Meet Sally Rooney, millennial hero and literary sensation

She’s hailed as the great millennial novelist. So what’s Sally Rooney really like?

Sally Rooney. Picture: Richard Saker/Contour by Getty Images

Chatting to Sally Rooney leaves you feeling clever. These are some of the topics we get through over an hour and a half: power in romantic relationships; the ethics of free speech; the history of theology; the economic consequences of the 2008 financial crash; Twitter memes; the death of the novel; Brexit; Trump; Korean crime dramas; and private education. In an interview with a US magazine she speculated on the matter of whether frogfish are genetically related to chameleons. “Mmm, interesting,” I interject uselessly as she lucidly analyses the ­consequences of the resurgence of the far right in Europe. She’s kind enough to make me feel as if I’m equally responsible for this conversation.

Rooney, 27, has been hailed as “the great ­millennial novelist”, “the voice of a ­generation”, “the Jane Austen of the precariat” or ­“Salinger for the Snapchat generation” Her latest novel, Normal People, won the Costa prize for best novel and last year was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Rooney is adapting the book for BBC television — it will be directed by Lenny ­Abrahamson, the Oscar-nominated director of Room. Normal People and her debut novel, ­Conversations with Friends, have been acclaimed by critics and are runaway bestsellers. The novels deal with the romantic and social tribulations endured by ­intelligent, hyper-­articulate students at Ireland’s elite university, ­Trinity College Dublin. And as we sit in an austere, ­hipsterish cafe near the centre of ­Dublin, where she lives, analysing what Rooney calls “the ­sickness in ­modern society”, I have the surreal feeling that I’ve walked into one of her books.

Rooney is ­wearing a green V-neck jumper that she pulls and twists when she’s ­thinking through a tricky problem. One of those problems is her ­success, about which she feels ambivalent. Characteristically, she takes a long view: “Given the pessimism I feel about the trajectory of our civilisation,” she says, “I can’t feel completely persuaded that the popularity of something is an unambiguously good sign.” She’s disarmingly level-headed about the literary prizes and critical acclaim, too. ­“Accomplishments don’t really bring me a lot of fun,” she says. “I’ve never really fantasised about ‘Oh, imagine if I accomplished something’.”

She’s sceptical of the literary circus of festivals and newspaper interviews that a bestselling ­novelist is ­inevitably dragged into: “I think that a large part of the way books are marketed is ‘Be the kind of ­person who reads books because that kind of person is superior to the kind of person who doesn’t’. That’s something that I don’t believe and it’s an opinion that is unbelievably common among even supposedly sensible people. They think that being a non-reader is in some way morally inferior. It’s obviously not, any more than being a non-cyclist is.” At a time when older writers thunderingly warn of the imminent death of the novel, she remains sanguine. “I’m not scared about the demise of the novel,” she says. “It’s still quite a ­relevant form [and] if it does fall out of favour it’ll be replaced by something more vigorous.”

Often writers labelled “voice of a generation” are eager to eschew the tag, but Rooney sticks up for her much-maligned generation. She’s scathing about media characterisations of ­Millennials as lazy, entitled and afraid of hard work, noting that before Millennials entered the workforce they were praised as socially conscious and progressive. “Then the ­people ­writing these pieces realised that Millennials were coming into the job market to compete with them and the analysis changed immediately.”

Her books are driven by themes as old as literature itself: love, friendship, social status. Power is especially interesting to her. “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 recognise 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,” she says.

Most critics agree that the main appeal of her writing is its sharpness about people, which Rooney admits is strange because “when I was growing up I was quite a loner”. She reflects that this “begs the question of why have I gone down the route [of] writing about other people and their interactions with others”. She suggests the answer might be that “rather than having a particularly well developed insight into others, I actually have an unusually low level and that’s why I’m compelled to write about them at such length and make an effort to understand them. So what comes intuitively to other people I have to write an entire novel to actually get my head around.”

Rooney was once a champion debater and her forcefully argued self-deprecation is one of the most engaging aspects of her conversation. She can construct a case against herself — proving her laziness or ineptitude or general uselessness — with such vigour and commitment that you’re unable to protest, even though her conclusions are patently absurd. I find this very funny — which I think it’s supposed to be. On one occasion she manages to prove infallibly that “I’m incredibly ill-suited for everything, arguably including being a novelist.”

Despite describing herself as a “loner” growing up, Rooney clarifies that her experiences weren’t anywhere near as bad as those of Marianne, the heroine of Normal People, whose school days are marked by bullying and social ostracisation. By contrast, Rooney is “still friendly with a lot of the girls” she went to school with at St Joseph’s, a girls’ Catholic high school in Castlebar, in the west of Ireland. But she did find “the environment and the institution of school incredibly oppressive”. “The idea that these adults who were just ­random ­people were allowed to tell me what to do all day: fundamentally I do not get that… the arbitrariness of institutional power made me so angry.” Her response to school was so powerful that she thinks it has shaped her personality. “I honestly think I still carry this very deep, ­defiant streak in my character that I spent six years honing because of how much I hated the experience of being told what to do.”

Rooney’s father, Kieran, worked for Ireland’s state telecoms company and her mother, Marie, ran the local arts centre. Both held strong left-wing political beliefs. The family mantra was “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”. Rooney’s family background and left-wing upbringing perhaps explains why class is such a big theme in Normal People. The book will chime with anyone who has turned up at university from the provinces to discover the existence of a breed of people who, as Rooney puts it in the book, all “have identical accents and carry the same-size MacBooks under their arms”.

She says she wasn’t aware of class disparities at school. “The idea of people going all the way through school — even primary school in some cases — paying a premium not to have to mix with people like me was something that was so alien, I didn’t know anyone would do that.” She points out that, while only a tiny percentage of Ireland’s ­population is privately educated, about a third of students at Trinity College are — and they’re the ones “running clubs and prominent in the student union”. So if she was in charge, would she get rid of private schools? “Oh God, yeah. Immediately. Yeah, yeah, yeah,” she replies. No ambiguity there.

Talking to Rooney, I get the impression that going to university has been the defining experience of her life so far. “When I went to university, that triggered a real interest in learning: about the course materials, but also just about the world ­generally,” she says. “I started to read a lot.” It’s also where she fell in love with her partner, John ­Prasifka, now a maths teacher at a secondary school in Dublin, and where she became politically active. Her time at Trinity, where she studied English, was before the so-called free-speech wars broke out at universities, but in her third year she was involved in a successful campaign to stop the right-wing British Nationalist Party leader at the time, Nick Griffin, appearing at the debating ­society (the incident is very briefly in Normal ­People). Surprisingly, Rooney describes herself as “a borderline controversially strong advocate of free speech”. “Even on hate speech,” she says, “I feel hesitant to allow the government power to legislate.” That’s because “I just can’t think of a ­currently existing state that I would trust with the job of legislating what we can say”. Instead, she says: “I believe very strongly in the informal regulation of protests and no-platforming.”

Rooney says her next book will be about ­people her own age. When I ask what this might entail, she says that, as you grow up, “life becomes more serious” and “the levels of obligations and responsibilities you’ve taken on in your life” increase. “You tend to become more closely enmeshed with other people and more likely to become the ­person who is just there if someone else has an accident or a fall or whatever.” That sort of ­situation “is relatively unlikely for the kinds of people I’m writing about at the age of 21”.

This should prove fertile ground, because what interests her as a novelist, she explains, is less ­individual people than the relationships that exist between them. In her next novel she’s ­hoping to write from the points of view of “a group of ­characters rather than just two”. It looks, then, as though Sally Rooney will continue to be the voice of her generation as it grows up, leaves university and becomes more entangled with the world. As a fellow millennial, this strikes me as a resolutely good thing. If this clever, funny, articulate woman is the voice of my generation, then it’s one I feel proud to be part of.