The New Normal

ALREADY A HUGE HIT IN THE U.K., NORMAL PEOPLE IS THE BUZZIEST NOVEL OF THE YEAR—AND ITS 28-YEAR-OLD AUTHOR, SALLY ROONEY, IS BEING HAILED AS THE ROMANTIC, HYPER-INTELLIGENT VOICE OF HER GENERATION. JUST DON’T TELL HER THAT.

- David Canfield

SALLY ROONEY IS TALKING ABOUT TWITTER. HOW SHE LOVES scrolling through the app for its stupid jokes. How she happily absorbs its many hot takes, as well as the “cycles of people disagreeing with the previous hot take.” How she can’t seem to quit it. “I read my timeline obsessively,” she admits. “I’m always looking at tweets and liking tweets.” Speaking on a crisp mid-March evening from a writing retreat in the hills of Tuscany, Italy, Rooney comes across as chipper, energized, and revealing, just as you’d expect of a clever 28-year-old discussing social media. But she turns suddenly cerebral as she continues: “I used to tweet all the time without thinking about it, but now I’m much more cautious. That’s partly from just getting older, and partly from becoming a very, very minor public figure.”

“Very, very minor”? If she says so. Already a literary celebrity in the U.K., the Irish-born Rooney is preparing to make a major splash Stateside with the publication of her second book, Normal People (April 16). Released in Europe last fall, the novel won multiple major prizes and emerged as a mainstay on national best-seller lists; The Guardian dubbed it “the literary phenomenon of the decade.” And from a creative standpoint, Normal People confirms what Rooney’s 2017 cult-hit debut, Conversations With Friends—a bougie, a sharply realistic comedy of adultery and friendship—promised: Among the vast cohort of new millennial novelists, none are connecting with readers as intimately, or generating as much excitement, as Sally Rooney.