Londoner’s Diary
Sally Rooney’s career was launched into the stratosphere by her 2018 novel Normal People. The book is a household name, having sold over a million copies in the UK and spawned a hit TV series. But the Irish author says she has come to regret its title.
“I am really interested in what’s considered ‘normal’,” Rooney told the audience during a talk at the Southbank Centre. She said that’s why she chose to call her second book Normal People, but added: “I kind of wish I didn’t, because I use that phrase so much in ordinary conversation.”
Whenever the author now says “normal people” in conversation, she’s met with a wink and a nudge. “So yeah, I’ve lost that from my lexicon which is a shame because it’s otherwise a phrase I use quite a lot,” she said.
Rooney was speaking at an event to promote her new novel, Intermezzo, which came out this week. The book follows a pair of brothers navigating grief and romance, and Rooney said it focuses on “intimate relationships that maybe don’t fit comfortably into categories that we would consider socially normal”.
Any Normal People fans hoping for a lowdown on writing sex scenes or what Paul Mescal is really like may have been left wanting. Rooney and author Merve Emre, who chaired the talk, instead spoke indepth about Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and discussed the concepts of “textual lineage”, Marxism, and “naive realism”.
While some have called Sally Rooney’s novels elevated chick lit, Emre pronounced her a writer of “Ordinary language crypto-Christian romance.” Catch that?
