The arrival on Sept. 24 of Sally Rooney’s new novel, “Intermezzo,” is one of this fall’s biggest publishing events — not only for the legion of devoted readers hungry for new fiction from the 33-year-old Irish author, but also for the literati ready to devour all the takes and think pieces the book is sure to spawn.
Rooney is one of those rare authors who have been able to garner mass readership as well as serious critical attention — I should probably just say attention, full stop. The popular success is, on some level, easy to understand. Her novels, two of which, “Normal People” and “Conversations With Friends,” were adapted into buzzy TV series, are precisely observed relationship studies that deftly weave together politics, sex, moral philosophy, dry humor and a distinctly millennial unease with the state of the world. Fans will be happy to know that the same qualities are on display in “Intermezzo,” which centers on two grieving brothers, Peter, a lawyer who’s entangled with a younger lover, and Ivan, a chess prodigy who falls for an older woman.
Any writer who is held up, as Rooney is, as the voice of a generation is sure to be scrutinized. But the amount and intensity of both the praise and the criticism of her output can feel a little outsize, a little confusing — including to Rooney, who, as she suggested over the course of two long conversations in July, would much rather let her work speak for itself.
In an interview you did with The New Yorker that ran in conjunction with an excerpt from “Intermezzo,” you said that it’s stressful to publish your work and maybe even more stressful to wait for it to be published. Why? The part that involves me putting myself out there and trying to work out a way of talking about my book happens before the public has had a chance to read it. It’s a weird mental space to be in. I feel like everything that I had to say went into the book, and I have nothing left to give that isn’t already in the text.
Has it ever happened where you’ve paid attention to the discourse around one of your books and then thought, I wish I’d had a chance to respond? I try, and this may sound insincere, not to look at the discourse around my work. And do I ever feel like responding to it? No, I don’t think so. I don’t need to be over the reader’s shoulder, saying, What do you think of that page?
Connell was a protagonist in “Normal People,” but the main protagonists in “Intermezzo,” Ivan and Peter, seem central in a way that men haven’t been before in your books. Was it a particular challenge to write from a male perspective? Interestingly, the first voice that came to the page for me in this project was Margaret’s — the character who becomes entangled in Ivan’s life in the course of the book. It certainly wasn’t that I sat down thinking, I have to write a book where the male voice is central. I just felt my way through the story that seemed to emerge when I encountered these characters, which is what I always try to do. Of course I had moments of self-reflection and self-consciousness, because I was thinking, What do I know about this form of interiority and specifically — which is different from Connell in “Normal People” — relationships between men? On the other hand, just having said that I try to ignore all discourse about my work, it has permeated through.
It filters in. It filters through, and I’m aware that people think that my work is heavily autobiographical, and in fact, it isn’t. It felt like they were just fictional characters, like all my other fictional characters, and I was intrigued by them. So the question of gender felt very secondary, but there were moments where I thought, Have I got any of this right?
“Intermezzo” is undergirded by grief — Peter and Ivan have lost their father. I was curious about your experience of grief. Were you writing from personal reflection? And if you weren’t, was it difficult to write into a feeling so deep that you had not experienced? That’s a fair question, but I’ve never been conscious, in writing about any emotional experience that any of my characters have had, of drawing on something that I have felt or known in my own life. The relationship between fiction and the life of the author is a very live relationship in the minds of readers and critics, and it’s a completely unknown relationship in my life. Only when I publish a book do I ever have to wonder what the relationship between my fiction and my own life is. I’m not in any way saying to myself, Well, I know that it would be like this because I remember when something analogous happened to me and I felt like this. If I caught myself doing that, I’d think there was something wrong with the way that I was working.
Do you find yourself having thoughts about the writers who are meaningful to you that it seems people have about you and your work? No.
Really? You don’t? No!
You’ve never read a biography of a novelist? I’ve actually never read a biography of a writer.
There are some good ones! People say that there are, and I’m recommended them on a regular basis. I must have some kind of mental block to reading them. There are natural gaps in my reading — I wish there weren’t — but this is more than a gap. It’s a stubborn lack of curiosity. I don’t tend to wonder about the relationship between the writer’s life and the writer’s work. Part of it might be that that’s an imposed relationship that comes from outside, and I want to resist engaging in that. But I think part of it is a genuine lack of interest. Before I ever became a published writer, I also didn’t read writers’ biographies or even really know anything about writers. I would know what period they lived in. That’s kind of it, and I’m still a little bit like that.
Then do you have apprehensions about sharing your political views? You’ve written about being against the war in Gaza, for example, or about abortion in Ireland. Making your opinions known about these kinds of issues opens up the possibility that people might conflate you, Sally Rooney, with your work. I feel that I have been given a very privileged position in public discourse, particularly in Ireland. I have the power to intervene in public conversations. I still feel disinclined to do it unless I feel that there might be something that I could contribute that I haven’t seen said elsewhere. In cases like that, I don’t want to use the words “moral duty,” but I do feel a bit of an obligation. What’s interesting to me is that you raise the question of whether that invites people to read my work in a personal way. I think, But what does that have to do with anything? I feel like my political work is there and public and I can stand by it and I’m happy to discuss it, and my fiction is the same, and that all feels separate from my personal life, which I never want to talk about and doesn’t feel like it has anything to do with my work. Those feel like separate things to me. Two of them I can talk about, and the third one I can’t or don’t want to.
There are stylistic aspects to “Intermezzo” that make it different from your past books. But it’s not that different. The way I think about it, any character from one of your novels could walk into another of those novels and the reader wouldn’t be like, What is that person doing here? Do you ever wonder if your books are too similar, and about how your writing might change in the future? That’s a really good question. I would have to answer it by saying I don’t care about my career. I think about, How do I make this book the perfect version of what it can be? I never think about it in relation to my other work, and I never think about what people will say about how close or distant it is from my oeuvre. I don’t think of myself as even having an oeuvre. I just think about: I’ve got these characters. I’ve got these scenarios. How do I do justice to them? I don’t feel myself thinking about my growth as an artist, if you will.
You’re not being a little disingenuous? I’m skeptical. It’s fair to be skeptical. There is a huge cultural fixation with novelty and growth. Everything has to grow all the time. Get bigger, sell more and be different — novelty, reinvention. I don’t find that very interesting. When you say one of my characters could walk into another of my novels, perhaps that is true, but they haven’t. There is no Ivan in any of my previous books. He is a new guy, and for me that’s enough. I do understand that people might feel, Oh, she’s repeating herself because it’s another book about people — same age range, same milieu, some of them are in Dublin, some are in the west of Ireland — and they’re traveling back and forth, and they’re having these relationships, and there’s sex and there’s talking, and they have political beliefs or whatever. Yeah, that is all my books, and perhaps it always will be. I don’t know. I’m wary of saying this, because it could sound like I’m trying to compare myself to the great masters of the past and I absolutely am not, but when I look at writers whose work has transformed my life, I look at Austen, Henry James, Dostoyevsky. Those writers produced work that adheres to what you’re describing, where it feels like a figure from one of their books could stroll into any of the other novels that they wrote and be at home. But each of the novels is its own world, and it’s intense and it’s profound and it’s beautiful, and that’s what I’m striving for.
In “Beautiful World, Where Are You,” you were trying things out with not conveying interiority. In “Intermezzo,” the Peter sections have a stream-of-consciousness feel. Do those formal experiments come out of character, or do you think, This is something I would like to try, and here’s an opportunity to do it? It’s the former. They strictly come out of not only character but scenario. With this one, as soon as I conceived of Peter, the older-brother character, I wrote down what is now the first page of the novel almost instantly, and it has hardly changed. It was a fragmented, fluid way of trying to grapple with his interiority, and it started like that and basically went on like that. There was never a point where I consciously thought to myself, I’d love to have a go at writing sentences like that. It was always, how do I get the reader to understand what I’m seeing in my head? Whatever language I have to use to get to the idea, I’ll use it.
Do you feel like you’re just trying to get to the idea when you’re writing sex scenes? Yeah! Often the crucial changes in the dynamic between two people can happen in the context of a sexual interaction. So when there are crucial shifts in how two people relate to each other, those shifts have to happen on the page. It can be a challenge stylistically. It can be a challenge in terms of what I would call petty personal reasons — it’s embarrassing. But to be true to my work, I have to go there.
Your writing about sex is so not corny. Are there writers you’ve learned from? Do you have friends that you show that writing to, like, “Let me know if this sounds corny”? You set me up for failure here, because if I start talking about how I avoid cringe — a lot of people think I don’t.
My intention was not to trick you! It’s absolutely fair for people to have the exact response that you’ve described not having to my work. For me, it feels like a tightrope act. All prose writing does, but particularly those intimate scenes. My vocabulary becomes very repetitive and narrow in those sections, and that becomes an editorial conversation. Part of it is, I want to convey a sense of repetition. I want to create an enclosed sense of intimacy, and sometimes repeating vocabulary can help to create that sense of enclosure and closeness. But also I know that can become unpleasant to read and feel clunky. There’s such a large degree of subjectivity there, both aesthetically and erotically. So I just do the best that I can. Which is such a nonimpressive answer, I’m sorry.
I know you try not to pay attention to the discourse around you, but people have said “first great millennial novelist” or “Salinger for the Snapchat generation.” I’m curious if you think about your youth in relation to your work. It’s so difficult to think about one’s own youth for lack of comparison; I’ve never been older than I am now. I’m sure that in 10 years, 20 years, I will feel differently about how my age inflected my writing, my position in the culture and how my work is talked about. I keep bringing the questions back to the public reception of my work, which I started out by saying I don’t have any interest in — it seems that that was a lie, because I keep talking about it.
Paging Dr. Freud! Yeah, but it’s because I’m talking to you. I’m being placed into a position that’s dredging up all these feelings about my public role — and that’s what I keep talking about while saying, “I don’t care about that.” That’s probably more revealing than I would like. But I do think that my youth has been an element in the reception of my work, and I’m also aware that my youth is very much at play in the work that I’ve written. I belong to a generation that came of age around the financial crisis, and I am aware how that generational experience is there in my work. My characters’ relationship with housing, for instance, has been there from the first book. It’s not that I sat down and said to myself, I’m going to be a novelist who writes about my generation’s relationship to the housing crisis. But it was simply in the air. I am aware of how generational my work is, but I find myself hesitant to speak about it because it can be a difficult topic.
In what way? It can be tricky to be a young woman in the public eye, and I say that having been a much younger woman in the public eye. There’s a huge level of visibility that is accorded to young women, and that’s something I grapple with: the unfairness of that and my having benefited from the unfairness of that. But also the other side of it, which is the difficulty of hypervisibility. I think that relates specifically to being a young woman, but again, I’ve never been anything other than that, so what am I comparing it to?
I think it seems perfectly valid to suggest that there are beneficial things to being famous and successful and things about it that are awful. Yeah, but I didn’t say that. You said that.
What do you like to do when you’re not writing? What do I like to do? I feel like I’m so uninteresting.
But do you think I’m expecting you to say that you heli-ski? Even that coming from me would be like, Why is it interesting that she does it? I’m just a random person, and I do all the things you would expect a writer would do: read, watch films, watch TV. There’s something in me that resists being humanized. At least when I talk about my work, I feel like I’m holding onto something.
I see what you’re saying. It’s like, I’m the one who can talk about it, because I wrote it.
It’s justified. Yeah, I need this constant self-justification to feel like I can sit here and talk to you. Otherwise I’d be running away. The only justification that I can find is that I’ve written work that’s in the public and you’re entitled to grill me about it and I should have to come up with answers. I get a little bit of shifting sands when I start trying to talk about things that shift away from that.
In all your books, even though the central thrust tends to be relationships, the people having the relationships are thinking about the biggest questions: How do we live under capitalism? What kind of person do I want to be? Does exploring those questions through your work help you get closer to answers? That’s interesting. I had never thought about that. I think that I’m so committed to being with my characters that I sense myself as an almost passive observer following their conversations and their interior monologues. But there must be some reason why they find themselves drawn to the same kind of questions that I find myself drawn to — philosophically, ideologically, interpersonally. What’s the interplay there? I feel very enriched by what I do, so there must be some level on which it’s not just the satisfaction of a good day’s hard work done. I suspect that there probably is something that I’m learning from my characters. Or I am allowing myself to experience other lives, lives that I haven’t had. One of the things that I find haunting or difficult to accept is that I only get one life. I’m condemned to being myself, and I have to be me until the end. In a way, being a novelist allows me to get around that problem.
I feel so much of the opposite. I get to be me, and I get the family and the friends and the life I have. I just feel gratitude. But what you’re talking about and what I’m talking about might be closer than you think. Because what you’re describing I also feel. Especially when I’m in the middle of a project and I close my laptop and return to my own life, I feel that sense of indescribable gratitude that I am alive on this earth, that my loved ones are a part my life and that I can experience the sensory reality of the earth that we share.
It’s unbelievable! It’s unbelievable. That’s something that I think my work puts me in touch with. Because it’s like I go into what feels like another life, and then when I close my laptop, I’m returned to my own life and my own circumstances and I remember what an incredible gift it is just to exist.
Earlier you said it can be difficult to be a young woman in the public eye. Can you tell me more specifically what felt difficult? It’s difficult for me to talk about specifically, because I feel inhibited by a lot of different pressures. One of those pressures is that I am extremely conscious of my extraordinary good fortune. Like the fact that my books have been so widely read and discussed. That’s an enormous privilege. Perhaps that has to do with the fact of my youth or of being a young woman. So I find that a tough question to answer. It’s like I want to be able to gesture to it very vaguely and for everybody to go, Oh, of course, we know what you’re talking about without me having to say, “Then this happened and this happened and that was so hard for me personally.” I suppose that the role afforded to young women in the culture tends to be very image-focused and less intellectual. The young women who are given the most prominent roles in our mainstream culture tend to be not political figures and not public intellectuals and not critics or commentators. That’s maybe the space that I’m trying to work within, and maybe I’m not legible within that space. I sometimes feel people want to read me as something closer to a kind of celebrity figure, because that’s the way in which we’re used to reading the image of a young woman.
I want to ask about the TV adaptations of your work. The general consensus was that the “Conversations With Friends” adaptation was not quite as strong as the “Normal People” adaptation. You weren’t as involved in the former. Do you wish you’d been more involved? No, I don’t. The reason that I chose not to be so involved in the second adaptation was because I was working on what became my third novel [“Beautiful World, Where Are You”]. The experience of working on the first one had been, in so many ways, amazing — the team of people involved in it. But it did also feel like a really big job. Then, when the show was broadcast, that felt like a lot in terms of the amount of discourse that it generated and the amount of media attention. I felt that world was not where I belonged. I felt like, OK, now I know that my books are where I belong, and that’s all that I want to be doing.
Is anybody working on adapting “Beautiful World, Where Are You”? No. So far I have decided not to accept any offers to option the rights for that book.
Why is that? I felt like it was just time to take a break from that and let the book be its own thing for a while.
I have one last question. It relates to a recurring theme in your work: how one might live a meaningful life in a time of historical crisis. How do you think about the value of your work in that regard? That’s a really good question and a really difficult question and certainly one that I constantly return to in my own life and work. I feel absolutely convinced that our present world system is not fit for purpose. I think the rate at which we’re destroying our planetary ecosystems is completely unsustainable. We kind of know that there is no way that we can continue living the lifestyles we live under the economic systems that we have designed and continue to propagate. That’s a crisis that is extremely pressing, and I’m aware that I’ve spent three years of my life working on a novel that does not really directly contribute anything to the struggle against these forces. I absolutely question why I’ve done that. Partly because I didn’t know what else to do. Also, I suppose I tell myself that in the midst of all of this, people need not become so incredibly overwhelmed by the enormity of the problems that we’re facing as to feel that life itself is no longer meaningful and that there’s no reason to go on. Part of what I feel is that art has a role in giving people a reason to go on, and that is an important thing in and of itself. “I don’t know” is the answer to the question. A lot of this would be more easy to justify if I could say, “Thankfully, all my novels are works of genius.” But what I will say is they’re completely sincere. If they’re bad, then they’re sincerely bad. I genuinely put my heart and soul into them. And I had to write them. I felt like I didn’t have any choice.
This interview has been edited and condensed from two conversations. Listen to and follow “The Interview” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, iHeartRadio, Amazon Music or the New York Times Audio app.
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