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This week, I’ve seen half of the 12-part television adaptation of Normal people, and this column is an appreciation of Sally Rooney. I vividly remember how I felt when I first read his debut novel, Conversations with friendsand then the exact emotions Normal people forced to the surface. When I turned the final page, I was almost overwhelmed by the fear that she had somehow accessed the parts of my brain that even my friends had gotten rid of.
I don’t think she requires or demands anything of us as a writer, only that we accept that her characters are, at a basic level, versions of the people we all are. It was by reading Rooney that I was able to accept the parts of myself that thought too much, were analytical, and were just trying to spend the day carrying emotions, that I didn’t know other people. had.
The adaptation is sublime. Do you know that you are concerned that a movie or a TV version will not do a book justice? She didn’t have that, because Rooney herself has written the script, along with playwright and screenwriter Alice Birch. And somehow I have broken, but in a way that I know we are all a little broken when someone holds a mirror to the fact that we are all normal people, with fragile hearts that we do anything. We can protect.
