The homecoming

Her seductive depiction of how twenty-somethings live, catapulted Sally Rooney to literary fame. Her latest book reckons with the thornier aspects of fame, finds Olivia Marks

- Olivia Marks

Three years ago, on an early summer afternoon in leafy Blooms-bury, London, a 27-year-old Sally Rooney and I were sitting in the grand offices of her British publisher, Faber, discussing her upcoming second novel. Her debut, Conversations With Friends—the story of two best friends and one’s adulterous relationship with an older married man—had been out for a year, and already Rooney was haloed by a cult status: a literary novelist who had broken the mainstream. “Salinger for the Snapchat generation” is how she was introduced to the world (“I remember thinking at the time,” Rooney guiltily recalls, “What is Snapchat?”), and anticipation for her follow-up was reaching fever pitch.

Fast-forward to 2021, and that second novel, Normal People, a will-they-won’tthey tale for the millennial era about two students, Marianne and Connell, has sold more than three million copies worldwide to date, been praised by everyone from Barack Obama to Taylor Swift, and been translated into 46 languages. The subsequent TV adaptation has made overnight household names of its two newcomer stars, Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal, who naturally adore her. “I want to consume everything Sally Rooney forever!” says Edgar-Jones from the set of her latest film, in New Orleans. “She is so lovely and so incredibly intelligent.” Joe Alwyn, the British actor set to star in the upcoming adaptation of Conversations, is similarly smitten. “Sally’s mind is just so brilliant,” he says, “testing the boundaries of how we love, how we are able to love, how we are able—or not—to function within structures that we have been taught. And her refusal to tie things up neatly or offer definite solutions. I love that.”