She squirms in her seat, hands flapping in disgust, and doesn’t mince her words. Shortly before the publication of “ Conversations with Friends,” her first novel, in 2017, a piece about her appeared in the Irish Independent. And I knew immediately that I wanted to be friends with this person who could so easily upend, and transform, my view of the world-and my ranking system for cakes.”Ī lifelong Marxist, Rooney is particularly outspoken about issues that stir her social conscience. “But you can guess how it went: Sally was right, and I was wrong. “I naïvely, arrogantly thought because I was older that I would win the argument,” Morris said, at one of Rooney’s recent book events. Then they started sparring over whether they were ranking the Bakewell tarts as Bakewell tarts or as food in general. Morris said to Rooney that he’d rate the tarts an eight on a scale from one to ten. Thomas Morris, a writer in Dublin, told me that his friendship with Rooney began at a university literary-society event, over a platter of Bakewell tarts. At the same time, I can imagine Rooney-who recalls having “nursed intense romantic obsessions for droll counterfactuals”-noting the unoriginality of invoking her collegiate debating record as evidence of her verbal precocity. I can make a strong case for beginning with it. But her acknowledgment, in the essay, of a “taste for ritualized, abstract interpersonal aggression” provides a better insight into her habits of mind than any I could manufacture.

Maybe it’s unfair, then, to begin an article about her by citing a stray piece of personal nonfiction. Rooney’s fiction is largely concerned with the power dynamics of social groups. Rooney gave her a manuscript, which, a month later, Bohan sent to publishers. Do you have any material you’d like to share?” Bohan recalled. “I said, I know you write fiction as well. An agent, Tracy Bohan, of the Wylie Agency, saw the piece and got in touch with Rooney.

“I wrote it with a confident sense of my own anonymity,” she told me. In “ Even if You Beat Me,” the 2015 essay that launched her career, Rooney looked back on her time as the “number one competitive debater on the continent of Europe.” The essay is excellent, but Rooney now sort of wishes she hadn’t written it, seeing it as an inadvertent overshare. “I was Remain, like any sensible person,” she answered. I asked what she made of Corbyn’s lukewarm support for Europe in the run-up to the Brexit vote.

Normal people book review