It is no coincidence that Sally Rooney’s sharp debut novel begins with a photograph.
Frances and Bobbi are outside a bar where they have just performed poetry as a duo when Melissa snaps a picture of them posing. This opening captures their friendship before it undergoes the fundamental changes we witness over the course of Conversations With Friends.
Rooney, in her fiction, presents her readers with snapshots and dialogue that deftly explores the dynamics of her characters’ relationships as events unfold.
"The book is about how we get to know people and how it is that we come to understand people as individuals rather than as archetypes or stereotypes." Rooney tells a packed audience at the International Literature Festival Dublin. "How do we move past these labels that we fix to people and try to understand them on some deeply personal level."
I am interested in how we can rebuild relationships in a way that feels liberating.
Frances and Bobbi are precocious college students and best friends, but also ex-lovers. Both women are attending Trinity, but with it being summer they have some free time and soon befriend this older married couple, Melissa and Nick, whose sophistication they find alluring.
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Whether it is Bobbi and Frances, Melissa and Nick, or Frances with her father, Rooney’s characters are never involved in neat, easily definable relationships.
Strict labels such as husband and wife, girlfriend and boyfriend, and even friend, are blurred and broken down as the messy dynamics of real life contravene these inherited orthodoxies.
"These are characters who feel – which maybe a lot of people feel, and I probably feel – that traditional relationship forms are drawn from power dynamics that can be quite repressive.
"So traditional forms, like the nuclear family, are probably based on gender relationships that can feel kind of oppressive."
Throughout the novel we are privy to the fallouts and frustrations that arise when clear power imbalances and dependencies exist between people in a relationship, as they so often do.
It annoys me when contemporary films and television shows create artificial tensions that could easily be resolved by a quick email or the use of a search engine.
This is an area the writer is keen to examine, as Frances experiences both the joys and despair of her developing desire for Nick.
"The characters are young feminists and they are interested in asking questions about how men and women relate to one another… Those are questions that I am dramatically pursuing in the book. How we can rebuild relationships in a way that feels liberating. And how we can try to bypass, subvert, or even just acknowledge how power relationships are so deeply ingrained in our intimate personal lives.
"I’m interested in how we can put political principles into practice in our personal lives and the limits of theory when it comes to our desires and needs."
"Because the book is so much about a young woman having a relationship with an older man who’s married and who’s much more financially secure than she is, there’s obviously a power imbalance there. It seems ingrained in the structure of the relationship.
"I am also interested in the question of how you can overcome those power imbalances, or can you? So exploring the ambiguities there of how political power in the abstract maps on to the intimate details of our personal lives."
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Much of the communication that takes place in the novel is done online, over instant messaging or via email, as readers would expect these days.
For Rooney this wasn’t so much a conscious choice as simply the natural order of things. As someone who spent just as much time on the internet as immersed in literature, it was obvious that the most ubiquitous of technologies would find its way into her writing.
"I was on the internet a lot during my teenage years, and I think the influence of that kind of textuality on my writing has been pretty significant. Dominant and emerging forms of interpersonal communication have to find their way into literary language somehow – think of the epistolary novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
"It would have been unnatural for me to force my characters to communicate without the internet. It annoys me when contemporary films and television shows create artificial tensions that could easily be resolved by a quick email or the use of a search engine. La La Land was guilty of this several times, as well as a more generalised aesthetic nostalgia."
Listen: Sally Rooney talks to RTÉ Arena:
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She describes the ridiculous horror movie tropes where characters have to be brought to locations without any signal before the plot can get going.
"Brecht wrote: ‘Reality changes; in order to represent it, modes of representation must also change.’ So I guess I am trying in some limited way to reach for new modes of representation, to try and address the very rapid and unpredictable changes we’re witnessing right now in our political and cultural reality."
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While out promoting her first novel, Sally Rooney has managed to court some controversy by criticising one of Irish literature’s totemic figures.
She simply pointed out that there should be question marks over the reverence W.B. Yeats is afforded in this country by critics and the cannon. Amongst all the hagiography, they have conveniently airbrushed away his support of fascism and the aristocratic order of things. Fair points, yet great art should not be precluded by someone’s politics.
And yet all Rooney was doing with her comments on Yeats was echoing the sentiments of her narrator, Frances, who said this when describing a one-night stand with a Yeats fan:
He was awful, I said. He told me he loved Yeats, can you believe that? I practically had to stop him reciting ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ in the bar.
Wow, I feel terrible for you.
And the sex was bad.
No one who likes Yeats is capable of human intimacy.
Conversations With Friends is published by Faber & Faber and is out now.
