Sally Rooney – Who is that Irish girl?

Who is Sally Rooney?

Let’s guess – “literary superstar”, “the first great millennial novelist”, “the voice of a generation” or “Salinger for the Snapchat generation”.

Nowadays reading Sally Rooney became some kind of a status symbol and  Instagram status symbol, too.

Even Barack Obama was interested in Sally’s work so he took one of her books on the holiday.

“My parents have definitely influenced my values and political outlook.

They are both feminists and socialists, and both raised me to believe very passionately in the equality of all human beings.

But they were also normal parents, working full-time, trying to raise three small children.

They weren’t sitting us down in the evenings and making us recite passages of The Communist Manifesto or anything like that.

I learned from them mostly by example – they live by their principles and I hope that I try to live by mine.”

Her parents were passionate readers and  usually initiated interesting dinner table chats.

Sally enjoyed the intellectual elegance of the game chess but definitely she was addicted to the endless talks with people who love. 

What’s about historical background of Sally Roodney’s time in Ireland?

 She grown up in the period of the serious foreign investments so called “Celtic Tiger boom”.

But her student period was influenced by the financial crash in 2008.

“I have not so far been able to write about a happy, well-balanced relationship from start to finish because

it does not generate what I would recognize as a plot…

I have to choose relationships that are out of equilibrium in order to observe them in the process of trying to reach equilibrium,

and that process will always be a study in power.” 

Rooney doesn’t consider her novels as millennial and thinks about them as “female novels”.

Her most popular books “Normal People” and “Conversation with Friends” focus on young Irish intellectuals,

usually involved in the romantic relationships and trying to analyze their emotions as a form of self-protection:

“I find myself consistently drawn to writing about intimacy, and the way we construct one another.”

 It’s interesting  that “Normal People” sold a million copies .

It was transformed into TV hit with Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal.

Her latest novel “Beautiful world, where are you?” impressed her fans and attracted new readers.

According to the “NY Times” Rooney’s book

“has the arid, intense melancholy of a Hopper painting.

The novel follows Alice, a writer of global acclaim, and her best friend, Eileen,

who works at a literary magazine in Dublin.

Recovering from a breakdown brought about by complications of modern fame,

Alice is morbid but openhearted, a secret idealist in wolf’s clothing.

Eileen is the standard Rooney protagonist – ambivalent, sensitive, lethal in conversation”.

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