Of The People

It’s hard to keep track of all the book-of the-year accolades SALLY ROONEY has racked up in recent months. The Irish literary phenom is not quite sure what to make of them herself.

- A. N. Devers

About half an hour into our conversation, Sally Rooney and I begin talking about the end of the world as we know it. But maybe it’s best to rewind a bit. When I arrive at the Library Bar, in Rooney’s adopted hometown of Dublin, the 28-year-old author is waiting for me in a low-slung reading chair, politely having chosen a spot next to a window and facing the entryway to avoid any possibility of us missing each other. Hidden on the second floor of the Central Hotel, the bar is unassuming, the kind of place Dubliners know about and tourists miss entirely. It’s cozy.

We say hello and order lunch—a steak sandwich and fries for her, tomato soup for me. It feels appropriate to offer congratulations, since just two days prior, Rooney became the youngest recipient ever of the Costa Novel Award (formerly the Whitbread) for her second book, Normal People. The brilliant coming-of-age novel—out last year in the UK, this month in the U.S.—had already received accolades, such as the Waterstones Book of the Year Award, and had been nominated for the Man Booker Prize. What’s more, Rooney has been dubbed “Salinger for the Snapchat generation” and the “voice of the millennials,” which is a lot of labels. Hype over Normal People has hit such a fever pitch in the literary community that an American friend recently admitted to having been so desperate to read it, she turned to “the black market” to acquire the book.

Rooney nods and says thank you and acknowledges mildly that the praise is nice to hear, but that she is also a bit wary of all the attention. “How am I any more interesting than any other random person on the street?” she asks. “I just don’t get it.”