{"id":168805,"date":"2024-10-09T10:46:39","date_gmt":"2024-10-09T14:46:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=168805"},"modified":"2025-07-28T11:22:33","modified_gmt":"2025-07-28T15:22:33","slug":"loving-the-limitations-of-the-novel-a-conversation-between-sally-rooney-and-merve-emre","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2024\/10\/09\/loving-the-limitations-of-the-novel-a-conversation-between-sally-rooney-and-merve-emre\/","title":{"rendered":"Loving the Limitations of the Novel: A Conversation between Sally Rooney and Merve Emre"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Sally Rooney. Photograph by Kalpesh Lathigra.<\/p><\/div>\n

Each of Sally Rooney\u2019s novels writes back to a novel that she admires: <\/em>Conversations with Friends to Jane Austen\u2019s <\/em>Emma; <\/em>Normal People to George Eliot\u2019s <\/em>Daniel Deronda; <\/em>Beautiful World, Where Are You to Henry James\u2019s <\/em>The Golden Bowl; and <\/em>Intermezzo to James Joyce\u2019s <\/em>Ulysses. But while Rooney is delightfully conversant in the history of the novel, it is not, she says, her first thought when she starts to write. Her characters simply walk into her mind and stay there until she has puzzled out the precise nature of their relationships to one another. In Intermezzo, as in the novels that preceded it, her characters\u2014Peter and Ivan Koubek, and the women they love\u2014are often self-deceiving, misguided, and dishonest. No one\u2019s intentions are pure. No one\u2019s actions are consistent. Yet amid this tangle of secrets and lies there is, every so often, a glimmer of mutual understanding\u2014a minor triumph in a world designed to erode all human exchanges and emotions. It is the burden and the pleasure of the novel, from Austen to Rooney, that it can animate these triumphs and the unbeautiful world from which they arise, so long as we keep turning the pages.<\/em><\/p>\n

This summer, Rooney and I met in Dublin, where we mostly talked about novels, old and new. We met again on September 25, for a public conversation onstage at the Southbank Centre in London. Before Rooney and I began to speak, she delivered a brief statement<\/a> condemning the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the deaths of civilians in Israel, in Palestine, and in Lebanon. She urged the audience \u201cto keep protesting, to keep speaking out, to keep demanding an end to this horrifying war.\u201d Although our conversation in London was a continuation of our earlier exchange, her words were a reminder that any discussion of the novel, cannot be, and must not be, isolated from a consideration of longer and broader histories\u2014of death and dispossession, beauty and belonging.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

In Dublin this summer, we talked about contemporary novelists who, quite self-consciously, are writing back toward the history of the novel. You said something that stuck with me\u2014\u201cMany writers are contemptuous of the novel as a bourgeois form, but I love the novel.\u201d How does one sustain that love for the novel at a time of horrific violence? More specifically, what shape does that love take in Intermezzo<\/em>?<\/p>\n

SALLY ROONEY<\/p>\n

I stand by that. I do love the novel, and I think a lot about its specific textual lineage. My great friend Tom Morris is a fantastic short-story writer, and he often says short-story writers get asked about form, but novelists just get asked what their novels are about. We tend to forget that the novel isn\u2019t just a big, long piece of text. When we say it\u2019s a bourgeois form, what we mean is that it emerged coincident with the emergence of industrial capitalism, and it documented a kind of psychology, a kind of individuality that that historical moment produced and made possible, which was, at the time, a bourgeois subjectivity. Now, in the twenty-first century, most novels have been written by people who had to work for a living, who didn\u2019t just live off passive income, capital income, and most protagonists of novels similarly don\u2019t live off the riches of their tenant farmers, as the protagonists of nineteenth-century novels often did. How can contemporary novelists work in conversation with that textual lineage, respond to it, subvert it, make it more capacious, or change the kinds of subjectivity it\u2019s capable of documenting?<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Loving the novel, then, not only gives it more life but allows it to represent different possibilities for life?<\/p>\n

ROONEY<\/p>\n

To say \u201creinvigorate it\u201d might not be fair, because when was the novel not vigorous? It has always been a living form, but I do feel that, after the modernist period, there were serious challenges that the novel struggled to accommodate. \u201cPostmodern writers\u201d came up with fascinating answers, but I think the challenges remain. The questions asked by the modernist novel are the questions that we, as contemporary novelists, are trying to answer still. Loving the novel is a bit like a rebellious love, like a teenager\u2019s reaction to their parents\u2019 love.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

A half-smothered love.<\/p>\n

ROONEY<\/p>\n

Yes, you have to feel hemmed in by its limitations to truly love it, to feel excited by it. I like the limitations of the novel. I like feeling them pressing in on me while I\u2019m trying to get close to my characters.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

One response to the valorization of individual subjectivity is to write about dyads. Your previous novels have often focused on a couple flanked by friends. Intermezzo<\/em> features two brothers flanked by lovers. Readers of novels about couples know that the couple will encounter certain predictable narrative and communicative obstacles. Will they or won\u2019t they make it work? Can they come to understand each other? But the shape that a story about brothers takes is less clear, unless, that is, you\u2019re particularly enamored of the Cain and Abel story. How does the sibling dyad open different possibilities for relationality in the novel?<\/p>\n

ROONEY<\/p>\n

Throughout my work, rather than writing about characters, I write about dynamics. I always find it funny when people say “That’s an interesting character,\u201d or \u201cThat\u2019s a good character,\u201d because I don\u2019t think a character has any intrinsic value. Every person is intrinsically interesting, but in a novel, what gives a character power is their relation to others, and how those relations change.<\/p>\n

The textual lineage of the novel fascinates me, but when I sit down with my Word document, it would be a lie to say I\u2019m thinking about it. What I\u2019m thinking about is, I\u2019ve got this guy, and he has a brother. I want to know how their relationship grew and changed through their childhoods. I want to know what sort of pressures it exerted on them. Did one of them feel in the other\u2019s shadow? Did they resent each other? Did they really love each other? Did the younger brother idolize the elder? I fell in love with these characters. Every novel I have written has been that process of falling in love with these totally fictitious individuals, and, in that way, their relationships become the plot.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

We expect lovers to not speak the same language from the get-go. We expect for there to be misunderstandings between them. But siblings tend to think, at least when they\u2019re younger, that there exists a communicative ease and a stability between them that will persist. One of the things I find interesting about Intermezzo<\/em> is how it relates the communicative problems of the couple-form to those that emerge between siblings as they grow up.<\/p>\n

ROONEY<\/p>\n

I love communicative problems. They always introduce just enough friction for me to feel drawn into a scene, when there\u2019s some slippage between what somebody is trying to say, or feels capable of saying, and what the other person wants to hear or is capable of hearing.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s interesting that you say that with lovers there\u2019s an expectation of miscommunication, but with siblings there\u2019s an expectation of knowledge, because you had a childhood together. I think people often have fixed roles within family dynamics. I don\u2019t mean that people become entrapped\u2014it\u2019s not necessarily a negative thing\u2014but, for instance, the younger sibling will always be the younger sibling. For me, it was interesting to think about how those dynamics change when the younger sibling, who has always been the baby, and is indeed ten years younger than his only, elder sibling, is now an adult himself. How can he conceive of himself as an adult within their family unit? How much space can his brother make for him to be an adult in his own right? It felt like this was a family unit where people had labeled themselves and one another in relation to one another, and they weren\u2019t seeing the parts of one another, or even of themselves, that didn\u2019t fit within those roles. Maybe an analogous process goes on between lovers or between best friends, but with families, the dynamic is set from such an early age that it becomes even harder to break out of.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Remind me, are you a middle child?<\/p>\n

ROONEY<\/p>\n

Yes, I am a middle child.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

That felt to me, an eldest child, like a very middle-child answer. You say you don\u2019t want to use the word entrapped<\/em>, but you do use that word in Intermezzo<\/em>. Your characters are entrapped in particular ways of being. What frees them from their roles is the rearrangement of the family form and the many forms of grief that result\u2014grief for the loss of their father, grief for the life they have lived, perhaps badly, grief for the life they can never live, grief for the life that other people will never be able to live. As I was reading the novel, I realized I don\u2019t fully understand what grief is. Is it a steady feeling, like sadness? Or is it a way of perceiving the past, relative to the present, as irretrievable? How did you think of it as you were writing?<\/p>\n

ROONEY<\/p>\n

Everything you\u2019re describing felt like the very questions I was working through in the book. Families get stuck in certain roles, but what becomes possible when one of those roles is suddenly absent\u2014in this case, because of the death of a family member? There\u2019s some guilt and discomfort in realizing that new family formations are possible because this beloved person is no longer there, and the space their absence leaves\u2014maybe you don\u2019t want to fill it? I was asking myself those questions as the author, but I was asking them alongside the characters, because they are grappling with them too.<\/p>\n

In the case of the elder brother, Peter, he is also grieving for a life he didn\u2019t get to live. When he was in his twenties, a very significant event changed the trajectory of his relationship with his then partner and changed the life they both had planned to live. There\u2019s a sense in which he hasn\u2019t\u2014 I hesitate to say he hasn\u2019t dealt with those feelings, because who can ever deal with feelings? I don\u2019t even know what that means. But those feelings are there, and the loss of his father prompts him to spiral\u2014to experience a mad, spiraling regret. He cannot believe that time keeps passing, and this is the one life he has on this earth. There\u2019s a rueful quality to his grief. For his younger brother, it\u2019s different, because he\u2019s lost a parent at a much younger age, before he feels that a lot of life\u2019s doors have closed behind him. He\u2019s moving into his adulthood\u2014that\u2019s a different kind of grieving process. He feels shocked to realize his father will never know him as an adult man.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

You don\u2019t have to regret the events of your life to grieve the passage of time. I often feel as if I want more life\u2014not a different life, just more of what I have. It feels greedy or spoiled. I don\u2019t know if grief<\/em> is the right word to describe that, but it does seem like one thing the novel lets us do is to imagine more lives for ourselves.<\/p>\n

ROONEY<\/p>\n

I\u2019m hesitant to get into my own psychology, but I\u2019m aware that for me, writing novels is a way of preventing or being in denial about the passing of time. The years I spent on this book passed, and I can never have them back, but I do have the book. It\u2019s like I\u2019ve stored that time in a jar, like it can never quite get away from me, because it\u2019s in there. There is a sense of pouring life into the novels and feeling like I get to live the lives of my characters. It does give me a doorway out of the world where time passes, as it does for all of us, into a world where I get to control the passing of time. The chronology of the book runs from about September to December of a single year, and when I was writing it\u2014it took me about three years to write\u2014I often got confused about what time of year it was in real life. I would be in October with my characters, but it was actually May.<\/p>\n

I wonder if it\u2019s common to other writers\u2014something a little bit frantic about wanting to preserve life, not to let that get away and not to have nothing to show for it, not to have spent three years and have no evidence that I had ideas and experiences. I forget I live in a world where I do not dictate the speed at which time passes\u2014it passes in the normal way for everyone.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Perhaps there\u2019s something more normal about trying to control your time than about accepting the time kept by the industrialized world? It reminds me of a scene in Intermezzo <\/em>where Ivan goes to his mother\u2019s house, and his mother\u2019s husband and his children are intolerable to Ivan, in part because of what they buy and how they work\u2014that is, how they spend their time. As he\u2019s leaving the house, he thinks there\u2019s nothing wrong with him, that he is the normal one, and that people who are well suited to this world are the deeply abnormal, maladjusted ones.<\/p>\n

ROONEY<\/p>\n

I used the word normal<\/em> in the title of a book. I wish I hadn\u2019t. It\u2019s like I\u2019ve lost it from my lexicon, which is a shame, because it\u2019s a word I use quite a lot and\u2014why do I use it so often? Because I am interested in what\u2019s considered normal. That\u2019s something that comes up in Intermezzo<\/em>, in the sense that there are social relationships and intimate relationships that don\u2019t fit comfortably into categories that we would consider socially normal. The desire to be normal places demands on us that can often feel intolerable. To many of the characters in novels, those demands do feel unbearably intense.<\/p>\n

At the same time, normality is a way of belonging to a particular community, in a particular place and time. That\u2019s something my characters care about, and something I care about too\u2014being in a place with particular people, the same people, and seeing them often, and being accustomed to one another, living in community with others. I value it highly, but it comes with a normative principle. How do you balance the desire to belong, to be part of a community that makes life meaningful, and the desire to resist the constant drive to normalize relations?<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

One way to strike the balance comes to us through games. Ivan plays chess. Peter is a barrister. Both play highly formalized games with rigid rules, with clear winners and losers. Your epigraph, from Wittgenstein\u2019s Philosophical Investigations<\/em>, made me pay attention to how all your characters talk about playing games, many of which are less clear-cut. They especially play what Wittgenstein called language-games, self-consciously testing the use of language and the actions into which it is woven\u2014especially, for your characters, the action of desiring or feeling desired. I am thinking of Ivan wondering what it means when people say someone is \u201ca nice woman,\u201d and of Margaret\u2019s comically involved reflection on her use of the word passionate<\/em> when she speaks to Ivan. I\u2019m thinking, too, of how many ways there are for your characters to say \u201cFuck\u201d or to mean \u201cI love you.\u201d There\u2019s a thorough metabolism in this novel of ordinary language philosophy, which feels new to your work. Where did it come from?<\/p>\n

ROONEY<\/p>\n

I always hit obstacles at some point in writing a novel. It can be rough, and I got near the end of this one and didn\u2019t know how the book ended. I was writing and rewriting and rewriting loads of scenes that didn\u2019t really feel right, and then, for some reason, I started reading what you call the ordinary language philosophers. I read some J. L. Austin and Margaret MacDonald and made my way to the later work of Wittgenstein. I ended up reading Philosophical Investigations<\/em>, and I felt, after I read it, that I knew how to finish Intermezzo<\/em>.<\/p>\n

When I closed the book, I thought, I get what I\u2019m trying to do now. My characters were playing language-games and trying to figure out the rules of one another\u2019s language-games all the way through the novel. My reading of Investigations<\/em> helped me to see that more clearly, or to pursue that more passionately. It gave me a new way of thinking about language that is grounded in relationality. When you say something, there has to be someone you\u2019re saying it to. Otherwise, it has no meaning. Language gains meaning from the person who is uttering it and the person who is receiving that utterance. To ground language back down in relational dynamics was fascinating to me. That\u2019s what I have been interested in, from my first book through to this one\u2014the essence of things in their relation to other things, not in the thing itself.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

There are many moments in Intermezzo <\/em>when characters carefully reflect on what they\u2019re saying\u2014not only their words, but also their tone, gestures, eye contact, and the time and place in which they\u2019re speaking. Did reading Philosophical Investigations<\/em> make you think differently about how you structured dialogue between your characters, or what the stakes of dialogue could be?<\/p>\n

ROONEY<\/p>\n

Yes, and one of the other interesting things about Philosophical Investigations<\/em> is that Wittgenstein uses a lot of fictitious dialogue in it. Often, he makes a point, and then he introduces a fictitious quote from someone who disagrees with him. Then he will explain back to that person why he was right in the first place, sometimes getting exasperated with the person, even though he invented them. That\u2019s what I do. I make up fake people to get mad at all the time.<\/p>\n

The interplay of dialogue in Wittgenstein works toward a philosophical end, and I wondered, How could I do that to a novelistic end? My characters do get exasperated with one another, and sometimes it\u2019s because they are playing different games. One character thinks they are engaged in a certain kind of conversation. The other character attributes a different significance to what that character is saying, because they have misunderstood the game that\u2019s being played, or they are trying to play a different one.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

The moment when two people \u201cwin\u201d a language-game is a moment of mutual understanding. Like game, mutual is a word and idea that repeats throughout Intermezzo<\/em>. Henry James often uses that term to indicate the moment when subjectivity transforms into intersubjectivity, consciousness into shared consciousness\u2014or, as you put it in Intermezzo<\/em>, when two people\u2019s \u201cthoughts interpenetrate.\u201d Mutuality fascinates me because it\u2019s a form of thought that doesn\u2019t prescribe the content of thought. People can be mutually attracted and mutually contemptuous. Mutual understanding can lead to sex. It can lead to estrangement. What kind of function does mutuality play in your novel?<\/p>\n

ROONEY<\/p>\n

Much of Peter and Ivan\u2019s lives have been structured by the sense that it is possible to win at life, and if they just try harder, someone\u2019s going to give them a gold medal and say, \u201cYou are the champion.\u201d That drive has been destructive and also, in some instances, has given them the will to live. Mutuality complicates that paradigm. Instead of there being a winner and a loser in an interaction, the only way to win is when the other person wins too. Victory can only be shared. If you don\u2019t share it, nobody wins.<\/p>\n

Mutuality sits uncomfortably with both Ivan and Peter. They have to adjust themselves to the idea that it\u2019s possible to find mutual ground. For both, it\u2019s easier to do with women. They are more open to finding mutuality when it\u2019s colored by an erotic and romantic sensibility. When it comes to trying to find mutuality with each other, they struggle, and sometimes the mutuality they find is violent rage. They find they have mutual contempt and hatred for each other, and, as you say, that\u2019s a form of mutuality too. It\u2019s not an exclusively positive thing. Ivan becomes aware early on in his relationship with Margaret that he\u2019s no longer playing a chess game where he\u2019s trying to defeat his opponent. It\u2019s a different kind of game altogether.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Maybe it\u2019s easier to find a positive mutuality in their romantic relationships with women because sex doesn\u2019t require language. The moments of high eroticism in the novel are often described as moments of \u201canimal intelligence\u201d or \u201cdeep animal contentment.\u201d I found the most attractive character in the novel to be Alexei, the whippet, in whose presence I felt the same contentment that Ivan feels with Margaret. What is the role of animal intelligence in the world of language-games?<\/p>\n

ROONEY<\/p>\n

When we first meet Ivan, he\u2019s thinking about the relationship between mind and body, and he thinks, \u201cIt\u2019s great having a mind, but to have a body? You just drag it around everywhere, it\u2019s this sack, and it\u2019s awful.\u201d For Ivan, there\u2019s this sense that he is his mind, and that his body is an unfortunate fact of his presence in the world. Throughout the novel, that becomes more complicated for him. Partly it\u2019s complicated by the erotic, because he becomes involved in an intensely passionate and caring sexual relationship, which forces him to acknowledge that having a body has its benefits, and that those aren\u2019t neatly separable from the pleasures of the mind. The sense of selfhood is equally animated by the body, just as it is animated by consciousness, or what we would think of as sentience.<\/p>\n

The mind-body problem is interesting for me, because when I\u2019m writing my novels, I feel like I am a floating brain. I forget that I physically exist. I\u2019m a Word document. It can be a shock for me to catch sight of my own reflection\u2014not that I\u2019m shocked at what I look like, but that I look like anything at all. It\u2019s strange to exist while I think I\u2019m floating in the ether with these characters.<\/p>\n

I think that my interest in this problem also explains the recurrence of the animal. I didn\u2019t realize I had done this until now, but at one point Naomi says, \u201cMen are dogs\u201d\u2014but the dog is the nicest character in the novel! He supplies a\u2014I was going to say \u201cwordlessness,\u201d but in a novel, nothing can be wordless. He is an artifact composed entirely of words, but as a dog he cannot verbalize. I wanted to capture the feeling of purely physical sensations or purely physical interchanges, like staring into a dog\u2019s eyes, or being with an animal in silence. How do you, as a novelist, capture that, when you only have recourse to language? That\u2019s an interesting philosophical challenge, as well as a technical one.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Going back to Wittgenstein, part II of Philosophical Investigations<\/em> begins by wondering whether, if a dog can\u2019t speak, it can feel hope.<\/p>\n

ROONEY<\/p>\n

Yes, and \u201cCan a dog lie?\u201d is another question he asks. A lot of the characters in Intermezzo<\/em> do tell lies, as many people in the weave of our lives do. But a dog can\u2019t, as Ludwig so wisely tells us. The dog becomes a beacon of pure honesty, which isn\u2019t always pure kindness. Sometimes your dog wanders away when you need comfort most. Dogs don\u2019t just provide love and care\u2014there\u2019s something else, animated by an inability to be dishonest. A dog is always honest, and that was an interesting presence on the page compared to my dishonest human characters.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Your novels sometimes get classified as romances, in the modern sense of commercial romance. But the idea of the language-game linked up for me with an older idea of magical romance, one in which people who are not well suited for their world, usually a medieval world, utter a particular combination of words in a particular order, and suddenly their world changes. It is a distinctly religious or spiritual approach to the power of the word. Is there a difference for you between the transformations that art offers and the transcendence that religion promises?<\/p>\n

ROONEY<\/p>\n

Growing up in Ireland in the nineties, I had a Catholic education. I attended Catholic primary school and secondary school. So much of my very earliest world formation\u2014and my ideas about how to read and what books were, and what stories were\u2014was deeply steeped in Christian ideas, and specifically Catholic ideas. Even if I wished to, it would be hard for me to untangle completely my idea of storytelling, or even the pursuit of artistic beauty, from the idea of God and the divine.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Why do you feel you should?<\/p>\n

ROONEY<\/p>\n

Part of the reason is because I am extremely critical of the fact that the Irish education system is still so institutionally religious. I think that is inappropriate for a contemporary state. There\u2019s a sense in which, in critiquing that system, I want to critique how intertwined those ideas were in my upbringing and education. But it would be dishonest to say I have really wanted to or tried to tear apart the interstitching between the pursuit of beauty and an idea of transcendence that might be called divine or religious. I think the experience of art leaves a residue that goes beyond what can be captured in ideological critical terms. What is that residue, then? You can call it magic. Or you can talk about it in specifically religious terms, and many writers do.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m interested in the absence that has been left in our textual lineage by the disappearance of religious practice. Of course, when we talk about narrative forms that preceded the novel, like the courtly romance Le morte d\u2019Arthur<\/em>, which I loved very deeply, this whole textual lineage was produced around the central organizing principle of the figure of God. Once that figure has become absence, which for many of us it has, that absence becomes sociologically, politically, and aesthetically interesting. Before, the pursuit of beauty was narrated to us in terms of godliness. What is that pursuit now? Is it just adornment? If so, it feels pointless. I have to tell myself it is something more than that.<\/p>\n

I think that\u2019s part of why my books return to the idea of religion, because of my interest in those absences, but also because I want to explore what feels like the transcendent power of beauty to change our lives. That was the motivating question behind Beautiful World, Where Are You<\/em>\u2014the title sums it up. I have spoken about my ideological commitments\u2014how I look at the contemporary world through a Marxist lens and through the lens of climate change, and how I feel like we\u2019re heading for a catastrophe that is driven by our consumerist lifestyle. It also creates this extremely visually barren, soulless, lifeless culture. What I would like to develop is an aesthetics of anti-consumerism, an aesthetics that is against buying and that can resist the extreme weight of the capitalist content-production mill. I want to play whatever tiny, grain-of-sand role I can in developing that aesthetic program, in making something beautiful that says no to consumerism, disposability, endless growth, and that is consonant with a political project, even if it\u2019s not in itself political.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Why do you think Christianity can be rehabilitated but not capitalism?<\/p>\n

ROONEY<\/p>\n

The reason I don\u2019t think capitalism can be rehabilitated is because we have only one planet to live on, and we are running out of the resources that power the capitalist system. We cannot keep plundering the earth. In the Marxist tradition, which wasn\u2019t originally an ecological intellectual tradition, there are other good reasons why I don\u2019t think the capitalist system is sustainable as a way of organizing human activity.<\/p>\n

Can Christianity be rehabilitated? It is important to be, and I am, very critical of institutionalized religion. It\u2019s not at all that I want to rehabilitate the tattered image of Christian institutions. But I do think religious faith\u2014and not just Christian religious faith\u2014involves traditions of immense intellectual and philosophical richness. There\u2019s a beauty to those lineages that still has a lot to give the novelist and the many, many people for whom religion is a central part of life. I don\u2019t think we have finished learning the lessons that religious traditions can teach us, even as we always try to bear our critical faculties in mind.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

I like the idea of describing you as a writer of ordinary-language Christian romance. I like that genre distinction more than some of the other categories that are used to describe your work \u2014a writer of millennial novels, for instance, or a writer of autofiction, which is a wholly specious category, but one that people seem attached to. They\u2019re also attached to the idea that your life\u2014and not the imaginative life you described, but a kind of literal accounting of your life\u2014is in these novels. I\u2019m perplexed by that desire, because I think it does evince some kind of powerful yearning for a recalibration of the relationship between fiction and reality. What\u2019s it about?<\/p>\n

ROONEY<\/p>\n

What is it about? I do ask myself that, because people believe or want to believe that my books are drawn from my life. It makes me think, How busy do you think I am? To me it feels silly, but when I protest and say, \u201cMy books are completely fictional, and I don\u2019t draw from real life,\u201d I get a laugh from the audience, as if they think I\u2019m joking. Many of the writers whose work really excites me\u2014writers like Sheila Heti or Ben Lerner or Annie Ernaux\u2014are working in what you might call autofiction. Their work challenges the boundary between fiction and memoir or essay. The extent to which the narrator is drawn from the persona of the author is part of the troubling and seductive experience of reading those works. And the fingerprints of those books are there in my work.<\/p>\n

But I think some people don\u2019t believe you can come up with fictional characters, because it\u2019s such a weird thing to do. It would be more normal if I just wrote about things that happened to me, because it\u2019s conceivable why a human being would want to write about troubling experiences\u2014as a form of catharsis, for instance\u2014and then market it as a novel. That seems like a more plausible psychological process than when I say, \u201cI was sitting on the train one day and I just thought, What if a chess player played a simultaneous exhibition game in a rural arts center, and then the woman who worked there began a love affair with him?\u201d That doesn\u2019t seem like something that would happen to someone, and even if it did, you wouldn\u2019t then spend three years fleshing out every aspect of their lives. People probably want to believe I\u2019m not as weird as I would need to be to have written the books I have written. But I am that weird.<\/p>\n

I also think\u2014and I hope this doesn\u2019t sound like self-flattery\u2014that sometimes when you read a book where the characters feel real, you think, Well, maybe they are. That\u2019s a lovely compliment to a book, to think that the characters have come alive as much for the reader as they have for me. That\u2019s my whole ambition. When I feel full of life, full of this fictitious life that doesn\u2019t happen in our world, but in a world very close at hand, I want to be able to bring that to somebody who picks the book up, even if it\u2019s just one person.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Merve Emre is the director of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University and a contributing writer at <\/em>The New Yorker.<\/p>\n

Sally\u00a0Rooney\u00a0was in conversation with Merve Emre about her new novel\u00a0<\/em>Intermezzo at the Southbank Centre\u2019s Queen Elizabeth Hall on 25 September 2024.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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