“Frances and Bobbi, two Dublin college students who used to date and now do spoken-word poetry together, become entangled with an older married couple — a photographer and an actor.”
What's in this book
- Sally Rooney's 2017 debut — two Dublin college students entangled with an older married couple
- Structural predecessor to Normal People (2018); established the Rooney prose conventions
- 304 pages of dialogue rendered without quotation marks and close-first-person Frances narration
- 2022 BBC / Hulu Lenny Abrahamson limited series adaptation extended the readership
- Aoife McMahon audiobook is the definitive audio production
- For readers of Normal People, Beautiful World Where Are You, Intermezzo, and contemporary Irish literary fiction
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Conversations with Friends is Sally Rooney's 2017 debut novel, the structural predecessor to Normal People (2018) and the work that established Rooney as the central voice in contemporary Irish literary fiction. The structural premise is Frances Flynn, a twenty-one-year-old Dublin English-and-French student and aspiring poet, and her best friend Bobbi Connolly, the more charismatic ex-girlfriend Frances still performs spoken-word poetry with. After a performance Frances and Bobbi meet Melissa Baines, a photographer-and-essayist who writes a profile of them for an arts magazine, and through Melissa they meet her husband Nick Conway, a working actor whose career has stalled in his late thirties. The novel runs across the next year of Frances, Bobbi, Melissa, and Nick across email exchanges, dinner parties at Melissa's house, and a vacation in the South of France.
Rooney's structural method is the close-first-person Frances narration with the dialogue rendered without quotation marks (the structural prose convention Rooney established with this novel and that she has carried across Normal People, Beautiful World Where Are You, and Intermezzo). The Frances-and-Nick relationship in the middle third is the structural emotional center of the novel; the Marxist-essay-and-class-anxiety thread that runs across the entire book gives the novel its structural argument about how contemporary Irish literary intellectuals navigate the specific class-and-money structures of contemporary publishing and the broader contemporary professional-managerial class. The novel reads as Rooney's tonal-and-structural rehearsal for Normal People while remaining the work most readers cite as their actual favorite of the Rooney catalog.
Recommended as required contemporary Irish literary fiction reading, as the right Rooney entry point for readers coming to her work for the first time, and for fans of Normal People, Beautiful World Where Are You, and Intermezzo. The 2022 BBC / Hulu Lenny Abrahamson limited series adaptation is competent if more sentimental than the source novel. The Aoife McMahon audiobook is the definitive audio production. Four solid stars.
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