Conversations with Friends

To my sisters

If you think you're an island,
Come and meet your god.
To a field where it's buried,
Somewhere underground
— Active Child (2011)

Three and a half years ago, sitting down the back of The Belfry in Stoneybatter, I had some vague notion that all this should take was a hurried reread of Conversations With Friends and within a couple of weeks I would draft an email with an argument that would convince you both of the book's indisputable merits. You would see, actually, that it was a great book, expertly and concisely written. And I would get the whole thing wrapped up before Ada was born.

I missed that deadline, but the feeling persisted that I would find just the right thing to say to make my point.

I've had this project at the back of my mind since 2023, reading this or that book or interview, jotting down on a whim as much as I could remember of some talking point that came to me in the shower that morning. All the while under the assumption that I needed to convince you of something.

About six months ago, I realised that was a losing battle. I remembered that what I'd intended to do was simply to articulate why I love it. If reading Conversations lifts my soul and engages my mind, what is it that the author, Sally Rooney, is doing to get me there? The project became not about validating my feelings but understanding them.

So I got to work.

When I first read this book, it created a feeling in me that persisted after I'd finished. I left the book energized and starting proselytizing it to others; "You have to read this to feel what I felt" was the message. I felt it, but I couldn't describe it.

The question is: What do I recognise in Rooney's writing that's true to my core, and how can I articulate that here?

Why do I love Conversations with Friends?

I think it would be crazy; however, not to also think about what is it that makes Rooney's work so universal, considering the reasons I love it are so specific to me and my place and time. Why has she been translated so widely and sold so well from China to the US? She has, I'll argue, something to say about how we live and how we should live, as well as about the illuminating power of literature.

Before we go on, it has been three and a half years, so I'll summarize.

Conversations With Friends is a novel about Frances, her friend and ex, Bobbi, and the complex relationship they develop with an older couple.

Frances and Bobbi are in university, around 21, when they meet Melissa and her husband Nick, an upper-middle-class family in their 30s.

Frances narrates the book, writing with perspective, and an extreme eye for detail, from some unspecified future point. She looks back on this time as formative.

Young Frances is staunchly principled - she describes herself as a feminist, a Marxist, a communist - but is cripplingly individualistic and restrained. She has no means by which to put her principles into action. Over the course of eight or so months, her certainty about the kind of person she is gets eroded.

Both Frances and Bobbi are flattered by the attention they receive, initially from Melissa, who begins to write a profile about them and their spoken word performances.

A complex dynamic emerges as Bobbi and Melissa develop a friendship at Frances's expense and Frances and Nick grow closer almost by default on the periphery.

Rooney created four complex characters but tells us almost nothing about three of them - Frances's view of the situation is so myopic - until tensions bubble over at key moments and flashes of those characters' inner lives, their insecurities or resentments, spill out onto the page.

Rooney tells us only a little more about Frances, who repeatedly denies that she even has a personality. Frances thinks that the world happens at her. That she has no agency.

Over time, Frances's foundational assumptions are undermined - her political ideals, her sense of propriety, the façade of her financial independence, her bodily autonomy, her autonomy from her parents: each is challenged in turn. She becomes increasingly isolated.

At her lowest point, physically and mentally, Frances comes to accept emotionally a concept that she had previously held only intellectually and in doing so, grounds her personality, creating a new core on which to rebuild her life and her relationships.

The central theme is a cliché then - that no man is an island.

But Rooney is aware of the cliché. She peppers the book with her references and inspirations. George Elliot's Middlemarch. Chris Kraus's I Love Dick. Noah Baumbach's Mistress America.

But Rooney makes the theme and the story her own in the telling of it.

If I'm honest, I was primed to like this book. So many of my favourite works of art are about fuck-ups in their 20s. Frances fits that mould. And so many of my favourite works of art are excruciatingly sincere. True of all of Rooney's writing.

Frances

The book suggests that Frances's flat, an-hedonic mindset, her ennui, are perhaps an appropriate response to modern life. Of if not appropriate, at least to be expected.

In a 2019 interview, Rooney said "I don't know what it means to write a Marxist novel... It's something that I struggle with and that I think about a lot when I'm writing." She went on: "The best I can do is to try and observe how class... impacts our personal and intimate lives. Like, how do we carry material realities and economic realities into our interpersonal relationships?"

I recognized something in Rooney's writing that in the real world was hard to diagnose. I see it in the people around me and in myself - that my politics, my views, principles and aspirations don't translate in any meaningful way into action.

This was one of the absences in my life that pushed me towards journalism - an urge to understand how the world works and why people aren't more motivated to be involved.

I learned two things in journalism. And bear with me here. I think they're relevant.

When I started my masters, I became friends with the great grandchild of one of the leaders of the 1916 rising. Watching their life and interests, I had to get over a personal bias - some part of me silently demanded that their family history should be central to their identity. That they should be consumed by anger, I thought, over what happened to someone so close to them by blood.

That if I wasn't in a position to uphold the principles of the republic, someone should.

But that's not realistic. I have no understanding of the injustices that members of my family had to endure under British rule. It's not in the history books. But if I did, I'd still be my own person. And I live in a society that values individualism. I don't have to be defined by my past.

So that was the first thing. That perhaps a break from history is inevitable in an individualistic society. And that perhaps that too is to be expected.

The question arises, what can replace that sense of connection to justice and politics?

Rooney writes about individuals living in a modern, highly materialistic society where the majority of the citizens are a-political.

She sees her work as being in the tradition of the 19th century novel. Her books see normal people in primarily domestic settings having conversations and navigating interpersonal relationships. But in those earlier novels, the politics and morality of the time are also front and centre amid the interpersonal dynamics. The characters wrestle with the themes. They debate change. They ask how is it we should live?

For this project, I've read The Brothers Karamazov and Middlemarch. And I've reread, Dubliners, (early 20th century, I know) which was rolling around in my brain as another Irish response to that tradition.

The contrast is striking with how the characters of those earlier, realist novels think about the world they live in, when compared with Conversations. Where are the ardent opinions, the genuine debate, the effort to understand a path forward? Where are the true differences of opinion?

In Middlemarch, we find an early 1830s community in flux. It's set between Catholic emancipation and the Reform Act that extended voting rights to more of the male population. It seems a society with diverse opinions and divergent goals, full of possibility as its citizens struggle with questions of political reform. That conflict is, in Conversations, replaced by loosely held views, sound bites and unexamined conclusions in a society of narrow possibility.

There's a scene in Conversations that takes place while the characters are on holiday in France. This was 2015. The subject of migration comes up. The conversation touches on all the talking points people raised back then; middle-class refugees with degrees, multiculturalism, right to asylum. Frances is bored by their conversation but as always, not quite motivated enough to insert herself and make a point.

The default position of the people of Middlemarch is to be driven by a stated goal, or by a strongly held value. The characters are almost archetypical but they have a physical tie to their place in the world - they appear more than an individual occupying a space.

I'll come back to Middlemarch.

The second thing that I learned in journalism was that, in a media industry dominated by clicks and engagement, newsrooms are incentivised to write about people and drama, not policy and purpose. As a result, many of the people who do engage with politics do so effectively for entertainment.

I didn't have a name for it then. Writing about the US, the political scientist Eitan Hersh calls it political hobbyism.

Hersh writes, in Politics is for Power (2020): "If you are reasonably well-off and white, and if you mostly live among other people like you, then you may have trouble seeing how your fate is linked to the fate of those less fortunate. Maybe you understand it intellectually but don't feel it day to day."

People don't use politics, they consume it. He links this apathy to the relative comfort of modern middle class society in the US. I might link it to capitalism, and Rooney might do the same.

Ireland is something of a neoliberal poster child. The country's rapid ascent from impoverished colony to thriving global economy has created a cohort of highly educated and largely comfortable people. Certainly, they need to work to live, requiring a pay check month to month. But the see themselves as safely above the fray. As middle class.

The flow of capital into the county since the 1970s (fascinating video here) has broken the typical Irish person's link to a struggle for self-determination that is only 100 years old.

Without that link, and because of the comfort that capitalism provides and the individualism that it fosters, fundamental questions of how we should live and organize our society are notably absent here. Conceiving of an alternative way of life after capitalism seems almost impossible.

The result is that we don't talk about it, and barely think about it. With my parents, students in school, in technical college with working class people, in engineering with wealthy upper middle class people, in journalism with socialists, human rights advocates, idealists, shrewd pragmatists and News Crop ghouls. Across the full swathe of life, in my 42 years on the earth, questions about how we should live have been almost entirely absent.

Perhaps that's changing. I met a man recently who was selling his bicycle second-hand. He offered me a lift home after realising the rear tire was flat. We talked about journalism and data privacy and society and parenting. He said, gesturing at the industrial estates by the motorway: "If we had to start over, there's no way this is the society we'd build."

Sally Rooney is interested in what kind of society we should build and in what's stopping us from doing it. It's no great insight to note that a lack of community or spirituality has eroded our sense of place and purpose. But it is unusual to see the void in our daily lives illustrated in the way Conversations does it - Frances does not tell herself the stories that most people do to get through the day.

Her default position is to reject, to disengage, to self-isolate.

The world

The Japanese have a term for this: mono no aware. An awareness of impermanence and a gentle sadness at the passing of things".

Anticipatory nostalgia is supposedly the less evocative English term.

I remember the mono no aware of my 20s. (It has become rarer now.) The lecture-free days when my friends and I would refuse to look at a clock and just exist for a while. The holiday house in Kenmare where a window in the shower overlooked the River Roughty and the bay. Wandering with Laura around the Electric Picnic festival grounds, just drunk enough on mojitos for hours but what seemed like forever.

Some version of life without salaries, without employers, without distance from or obligations to other people seemed possible. A kind of life that has never existed but, some part of you insists, must exist.

This is part of why I like art about being in your 20s; when we had agency but were too inexperienced to know what to do with it - naïve about politics, economics, finance and relationships. The Secret History. Scott Pilgrim. Dazed and Confused. Books and films stacked with characters oblivious to themselves and to how they're seen by others.

Conversations With Friends is a book in two parts; When I think about it fondly, I think about Part 1. It's summer. Frances is falling in love. It's full of those moments that drag us up out of the mire. And Rooney captures them with exquisite detail and in the fewest words possible.

The most common note in the margins of my ragged copy is the word "real".

Frances lies face down on the beach. "I couldn't see the children's faces, but occasionally in my peripheral vision I caught a blur of primary colour, a spade or bucket, or a flash of ankle. A weight had settled in my joints like sand." Real.

Nick puts his arm on the back of her chair. "I found it impossible to concentrate while he was doing it." Real.

While falling in love. "The next day I felt warm and sleepy, like a child. I ate four slices of bread at breakfast and drank two whole bowls of coffee." - Real.

The little pops of colour in Frances's life, moments of joie de vivre, that emerge from brief but real connections with the people in her life create such a stark contrast with her day-to-day. Frances, we see, otherwise often forgets to eat, sleeps through work or spends her time alone, editing the typos and punctuation in her writing.

But Part 1 is not real life. Part 2 is almost like a separate novel. It opens with a reference to the death of Savita Halappanavar, and descends from there.

Within a few pages, Frances is in hospital dealing with what appears to be a miscarriage of her own. As it turns out, she was never pregnant but the incident takes a toll. And then begins a wait for a follow-up exam and diagnosis.

With this threat looming, Frances takes a series of blows, falling out with Nick, Bobbi, her mother, her friend Philip. Through various selfish or ignorant acts she manages to fully isolate herself from the people she loves and who love her. At the same time, she's sideswiped by calls from a deteriorating alcoholic father. We see self harm creep into her life. Frances catastrophises and allows negative thoughts to intrude.

Much later, Frances is in hospital again for her scan. There she observes a father with his children. Typical of Rooney's writing style, we get the following sparse line: "I thought about the way Nick handled his little dog whom he loved so much, and then I stopped thinking about it."

Frances, in a split second, follows a painful train of thought before shutting it out again. This single line is doing so much work.

She is watching the father. She thinks about Nick and his dog. This leads us, the readers, to think about Nick and the little niece he loves. Then to the baby Frances imagined she'd lost, then to herself as a mother, to the life she and Nick might have had, to the whole imagined life of her child and the contrast with her own childhood and relationship with her father and finally to the fact that Nick knows nothing about this and she can't talk to him about it. Then: No! Don't think about it.

She leaves the hospital with a diagnosis. Endometriosis. She may never be able to get pregnant. Despite this diagnosis, she sits on the news. At first, lying to her mother, on the pretence that she just needs to get home and collect her thoughts. Then days and weeks go by. She keeps it to herself.

Frances's tendency to hold on to bad news - to process it in her own time and on her own terms, I find very relatable. Saying something out loud makes it more real and talking about it with someone else involves giving up control.

Tone

In the mid- to late-90s Wallace wrote an essay calling for a "new sincerity" in fiction. He was reacting to postmodernity and the prevalence of irony and world-weariness in literature and entertainment at the time.

I think it worked. On top of the 19th century novel, I see the influence on Conversations of some of my favourite independent films over the past 25 years that rejected the kind of 90s cynicism that I grew up with.

Fast-paced conversational works from Richard Linklater or Alexander Payne. Mumblecore-adjacent films of Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach. Films about family and the drama of the mundane. Chloé Zhao's work. Even the sincerity of a Wes Anderson film, without all of his pageantry.

Infinite Jest was Wallace's attempt to practice what he preached. The book is peppered with horrendous stories relayed by recovering addicts - the worst imaginable situations and deplorable actions. These are recounted simply as facts, as things that happened. And without judgement. Many of the stories capture the moment of rock bottom for their narrator. They have come to accept what happened and to forgive it, to some extent, in an effort to move on.

Rooney is writing without judgement. Adultery, lies, lies by omission, manipulation, self-deception. Rooney presents them all simply as the things that people do. I think Rooney likes Nick, though she gives him so little characterisation. I'm certain Rooney likes Frances. She is kind to her characters for all their faults.

Conversations reveals the contradictions that everyone has to live with - the gap between the person you say you are, and the person you know you are and the person you want to be. Conversations, like Infinite Jest, is packed full of moments of extreme honesty - how often we disappoint ourselves, how often we surprise ourselves. How easy it is to ignore self-criticism, to keep on moving if that's what seems necessary at the time. How necessary it is to accept who you are and stop fighting it.

How easy it is to profess one thing and do another.

The novel does this literally. Frances is constantly telling people what her values are. What her politics are. What her feelings are.

And then quite transparently, with hindsight as the narrator, she shows us exactly the opposite.

The voice of the narrator is so carefully constructed that I think it's the strongest part of Rooney's writing in this first novel. The story is being told by an older Frances. That Frances has a perspective not available to us as readers or to the Frances we follow. There's a reason for every throwaway line in the book, every minor detail grounding events in the mundane. We're expected to feel a tension between Frances's eye for detail, her apparent self-awareness, and the sorry way her younger self seems to stumble blindly through life.

While unwell, Frances picks up and reads the New Testament. She doesn't find much meaning in there, but she's looking for something.

Another thing happens to Frances while in hospital for that scan. She begins to read Middlemarch for college. She reads it over the course of a month or so, while at her most withdrawn.

Middlemarch is about community and the impact people have on each other's lives. On page 293, we learn that she's finished the book. Just two paragraphs later, Frances, in pain, ducks into a church to rest. There's not much there for her - it's empty, a place for old women with rosery beads.

Sitting there she feels the absence of community. Setting this scene in a church is intentional - Frances lives in an Ireland where something is missing. But, she thinks, community persists. We are simply alienated from it. It has become invisible. People have value and their work has value.

"Someone once made this pew I'm sitting on, I thought. Someone sanded the wood and varnished it. Someone carried it into the church. Someone laid the tiles on the floor, someone fitted the windows. Each brick was placed by human hands, each hinge fitted on each door, every road surface outside, every bulb in every streetlight."

It is no coincidence that a lost Frances finds new perspective after reading Middlemarch. Rooney here makes the case for literature as instrumental in our lives, particularly in the absence of meaning traditionally provided by religion or struggle.

Frances's new perspective energises her to reach out and re-establish her connection with the people she cares about.

It's notable also that Frances makes an effort to actively reconnect with the women in her life. She contacts Melissa and Bobbi. She visits her mother, where it seems she's come to some peace with her father. But she doesn't visit him. And Nick, she leaves alone until by chance they reconnect at the end of the novel.

Conclusion

Rooney gives us the thesis of the novel. "You live through certain things before you understand them. You can't always take the analytical position."

Pure reason or acquired knowledge can only get you so far.

Politically, this is a rejection of technocracy and neo-liberalism. Interpersonally, it's a call to community, to empathy, to a serious commitment to putting yourself in other people's shoes.

You can only do this through making connections with people. And along the way, there will be pain. People exist, and you have to live with them.

There is no hero's journey in Conversations With Friends. The only difference between Frances in the beginning and at the end is that now she's honest with herself and trying with others. She remains who she always was. But the unexamined life is not worth living.

Anne wrote recently about re-reading Leviathan and said she could remember so little of it. I agreed: my memory is so poor that I can usually re-read my favourites every few years and each time feels like the first.

But now, Conversations With Friends feels different. I don't expect to forget it. I know what this book is about. I know now how I feel about it. And my love for it is in no way diminished through understanding. In fact, it's richer for it.

__________________________________________________________

Post script

This process has had a material impact on my life. Reading beyond the most surface level about Marx for the first time started a reassessment of my relationship with corporations, with the people who make the things I love and with the technologies that mediate the things I create.

I had, years before, moved away from social media. But from a mental health rather than a principled perspective. Over the past year or so, I've made a more intentional decision to extract myself from algorithms more broadly. First was a return to buying music.

And carrying an MP3 player to reduce screen time on my phone.

And carrying a pocket notebook.

It has transformed my relationship with music. I've found so many thoughtful new artists that I really love, of every genre, from working class hip hop to throwback rock to electronica and hardcore punk.

Later came hosting my own server so I could drop photo back-up services and cloud storage subscriptions.

Next was cancelling my YouTube subscription and changing how and how often I buy video games.

As I've made each change, I've created more space for my mind to expand into. I haven't quite reached silence yet, but I'm no longer overwhelmed by noise.

Admittedly, it has still taken me six months to write the final version of this essay. But I've had the capacity for thought and the space to read the many books and references required to get to the finish line.

It was such a surprise to realise at lunch time some days that the one thing I wanted to do in the evening or during downtime was to pull out my notes and work on writing. To do something, rather then consume something.

It's such a contrast to the many projects or ideas started excitedly over the past two decades and never delivered. I'm hopeful that this is the beginning of a more intentional way of living - a more thoughtful engagement with the art I experience and a more critical assessment of my own thoughts and perspectives.

Thank you.
Peadar Grogan.
July 2026