Sally Rooney: the superstar writer who hates her ‘great millennial novelist’ label

Nothing sets literary pulses racing like a new Sally Rooney novel. When her fourth book, Intermezzo , arrives later this month, you can expect bookshops to be thronged by hordes of millennial fans. Some stores are even opening at midnight, such is the demand. There’ll be the inevitable branded tote bags, and special edition covers. A select few readers have already spent the last few months sneaking their advance proof copies into their Instagram stories, for the ultimate highbrow humblebrag.

Rooney’s first three books, released in quick succession over a four-year period, explore tangled human relationships, the power dynamics that emerge within them, and the myriad ways we understand others. Her prose is stylishly spare, sometimes almost surgically precise. A classic Rooney character is hyper-articulate, yet terrible at communicating how they really feel; they’ve become avatars for an emotionally unmoored generation that has come of age against a backdrop of economic and political turmoil. Since the release of her debut Conversations With Friends in 2017, the then 26-year-old Rooney (she’s now 33) has been touted as the first great millennial author. But she’s also perhaps the most reluctant one.

Although she is notoriously private , we do have a few flashes of insight into Rooney’s early life. She grew up in Castlebar in County Mayo, Ireland, where her father worked as a technician for a telecoms company while her mother ran a local arts centre. She and her two siblings were raised with the Marxist values she’d go on to explore in her writing; Marx’s slogan “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” was a common maxim in the Rooney household. Her literary precociousness began at the age of 15 when she joined a local writing group – one of its leaders later told the New Yorker that even as a teen, there was “a thread of steel running through her” – and tried to write a novel. These early efforts were, in her words, “absolute trash” – but she did manage to get two poems published in Irish literary journal The Stinging Fly while she was still at secondary school.

When she headed to Dublin in 2009 to study English at Trinity College, she found herself thrown into a very different social environment. “What I wasn’t prepared for was encountering the class of people who run the country,” she told the New Yorker . It’s a sensation she’d later examine in Normal People , when working-class protagonist Connell feels adrift among classmates who wear “waxed hunting jackets and plum-coloured chinos”. But while Connell’s response is to withdraw into himself, overwhelmed by “a sense of crushing inferiority” during tutorials or at house parties, Rooney seemed to view the situation as a challenge. “I had a feeling, on one hand, of being appalled, but on the other hand, a real sense of wanting to prove myself to people, to prove I’m just as good as they are,” she recalled.

She’d soon do just that as a star of Trinity’s debating society. Rooney was initially drawn in, she’d explain in her 2015 essay “Even If You Beat Me”, by the “clear and definable” rules of competitive debating – and the way that success seemed to translate into popularity. For her, a debate presented a “fantasy of invulnerability, of total control”, where she could put forward arguments without anyone getting “upset or angry … [with] all the pleasures of conflict without ever really showing my hand”. It’s not difficult to find traces of her debating past in the lofty back and forth that her undergraduate characters sometimes engage in, trying out opinions for size, often more for the thrill of the argument than for any real convictions.

Rooney attended competitions across Ireland and around the world, eventually winning the European championships. But she also became perturbed by her capacity to convincingly argue a position she didn’t necessarily believe in. By the end, she “no longer found it fun to think of ways in which capitalism benefits the poor, or things oppressed people should do about their oppression”, she wrote in “Even If You Beat Me”, which was published in The Dublin Review . “Actually I found it depressing and vaguely immoral.”

That essay marked the end of one chapter but inadvertently started another one, when it caught the attention of Tracy Bohan, a literary agent at the prestigious Wylie Agency. Bohan asked Rooney to share any fiction she was working on; in response, she sent over the manuscript for Conversations With Friends , having written a first draft over a frenetic three-month period while also studying for a master’s degree in American literature. When Bohan passed it on to publishers, a seven-way bidding war ensued, eventually won by Faber.

Published in the summer of 2017, Rooney’s debut told the story of Frances and Bobbi, best friends, ex-lovers and Trinity College undergrads who perform spoken word poetry as a duo. When Melissa, a successful writer and photographer in her thirties, asks to profile them for a magazine piece, they are drawn into the orbit of her and her actor husband, Nick. Soon Frances, who is a more diffident foil to the outspoken, charismatic Bobbi, starts having an affair with Nick, embroiling the four of them in a fraught quadrangle. Conversations With Friends quickly established Rooney’s style. Her prose was pared back and unadorned, but bracingly acute. Her sharp dialogue, which she’s likened to a tennis match, danced back and forth; speech marks were completely absent. She seamlessly integrated emails and chat histories into her narrative, nailing the ways we present ourselves online without straining to write an “internet novel”.

It soon became a word-of-mouth hit. The Times placed it in the millennial canon as “a novel to set beside Lena Dunham’s television series Girls [and] Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s sitcom Fleabag ”. Zadie Smith , probably the last author to cause a similar stir with their first novel, hailed it as a “debut where you just can’t believe that it was a debut”. An editor at Faber described her as “Salinger for the Snapchat generation”, a phrase that proved irresistible for marketeers and journalists; soon it seemed to crop up in every Rooney review or interview (“I remember thinking at the time, what is Snapchat?” she later told Vogue , summing up the disconnect between the Rooney of marketing speak and the actual author).

She seamlessly integrated emails and chat histories into her narrative, nailing the ways we present ourselves online

Rooney’s star would only rise higher when Normal People was released the following year. The will-they, won’t-they story of Connell and Marianne – classmates from the same town with very different class backgrounds, who drift in and out of each other’s lives when they both go on to study at Trinity – felt even more assured than Conversations With Friends. It also gave Rooney more scope to explore Marxist ideas, questioning how capitalism might shape or hinder a love story. The Guardian described it as a “future classic”. And weeks before it was even released, it appeared on the Booker Prize longlist, making Rooney the youngest of that year’s longlisted authors; although she didn’t make the shortlist, she later became the youngest author to win the Costa Novel Award .

Soon the phrase “the new Sally Rooney” became the publishing industry’s favourite bit of marketing speak: a way to stir up anticipation for a new release from another twentysomething female novelist writing about relationships (the Rooney comparisons came thicker and faster if said female novelist was also Irish). What really brought Rooney-mania into the mainstream, though, was the BBC and Hulu’s adaptation of Normal People , which arrived in April 2020, just weeks into the coronavirus lockdown.  It was a near-perfect screen translation of Rooney’s understated writing style (she worked on the scripts alongside Succession writer and playwright Alice Birch), capturing the pain and intensity of first love at a time when we were collectively starved of intimacy. Viewers could live vicariously through Paul Mescal ’s Connell and Daisy Edgar-Jones ’s Marianne; both actors were relative unknowns when they were cast, but soon found themselves in the odd position of rapidly becoming very famous indeed while not being able to leave their houses. That year, Normal People was the most popular show on BBC iPlayer, streamed more than 62 million times, and the book ended up back on bestseller lists.

So when news broke that Rooney’s third novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You , would arrive in 2021, expectations were sky-high. The promotional circus stepped up a gear, turning the lead-up to its release into a publishing event not unlike the fanfare that used to herald a new Harry Potter book back in the Noughties. Literary influencers received Rooney-branded bucket hats and tote bags from her publisher, emblazoned with illustrations from the novel’s cover art. A pop-up shop appeared in east London, offering candle-making and calligraphy classes.

When a writer is crowned the spokesperson of their generation, a backlash inevitably brews. None of this commotion helped stem a cynical but growing school of thought that saw Rooney and her work as symbols of a sort of aspirational literary chic for middle-class millennials: stories for and about people who liked muted prose and New Yorker totes. What was Marxist about braided bucket hats, the detractors whispered?

She’d never seemed particularly at ease talking about her personal life, but in interviews ahead of Beautiful World ’s release, you got the impression that Rooney was pretty uncomfortable with all the attention focused on her. She bristled at the way that she’d been coopted as a millennial oracle, without ever presenting herself as such. “Your name becomes a kind of floating signifier that people can attach to things that have nothing to do with you,” she told the New York Times . “And you’re like, wait, no, I want that back! That’s mine!”

She bristled at the way that she’d been coopted as a millennial oracle, without ever presenting herself as such

That discomfort was yet more obvious in the novel itself. Among its quartet of main characters is Alice, a young author recovering from a breakdown after the success of her first few books. “People who intentionally become famous [...] are deeply psychologically ill,” she opines. The book’s reviews weren’t quite as universally warm as those that had heralded Normal People; some readers were put off by the dense, philosophical email trail between Alice and her friend Eileen, an editor at a literary magazine. Rooney’s refusal to sell translation rights to an Israeli publisher , as part of her commitment to the pro-Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, made headlines too (she remains a staunch supporter of the Palestinian cause).

Following her difficult third novel and a disappointing TV adaptation of Conversations With Friends , criticised for flat dialogue and a central love story that lacked the heat of Mescal and Edgar-Jones, the anticipation for Rooney’s fourth book has a slight edge to it. Intermezzo , set to be released on 24 September, sounds like exactly the sort of thing that will thrill her devotees and give her detractors more ammunition. It will introduce us to another group of characters with interwoven lives: “Because my protagonists arrive pre-entangled in their various relationships, my job is a lot easier,” she recently told the New Yorker. But this time, the focus is on a pair of brothers – competitive chess player Ivan and his older sibling Peter, a lawyer working in Dublin – dealing with the death of their father.

Grief will surely prove to be fertile emotional territory for Rooney. But whatever the Intermezzo reviews are like, you get the impression that she is her own harshest critic – and that it’s this self-scrutiny, rather than public acclaim, that will keep pushing her forward, and make her ever more ambitious in her writing. The tension between the public circus and the private author will only make it more interesting to watch her career unfold.