Intermezzo, intervention

Spoiler alert: In her latest, Sally Rooney yet again plays the therapist we didn’t realise we needed.

- Stuti Agarwal

Can-cry-at-a-drop-of-ahat club, hello there! I hope it's been a somewhat happy one today; one with those soft reel cries. You know, when you're emotional but can't identify the spectrum of it—and you see a sweet 30 seconds of strangers' parents that help you realise your bunch isn't that crazy after all, a reminder of your partner's beige flags, maybe something that makes you miss a friend without feeling miserable about not having that big fun friends group, just a tiny tot of a monkey running to his mother for a squish after someone took his toy away, or a cat hitting a mouse who's faking its death and it all makes you tear up, but with a slight smile. It's been an anomaly of a few weeks of such nights for me while I have ended the day with a few pages of Sally Rooney's latest, Intermezzo; backaches; and M&S Cheddar and Gouda Crispies.

It isn't often that a fantasy-head like me gets the chance to find myself whole in the books I read. I mean, it is hard to see myself in the antichrist progeny that Linus Baker learns to cherish in TJ Klune's The House in the Cerulean Sea; even Nora Seed as she sifts through her many choices and lives in the multiverse in The Midnight Library by Matt Haig; and what about the hulking Mrs Komachi of Michiko Aoyama's What You Are Looking for is in the Library nonchalantly dishing out life direction to readers in the way of book recommendations.

But, it was different with Rooney. It is always different with Rooney, whose characters never fail to be "reach-out-and-touch-me real" as Kirkus describes them, and I should have expected it when I first began the book despite Rooney pushing her boundaries this time with an exploration of family relationships in ways that have her signature blend of ugliness and softness all at once.