Conversations with friends
Sally Rooney
Sally Rooney
Lately, we’ve been bombarded with messages like “You don’t need anyone to be happy,” “You are unique, you are important, you are enough, you are the love of your life,” and so on. But there’s something about these messages that strikes me as absurd. I believe we are all connected to one another. We all need each other. The clothes we wear, the food we eat, the books we read, the trips we take—even our ideas—are shaped by and depend on others. Everything is interconnected, whether it’s with strangers or the people we love. This narrative of self-sufficiency doesn’t make sense; it’s an illusion. And it doesn’t matter how these relationships present themselves—they can be conventional or entirely new.
It’s within this framework of human interactions, with ambiguous relationships that reject labels, that Sally Rooney’s literary debut emerges. A story set in Ireland, it revolves around young women starting their university studies and a mature married couple working in the literary world. It highlights the importance of these human connections through a four-way relationship.
With witty dialogue and sharp humor, the characters delve into friendship, desire, jealousy, innocence… and the complexities and contradictions these bring. And all of this—things we often struggle to explain or communicate in real life—Sally Rooney writes with mastery. These are silent conversations that allow us to get inside each character’s head. In this story, what is left unsaid is more important than what is spoken.
The anxiety about the future, professional dreams, the precarious reality of most jobs when you’re young (or not so young), and the moral codes imposed by an archaic society… They say this is what resonated with millennial readers—but hasn’t this always existed? Literature has this unique ability to universalize the particular. Perhaps this is what I love so much about this book. It’s not just a reflection of a generation’s concerns (as every review seems to label it), but rather an acknowledgment that these worries are shared, and that human relationships, in all their ambiguity, are a constant source of meaning.
Perhaps all those self-love and self-sufficiency messages we encounter on Instagram are simply expressions of our desire to find ourselves while also acknowledging our need to connect with others. Conversations with Friends shows us that it’s through our interactions with others that we discover what makes us human.
Note
“I think I only appear smart by staying quiet as often as possible.”