Hot takes on Intermezzo, in which the Normal People author turns her attention to two grieving brothers and their messy love lives, have ranged from it being the best thing the author has ever written to just about the worst. What can we glean from the way Rooney portrays fashion, critics have asked. Or thinness? Or sex?
Rooney herself doesn’t seem too interested in being part of the hype. She wears her fame as if it were a nuisance, or, at best, an unwanted byproduct of the only thing she is actually interested in doing: writing. Publishing a novel “is stressful, and I don’t cope with it very well”, she told French newspaper Le Monde.
“For the first few books, I couldn’t understand why I was experiencing so much stress and I blamed myself for not coping better, and so on,” she said. “Now, I just brace myself for about five or six months of unpleasantness before my life goes back to normal. Because I only publish a book once every few years, I think this is an acceptable compromise that allows me to get on with my work in the meantime.”
That’s not to say the author disregards the power she has – in fact, she has used her platform to make repeated stands against what she described as “genocide” on the part of Israel in Gaza, choosing not to have Beautiful World translated into Hebrew by an Israeli publishing house and beginning her event at London’s Southbank Centre on Wednesday with a statement expressing her solidarity with Palestinians.
As an ardent Marxist and anti-consumerist, it’s hard to believe that Rooney would approve of the way bucket hats and tote bags made to promote her books have become status symbols. The fact that books themselves are products “is disturbing to me in a way”, she told her Southbank audience, and even at an event that was ostensibly encouraging people to buy her new novel, she pointed out that “you can also get [Intermezzo] from libraries, and I recommend that you do”.
Rooney might not be a natural fit for the publicity circuit, yet, somewhat paradoxically, that is part of her charm. Just as excitement around Elena Ferrante is heightened by the fact she is anonymous, Rooney fans admire the fact that this is an author who is not willing to play the game, who stands up for the things she believes in – who isn’t, in short, a Normal Person.
“I am really interested in what’s considered ‘normal’,” Rooney told her Southbank audience, laughing at the fact that “normal people” is something she can no longer say. “I’ve lost that from my lexicon, which is a shame because it’s otherwise a phrase I use quite a lot.”
Discussing the fact that some readers assume that her books are autofiction, she said: “It would be a lot more normal if I just wrote a bunch of stuff that happened to me, because it’s conceivable why a human being would want to do that.”
“When I say, ‘No, you know, I was sitting on the train one day and I just thought, what about if a chess player played a simultaneous exhibition game in a rural arts centre and then the woman who worked there began a love affair with him?’, that just doesn’t seem like something that would happen to someone.”
“And even if it did,” she added, “you wouldn’t then spend three years fleshing out every aspect of their lives. That just makes me seem kind of crazy.”
She is flattered, she said, that “people probably want to believe that I’m not as weird as I would need to be to have written the books that I’ve written”.
“But I am that weird. That is actually what I have done.” And I suspect many readers of Intermezzo will be very grateful that she did.
Sally Rooney. Photograph: David Levenson/Getty Images
