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.