The Gut-Punch of “Conversation With Friends”

By Alice Gelber

“I’m just not very emotional,” says Frances, the cool and somewhat masochistic narrator of Sally Rooney’s debut novel, “Conversations With Friends.” To this, her best friend, and ex-girlfriend, Bobbi, responds, “I don’t think ‘unemotional’ is a quality someone can have.” While Frances spends much of “Conversations with Friends convincing us that she is detached, impersonal, and unfeeling, every line of Rooney’s first novel feels like a punch, leaving the reader drained, but somehow begging for more. Her spartan sentences and nonchalant dialogue–free from quotation marks–disguise the torturous emotional undercurrent that runs through the novel. And, like Frances, the narrative moves with the pain, sometimes enjoying it, sometimes despising it, but always submitting to it.

“Conversation with Friends” follows the lives of Frances and Bobbi, two Dublin university students, who become entangled with a seemingly perfect couple. Melissa is all that Bobbi and Frances hope to be, and Nick is her achingly beautiful trophy husband. As Frances and Nick begin an affair that tests their relationships with both Bobbi and Melissa, Frances also begins to test the limits of her personality, and the power she has over the people around her. “Was I kind to others?” she wonders. “It was hard to nail down an answer. I worried that if I did turn out to have a personality, it would be one of the unkind ones,” she concludes. This quintessential Rooney line, both introspective and self-indulgent, is the epitome of Frances’s self-doubt and self-destructiveness; while she experiments with her dominance over people, Frances is continuously imagining–or inflicting–self-harm. “I wanted to hurt myself again, in order to feel returned to the safety of my own physical body,” Frances says. And while all this is going on–her shifting sense of self and relationships with others–Frances is also dealing with a crippling illness that goes unresolved for many months.  

Trigger warning: this book is intense. So intense at times that I had to put it down and take deep calming breaths. But I always came back; I needed to know what happens. The genius of “Conversation with Friends” is its unpredictability. Rooney defies all the stereotypes: the pining friend, the doomed affair, the unresolved relationship. And, while I won’t spoil the ending, I will say it is a great one. 

While “Conversation with Friends” is often overshadowed by Rooney’s second novel, “Normal People,” the first is fantastic in its own right. The book presents the fragility of eternal friendship and of new love. And, while Frances is trying to convince us that she is less emotional–and who knows, she may be–the novel asserts itself on every emotion I have to give. Expect to cringe, and laugh, and to want to throw up. And once you’re finished, to pick it up and do it all over again.