Normal People by Sally Rooney
Normal People is about a boy and girl who share a problematic relationship. Marianne and Connell are both young, incredibly bright and unsure of where they belong. They are growing in a world that has left them scarcely unscathed. The book starts with them in high school having a secret relationship that ends poorly and the story then follows the pair to the same college where they date and break up again. After their second attempt they remain close as friends eventually leading them to date for a third time. As the novel comes to a close, it ends without a clear message of where they’ll land. Because after all that back and forth, why would it?
Even when the main characters weren’t dating they might as well have been. They understand each other in ways that make them feel fully seen and draws them to one another. At the beginning of writing this I called their relationship problematic which is how I felt as I finished reading but now having wrote this I’m not sure. I’m envious of how capable they are of being completely emotional and vulnerable—they know each others flaws and accept them. Although their relationship can be unsure at times it’s always honest and present—there is no hiding.
“All these years they’ve been like two little plants sharing the same plot of soil, growing around one another, contorting to make room, taking certain unlikely positions. But in the end she has done something for him, she’s made a new life possible, and she can always feel good about that.”
The author of this book is 27 and some readers who aren’t in their 20’s might think this book is filled with too many ups and downs. I disagreed, I found the ebs and flows realistic. I thought most of their issues did have to do with their lack of open communication. However, Marianne and Connell are young and communication is a learned skill, especially in relationships.
“It’s funny the decisions you make because you like someone, he says, and then your whole life is different. I think we’re at that weird age where life can change a lot from small decisions.”
This book had me reminiscing on many of the decisions I’ve made to lead me to where I am today. Especially my decision to accept my first job offer. During my senior year of college I managed to land a job that I accepted early in the academic year. The longer I had to think about the fact that I’d chosen a path the more worried I became that I hadn’t made the wrong choice. Later on in the same year some classmates weren’t sure what they were doing yet and it was alluring to me that they still had a clean slate. They could choose to do anything they wanted. I had made a decision—my slate was no longer clean. When you make a decision you’re actually doing two things—choosing one thing and not another.
Looking back at the decisions I’ve made in the 3 years since then, I often wonder if my choices were right and if I’ve wasted any time. I find it hard for me to live my life without thinking I’m stuck in the decisions I make. I find it even more difficult to know when something doesn’t feel right, if uprooting myself from the situation is an acceptable course of action. Unfortunately, the only way to know which decisions I make today will have the most impact on the rest of my life is to live my life and make some. There was a point in the novel where Marianne is looking back and she knows the exact moment her life took the turn that made a difference.
“yes, that was it, the beginning of my life”
I think that was my favorite part of the book. Similar to Marianne’s realization, I believe there are defining moments in life and when you look back you can see the significance. I have this perception that the repercussions of my life choices are permanent. What if a decision I make today, turns out to be wrong? What if there isn’t enough time for me to make wrong decisions?
It’s appealing to think it’s always possible to change your mind about anything. Sure, hypothetically I could pick up and start over anytime and go anywhere, but there are some things in life you can’t undo and time is certainly one. I have a preconceived notion of what I think my life is supposed to look like and sometimes that can feel like a prison of my own making. I romanticize picking up the little bits of the life I’ve built so far, shattering it, and starting over somewhere new. The thought equally feels like a cop out to me. Would I be any happier? I understand what Marianne means when she says, “In a way I like the idea of something so dramatic happening to me. I would like to upset people’s expectations.” Lately I think it’s possible to achieve a give and take approach to my expectations on life.
I no longer envy those who don’t have direction. Being directionless is a conscious decision to not have control over what happens to you. I prefer to make choices for myself rather than let life make them for me. I think Marianne would come to the same conclusion.
While the story is following Marianne and Connell from their last year of high school through their lives at college, it’s a turbulent time where they’re learning so much about themselves. It’s more visually evident in the tv series, but there’s a point where Marianne is contemplating friendships she gained and then lost in college. She questions whether she knew at the time that they weren’t real friends. This is a symbol of her personal growth.
The novel also fixates on Marianne’s sexual growth. At the beginning of the novel she has no experience, her first kiss is with Connell. Continually throughout their relationship she tells Connell that intimately she would do anything he wants. We see her assume a submissive role not just in her relationship with Connell but also with Gareth, Jamie and the guy from Sweden. Besides her intimacy with Connell she doesn’t actually admit to enjoying herself with any of the other men and it follows that pattern with each relationship. It’s hard to say whether she is just adapting and adopting whatever the men’s preferences are or if it’s truly what she wants. I found this notion in the book unclear. I think Rooney was meaning to show how Marianne’s abusive relationship with her family misconstrues her understanding of physical pain and emotional pleasure and vice versa. But she could also have been showing how impressionable a young inexperienced woman or man can be.
The growth Connell experiences is one of learning to belong with his own self. At the beginning of the novel we can see him suspecting that he is out of place as a popular school jock. He worries about his schoolmates’ impressions of him to the point where he forces his relationship with Marianne to be a secret affair even though he really likes her. While at Trinity he is at the top of his class and earns a scholarship for free tuition. However, we still see him struggle with finding his footing even though as a reader it is a place we can see he very much belongs. Throughout the novel the only exception to this is when Connell is with Marianne. She is the person he turns to as he grapples with depression and panic attacks while internally struggling to figure out who he is.
“Lately he’s consumed by a sense that he is in fact two separate people, and soon he will have to choose which person to be on a full-time basis, and leave the other behind.”
This book takes Marianne who is rich and Connell who is poor and gives them a commonality. Their unsureness about themselves and their place in the world is their equalizer. Two people who should have experienced life so differently based on their socioeconomic backgrounds are very much the same. In her writing Rooney shows this through the contrast of Marianne and Connell’s view of money. She takes these two ideas about wealth and the way the world works because of it and she pits them against each other. I absolutely loved that.
Marianne has a conversation with her friend Joanna about spending all her time at a job while pointing out that time on earth is limited. Marianne can have this view because she doesn’t in fact need a job to survive, she has money at her disposal without one. Meanwhile, when Connell receives a full scholarship he has money to spend and suddenly places and things that have never seemed real to him are.
“Marianne replaces the yogurt pot in the freezer now and asks Joanna if she finds it strange, to be paid for her hours at work – to exchange, in other words, blocks of her extremely limited time on this earth for the human invention known as money.
It’s time you’ll never get back, Marianne adds. I mean, the time is real.”
Joanna: “The money is also real.”
“Suddenly he can spend an afternoon in Vienna looking at Vermeer’s The art of Painting, and it’s hot outside, and if he wants he can buy himself a cheap cold glass of beer afterward. It’s like something he assumed was just a painted backdrop all his life has revealed itself to be real: foreign cities are real, and famous artworks, and underground railway systems, and remnants of the Berlin Wall. That’s money, the substance that makes the world real. There’s something so corrupt and sexy about it.”
I’ve found people’s reactions to the book can be polarizing. Some love it and some really hate it. I think this is one of those books that I’ll need to read again in a few years, see if I’ve gotten anywhere.
I don’t know who I’m going to send this book to next. It was a very personal read for me. I want to send it to Matt hoping that if or when he reads it, like Marianne and Connell, he’ll understand me.
I sent the book to Matt. It might have been a mistake but I’m allowed to make those. I’m also sending a copy to my friend Kristina because I think she’ll get it—what I’ve written and why I sent it to him. I think she’ll know how I felt.