like, of things that come easily to them. So writing, novels seems to be... Not that it's not hard work, but something that is native to your brain or your spirit or something and there's a way in which we can be so suspicious of that 'cause it's easy for us. And feel like something that's that easy can't have value. Not to say that your critique of the novel is not legitimate, but I also think that's also an element for me when I see... When I talk to artists or people who are good at extremely good at something, that it's almost like it's just breathing to them. There's a way in which it just... There's a quality that of undervaluing it.
SR: Yeah, I do find it largely easy. I do find it kind of easy. And I meet people who say "You must work really hard," and I'm like, "I don't think I've ever worked a day in my life," I really don't. Even the jobs that I've had, I was really lazy at and did not work hard at all. And now at this job, I feel like incredibly lazy, so it's that sense of like when I'm doing something that I feel is just easy for me and it's not even that it's easy, but it's just what I would be doing anyway. It's not separate for me from just my everyday life, it's like... The way you would just listen to music, the way you would just do that, it's not something that's difficult for you or that you need to get paid in order to do it, it's just part of what you do, the texture of your life. And for me that's the same, it's like I make up fictional people, and write about their fake lives. I've always done that. And I presume I will always continue to do that. So it just feels like that's part of... And I actually need that. It's like a psychological coping mechanism of some sort. It helps me to make sense of moving through the world and living life, I need to make up fake things, and write about them. And so the evidence of that need has now become my livelihood, and that's fine, but it is hard to feel that it's like hard work for me 'cause it's just not.
SH: Yeah. Something that I think is hard work. You've had a lot of success with these books, and I wanna quote you, something 'cause you were a top debater in Europe and one of the reasons that you stopped doing that you wrote in this really interesting article in the Dublin Review, you said, "Success doesn't come from within, it's given you by other people and other people can take it away. In part, that is why I stopped competing. I didn't wanna give up the feeling of flow that perfect self-eliminated... Self-eliminating focus, but I didn't wanna perform it for points anymore. Academic life had presented me with much the same problem. Maybe I stopped debating to see if I could still think of things to say when there weren't any prizes." So you wanted to get out of the world of prizes. [chuckle] And now, ironically or tragically you find yourself back in it as a fiction writer.
SR: Prizes all over again, yeah.
SH: Is there... [chuckle]
SR: What can you do?
SH: Is there some sense... [chuckle] is it is your characteristic life experience? Is there some sense of an interruption in this private joy, flow, ease with the introduction of this structure that you've entered as a published and successful novelist in which you are being given prizes and the expectation is, "Well, surely, Sally will write books that will win us more prizes," and is there any feeling of... Well, how do you feel about being in yet another some sense competitive, unfortunately, realm?
SR: Yeah, I do feel... Well, first of all, I feel like it's too early for me to say 'cause it all happened quite quickly and I definitely think I'm still acclimatizing to it and finding ways to think about it, I'm not necessarily a very quick thinker, because it's been going on for a year or two and I still haven't really managed to think about it in any way that makes sense to me. So I'm still trying to feel my way through it and to come up with ways of thinking about and conceptualizing the world of publishing and the fact that my books are out in the world, and in a way that I feel comfortable with, and can stand by, and also a way that means like I can answer questions like this in a superficially plausible sounding way. But there is... And I think it's a section from your book, Motherhood, where you talk about the sense of feeling like when your work was out of the world it becomes kind of dirtied. And I do... And that resonated with me so much when I read it. The thing is that it's an enormous privilege obviously to be able to make a living from writing and I'm very, very thankful for that.
SR: But it does mean that I become the ambassador of my work in a way that I don't feel qualified to be or equipped to be. When I was working on my own writing fiction to amuse myself, I still really wanted it to be good, I never wanted to do with sloppy work just even for myself, I was always trying to get it to be better. And I would edit my own work even when I didn't think anyone was gonna read it, because that's what I wanted to be doing. I wanted to be doing something I thought was good. But I never had the sense of myself as a person having to speak on behalf of my work, always answer questions about my work or to even stand in any kind of relation to my work. Because it was just something different from me that I didn't feel connected to. And the thoughts and opinions and feelings that I might have and the experiences that I happen to have undergone in my life, didn't really seem relevant to thinking about that work or reading it. And now, of course, I am indelibly connected to the work that I have written because it was written by me.
SR: But I didn't feel that to be the case when I was writing it, I didn't want it to be connected to me in that way. I guess I would love, and I think a lot of writers would love if the text could just speak for itself and I would never have to interact with it, or engage it in any way. And not because I don't... Not because I'm not interested in my books, but because I feared... I have a fear of not doing justice to them and because I fear speaking about them in the wrong way and I fear my own authority speaking about them. I don't... It's not something that I... I don't necessarily want to be seen as the authority on my own books. I'm sure there are people who have much more interesting things to say about my books than me, but it so happens now that I've been placed in this relationship with the text because I'm the person who sort of produce them and I do find that a tricky thing, honestly, to think about and to make sense of for myself. So that's something that I have found hard. And also going back to the thing about success being given to you by other people and... Yeah.
SR: I'm not wanting to take seriously the books as cultural products, like not wanting to know them in that way, wanting always to know the books the way that I wrote them and to have them in my documents folder and to know them in that way, but never really to know the books as objects of discourse out in the world and I think that's just because I have to keep my head down and write the next book and do the next thing, and that exposing myself to the eyes of the world in that specific way would be harmful for me as I try and do something new. But I don't know why I think it would, but I just think it would.
SH: I'd like to talk a little bit about love and true love because I feel like that's the topic of your books. And the one thing that I find interesting in your books is that you have a fascination with the inappropriate match somehow.
[chuckle]
SR: Yeah.
SH: The popular boy with the unpopular girl or the poor boy with the rich girl or the young woman with the older married man, and I think traditionally when people are interested in mismatches it's because they're trying to say something about desire, how desire is kind of random or it doesn't go along with our... Who we think we should love but I don't feel like that's what's going on in your books. I feel like the reason that the mismatches work is because they find a realm of privacy with each other because they're mismatched their relationships don't further any of the systems that they're part of. It doesn't further, the hierarchy of popularity in the high school, it doesn't further like the bourgeois whatever, marriage, and that's why they have a sense of privacy with each other, and that's what they're going for in love. That's my reading of the books and I wonder... You're shaking your head, I'm wrong.
SR: No, it's such a good reading.
[chuckle]
SR: I haven't... I haven't... I'm so interested to hear you say that. I'm so conscious of returning again and again to clandestine relationships.
SH: Yeah.
SR: I really have written a lot about relationships that take place for a multitude of reasons, in my stories and in my novels, that take place outside the gaze of the social world, that are kept secret from people's families and social circles, and I've never thought about that specific reason that you've just outlined, that there's actually something about the privacy, that that gives those characters that allows them to conduct their relationships in a different way, that actually by exempting themselves from the surveillance of the social world, they're allowing themselves to have a kind of romantic relationship that isn't transactional because it can't be because no one is witnessing the transactions that are taking place. There is no currency exchange going on, because it's away from the world of transaction of give and take, it's away from cultural capital and social capital, and marital capital and all that. I've never really thought about it in the way that you've just described before, and I think there's something really true about it.
SR: And I have been curious, why do I keep writing about secret relationships? I mean, you could say it's because I like writing about things that have a little frisson. That's interesting to me. And so, if something secret there's always a little bit of a question mark hanging over it. Why is it secret? How long will it remain secret? And those are fun things for a novelist to play with. So that's definitely partly what's going on. But I think there's also a deeper concern there. I'm not just doing it for my own fun, but I am actually interested in relationships that take place away from the public, away from public scrutiny, away from social surveillance and why? Why am I interested in those? And I think you've hit on something very true. It's that by taking them out of the realm of sort of transactions between personal capital, that there can be something that transcends that kind of transactional relationship completely. And I'm very attracted to that idea and I think that's probably very true. I think that's really interesting.
SH: You're writing a screenplay of Normal People for BBC Three? I'm curious, if you wanna talk a bit about that. Say whatever you want about it. But my real question is, this flow state that one gets into when you're writing or when you're doing anything that sort of... When you're doing your debating, when people are doing anything that where they lose a sense of their own self-hood, and they're just sort of in the moment, do you get into the flow state when you're adapting Normal People for the screen?
SR: I have managed it, a couple of times. Yeah, I have and it's very different because it's much more collaborative. I've been working with really great people. And I've been really excited by their ideas, but the collaborative work intrinsically is so different from what I've been doing up till now.
SH: So you're not writing it alone?
SR: No, I'm not writing it alone.
SH: So you've got a room of writers that you're...
SR: Yeah, so not a room. So I kind of wrote drafts of the script, and then another screen writer gave notes on that, and then we worked together. And so it's not like a whole gigantic team of people, or at least not yet, but I have been working with other people on the scripts which I definitely need it, because I've never written for the screen before, so there's a lot of technical stuff that I didn't understand, but also other people have really interesting ideas about what would you do with it which I'm interested to hear, and because I'm kind of just... I'm the one who came up with the way that I told it in the book. So obviously, I'm sort of fixed on that. And I know people who don't bring that baggage to it, can have more interesting ideas about different ways of retelling the story. So that's all been good.
SR: But I do find it harder, I think because I just have a novelist's brain. I find it harder to get into that sort of flow state you've described when I'm not in total control of what I'm doing, so for me, it's like, if I've got my Word document open, and I'm master of that domain, I can move the commas wherever I want them to go, then I can access that state quite easily. But if I'm collaborating with another person, and I regret this in myself, so I'm not certainly not bragging about it, I do find it harder to click into that state because I guess I just naturally work better alone or I work differently alone, but it has been an amazing experience and it's also very gratifying to see that people bring their own readings and interpretations of these characters and are excited about working with them, because these characters, Marianne and Connell, the protagonists of my second book, they're kind of very dear to me. I know they're not real, but they're dear to me anyway, and it's very touching for me that they've become dear to other people, I suppose. And so that part of it has been hugely enjoyable. Yeah, it's a very different way of working and it's not one that necessarily I find is innately easy to understand as I find the novel, but I do find it very exciting.
SH: You've said before that when people ask you about your connection between your own lived experiences and what you write about, you said something so beautiful and I... You said that when people ask that question, you feel they're trying to take away the accomplishment of writing these books from you, they're trying to take that accomplishment away, as though... Can you say something a little bit more about that when people just say, "Well, is your whole novel true, did that happen to you, did you have this kind of same relationship?"
SR: Yeah, I mean...
SH: What's underneath that, do you think?
SR: Well, I think there are different things underneath that. I think some people may ask... Some people may ask from a... Because they themselves have had similar experiences and then they just wanna connect with me as a human being, and I totally understand that. I do think some people ask because they want to be reassured that I didn't make it up, because there's something, I think that people would feel more comfortable sometimes if they thought that I just sort of passively lay there and all this stuff happened to me and then I went and wrote about it later, but I wasn't the active agent, the instrument of having invented this reality. I think that there's a way in which that that's something that's easier to understand or absorb or that they would prefer to be talking to me, if that's who I was, rather than me talking to me as a novelist who invented it all. And so I think... But that's not to say that I think everyone who asks questions like that is coming from that particular perspective but I do think, sometimes that question is a way of wanting to be reassured that I didn't make all this up in my brain, because it would make people uncomfortable to think that I did that for any number of reasons.
SH: What reasons?
SR: Well, because it's kind of an intimidating thing to do. Why would anyone do that? Like, I think it's a weird thing to have done in your brain. So it's a weird thing to have invented all of these people who don't exist, and put them through their paces, and made them suffer, so much and stuff. Why? It's a weird, it's a weird thing to do, and I think people find it a little bit creepy or uncomfortable, and it would be more reassuring for me to say, "Well, no, no, this is just stuff that happened to me and I had to write about it for cathartic reasons, to get it out." But I'm afraid I made it up, guys.
[laughter]
SR: I made it up. And I can understand... I can understand... And also, as I say, I think there's just a... There's also just a sort of inward fascination sometimes to just know whether, where novelists get their ideas or like, are they drawing on their real life? So there are a million different reasons why people might ask that question. But I think, yeah, there's maybe a discomfort, maybe it's a gender discomfort sometimes, maybe it's to do with my age sometimes, I don't know why, but I think, yeah, sometimes it's a sense of not wanting to credit me with the invention of all these circumstances and wanting to believe that in fact, they are derived from my having simply lived an exceptionally active life.
[chuckle]
SR: Yeah, which I haven't. So yeah, I think maybe I think maybe that's answering the question, I'm not sure.
SH: Yes. It is. Thanks so much to Sally Rooney. Thanks to everyone for coming.
SR: Thank you. Thank you.
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[MUSIC]
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