On Place
If Conversations is making me nostalgic, what am I nostalgic for? Let's say Dublin in the 2010s. Post crash.
There was something interesting happening after the great recession. You could feel it from 2011 on. It was probably my favourite time in Dubin. People we doing new things, making things. Bakers, brewers, baristas, marketers (as in farmers markets). They were creating new buinesses in the hollowed out city.
Paula has accused me of being some sort of epicurean. That streak comes from this time.
People were leaving high-powered jobs in finance and banking to open coffee shops. To thrive they had to make connections, explain their wares and their interests to every person walking through their doors. There was something very human about it - unalienating. People with an authentic stake in their jobs building new communities.
And it seemed to be powere by a kind of "there but for the grace of god" optimism infecting people in their 30s, relieved that they could still make choices, aware of the generation just above them, parents or older syblings, saddled with debt.
I didn't leave a high-powered job, but I did leave a real job - I suppose I got warpped up in that optimism
Who else lived in that world? People a lot like the characters of Conversations with Friends. A whole generation of young people who were having a very different life from the one I had just a few years before. They had a very different perspective.
If I'd been swept along on the crest of an economic wave, all optimism and options, they'd crashed onto a dull grey beach. A whole generation then who had not received the grace of god. I found myself somewhat disappointed by the lack of energy and motivation among them, in contrast to how the city felt at the time.
In 2012, when I started my masters I was 28. I found myself surrounded by people aged 21 to 24. Rooney wrote Conversations while studying for her masters. She got her degree from Trinity in 2013. And it seems to me that she wrote about the people she knew.
These were people who started college as the recession kicked off. Many with parents who'd found themselves under financial pressure. The options I'd taken for granted weren't open to them. Many of them were doing the masters degree to kill time, unsure of what sorts of job opertunties they'd have.
They didn't think about travel after colledge the way I had. They thought about emigration.
They also didn't think about journalism they way I did. I was there to learn a trade. I had an idealistic view of journalism's power to help people make better decisions.
I was doing journalism to understand the world, to find some connection to my country and culture and politics. I expected that my colleagues, many coming from journalism degrees, would have a huge advantage over me. That they would be embeded in the world in a way I was not.
Not so much.
But they were an interesting bunch, and I liked most of them. They had opinions. There were feminists, campaigners, classics scholars, politics wonks. Some working class, some very out of touch.
What surprised me was the kind of surface-level understanding everyone had. I knew that I had a surface-level understanding. The main reason I was diong journalism was to understand the world better - to get some sense of why things were the way were were.
Journalism, I thought, was where I'd be exposed to new ideas and strong opinions.
Perhaps in another time the journalism masters might have felt like that, but not right then in 2012.
There were people from journalism families who didn't seem to think critically about the industry at the time. There were people from political families who didn't seem to have an opinion on the state of our democracy.
In some ways it felt like a whole generation of people with no real connection to their time or place, to the history or politics or religion that led to it.
In other ways, they just felt like people. Just wandering through a life that turned out to be far smaller and less promising than the one they'd been promised. They hadn't seen what was possible and therefore weren't motivated to make it for themselves.
You know: people. The didnt' see theeir lives as part of a grander narrative. They weren't striving for anything. They didn't expect wealth or success. But they weren't an underclass either. They didn't push up against anything or agitate for change. They didn't want power.
They were just people. And I couldn't fault them for that- even if I was disappointed that I didn't find myslef in some rarefied air, surrounded by socialsts, idealists and activists.
Rooney writes about those people. And she does so without judgement.
Her characters don't strive or strain or aim to change the world. In Conversations, she presents Francis and Bobbi as ineffectual, over educated, selfish. Francis in particular doesn't care about her studies and never wants to get a real job. But Rooney's characters are also creative and loving and adventurous.
She presents characters that feel so real that they're likely the kinds of people she knew.
Conversations was eventually recommended to me by one of these people, a woman I studied journalism with and later worked with, someone who would have been in Trinity at around the same time as Rooney. The books are representative of a real place and time and people and I recognise all three.