A Conversation with Sally Rooney
Author of CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS
Q. CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS is your debut novel. Can you tell us a bit about what inspired it?
A. The four central characters came to me almost fully formed, long before I had any real idea of plot, voice, or setting. In the three months that it took to complete the first draft, I had a lot of fun trying to work out the various dynamics at play between the four of them. All the other elements of the book gradually fell into place as those characters’ relationships developed.
Q. How would you describe CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS in your own words?
A. It’s a novel about two young women, Frances and Bobbi, who become involved in the lives of an older married couple, Nick and Melissa. In a way it’s a coming-of-age story, about Frances’s transition into a new social world, and her attempts to become a new kind of person. But it’s also a romance. J. D. Salinger’s novella Franny and Zooey describes itself as a “compound, or multiple, love story”—that’s probably what I was trying to accomplish here, too.
Q. Early reviewers have lauded your ability to capture the intricacies and complexities of contemporary relationships, some calling it a modern-day love story. How do you feel about that description?
A. Although the book takes a pretty unconventional approach to the romance plot, I am very happy for people to read it as a love story. I think love is an important subject in literature—psychologically, ideologically, and in terms of its relationship with the novel as a form. And for me there’s no such thing as an uninteresting relationship; I’m always fascinated by the complexities of how people relate to one another. In an era of rapid social and relational change I think there’s a lot of new things the novel can do with love and romance, and hopefully I managed to play with some of those possibilities here.
Q. CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS is told through the eyes of Frances. How did her character develop?
A. One of my difficulties when writing the first draft was limiting myself to the perspective of just one protagonist. The novel is in first person, and Frances’s voice came easily to me from the beginning, but in the early stages I was often tempted to write scenes or sequences in which she didn’t appear—exploring Bobbi’s family life, for example, or how Nick and Melissa got on at home. I felt a strong connection to all four of the central characters, and in a way I think the novel could potentially work from any of their perspectives, though of course it would be a very different book every time. Frances is the narrator mostly because she started as the narrator, and because her voice gave the book a particular texture. Though I felt I understood her pretty well when I started writing, I naturally got to know her better as I went along. People often accuse me of talking about my characters as if they’re real people, truly an unfortunate habit—and my only defense is that, to me, they are.
Q. What do you hope readers will take away from CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS?
A. Readers are a very diverse bunch in terms of what they look for in a novel. I don’t think I could possibly anticipate what they might take away from the book, or indeed what they might bring to it. For myself, I would like the book to offer a little solace in dark times—not by providing any straightforward consolation about where we’re headed, because I’m not sure that’s plausible at the moment, but by defending in some small way the possibility of love.
Q. What’s next for you?
A. At the moment I’m working on my second novel, which follows two protagonists over the span of about four years, alternating between their two perspectives. It’s a novel about the development of a relationship rather than the development of a personality and I think I’ve tried to build that into the structure in some way. Because it’s still just an unfinished manuscript, I’m still having fun with it—all the hard work lies ahead.
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