I’m the same age as Sally Rooney. I’m a writer, too, with three abandoned novels to my name. As a deeply jealous person, I’ve found Rooney-mania a bitter pill to swallow over the past few years. The literary success of any of my contemporaries causes me pain, but this was unprecedented.
I put off reading her for a long time. But she became the zeitgeist! It was starting to affect my conversation at parties. When, eventually, I did pick her novels up, I was surprised. I didn’t like them – in fact, I didn’t think they were very good at all. Were these putdownable novels the same ones that had critics saying things like:
‘Impossibly intellectual, impossibly tender. Impossibly beautiful, too.’
Vox
‘She is positing a world in which we might stop apologizing for apologizing, in which we might seek compromise and see vulnerability as a form of courage. We might stop protecting ourselves. We might love with bleeding, imperfect hearts.’
The New Yorker
‘In every generation, there are writers who speak for that generation, who bottle some essential current or mode of thinking and being, and arrange it in letters on the page. The 28-year-old Rooney has been hailed, not implausibly, as ‘the first great millennial author’. Her debut, Conversations with Friends, was as star-making as White Teeth and as zeitgeisty as Less Than Zero.’
The New Republic
