There can be only one Sally Rooney

A FEW YEARS AGO, SOMEONE POSTED a photo of a man walking through Brooklyn with a copy of Conversations With Friends tucked in the back of his trousers, the words SALLY ROONEY peeking out above his waistband. It was an accessory that telegraphed as much about his personal style as his choice in attire did. Less than a month earlier, the book critic Constance Grady had published an essay titled "The Cult of Sally Rooney," deeming it "aspirational" to be a fan: "If you read Sally Rooney, the thinking seems to go, you're smart, but you're also fun and you're also cool enough to be suspicious of both 'smart' and 'fun' as general concepts."

- KATE DWYER

Thanks in part to endorsements from Taylor Swift, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Lena Dunham, Rooney, the 33-year-old Irish novelist known for her exacting, witty portraits of the romantic and sexual entanglements of Dublin millennials, broke out in 2017 with her debut novel. Her name quickly became a shorthand for a cultural sensibility-the way young people in the late 2010s sublimated their deep uncertainty into a performance of anticapitalism and avoidant attachment. Conversations With Friends probed the ambiguities of friendship and affairs, while Rooney's second novel, Normal People, published in the U.S. in 2019, charted how social class and miscommunication derailed a romance.

With both books, Rooney had captured a mood. She has sold millions copies of her novels, which also include 2021's Beautiful World, Where Are You, in an age when most books sell fewer than 5,000 copies. Both Normal People and Conversations With Friends have been adapted into popular TV series. Ahead of her fourth novel, Intermezzo, out Sept. 24, 140 bookstores across the U.S. will host release parties-a treatment usually reserved for blockbuster series about wizards, fairies, and vampires.

Selling literary fiction is notoriously difficult-one publisher told Granta he estimates the category has only 20,000 "serious and consistent readers" in the U.S.-yet Rooney has managed to recruit fans who rarely read for pleasure. No one expected her success. Conversations With Friends was a sleeper hit, picking up momentum in the year after it was published almost entirely because of word-of-mouth buzz. Many have wondered: For the literary world's sake, could the Sally Rooney effect be reproduced?