Conversations with Friends - Sally Rooney

I’ve now read all of Sally Rooney’s novels apart from Conversations With Friends and with the new television adaptation hitting our screens recently, I thought it would be a great time to read the novel before watching the television series, which is exactly what I did when Normal People hit our screens back in 2020.

SYNOPSIS: Frances is twenty-one years old, cool-headed, and darkly observant. A college student and aspiring writer, she devotes herself to a life of the mind--and to the beautiful and endlessly self-possessed Bobbi, her best friend and comrade-in-arms. Lovers at school, the two young women now perform spoken-word poetry together in Dublin, where a journalist named Melissa spots their potential. Drawn into Melissa's orbit, Frances is reluctantly impressed by the older woman's sophisticated home and tall, handsome husband. Private property, Frances believes, is a cultural evil--and Nick, a bored actor who never quite lived up to his potential, looks like patriarchy made flesh. But however amusing their flirtation seems at first, it gives way to a strange intimacy neither of them expect. As Frances tries to keep her life in check, her relationships increasingly resist her control: with Nick, with her difficult and unhappy father, and finally even with Bobbi. Desperate to reconcile herself to the desires and vulnerabilities of her body, Frances's intellectual certainties begin to yield to something new: a painful and disorienting way of living from moment to moment.

REVIEW: I found this book to be the best Sally Rooney book that I’ve read. Not that I didn’t enjoy Normal People or Beautiful World, Where Are You but I found Conversations With Friends to be so much more dramatic and I was absolutely hooked. I was utterly obsessed with all the characters but especially Frances and Nick. However, I did find myself questioning whether I actually liked the characters. I found them all to be quite irritating but I was so invested in their story. In typical Sally Rooney style, the characters were hard to love and I found myself being let down by them over and over again but there was just something so encapsulating about each individual character that I just kept going back for more.

I really enjoyed how each character was dealing with their own quite tragic stuff but not necessarily handling it well either. My opinion of Frances changed throughout the story and it wasn’t until I saw Frances’ behaviour through the eyes of another character, that I realised how much I had been rooting for Frances from the very start. If you’ve struggled with Sally Rooney's books before but are still interested in giving this a go, I would definitely recommend Conversations With Friends because although similar in some parts, I would definitely say that, unlike her other books, so much happens in this plot compared to her others. And get ready for a whirlwind of emotions…

READ THIS IF:

👩‍❤️‍👩 You’re looking for a drama-filled novel

👩‍❤️‍👩 You enjoy books with multiple different characters

👩‍❤️‍👩 You’re looking to give Sally Rooney's books a try