Bobbi’s flirtation with Melissa threatens Frances and Bobbi’s unresolved breakup, and Frances’s affair with Nick is a lopsided exercise in power dynamics. Frances and Bobbi meet a sophisticated married couple, Nick and Melissa, and their entanglements drive the plot. To watch Conversations is to watch her acerbic words detailing the agony of the Millennial experience-so performative! so insecure!-get watered down until they argue nothing at all.Īs an autopsy of a ménage-à-quatre, Conversations the novel is uneasy from the first page. To read Rooney is to read Millennial malaise as interpreted by Europe’s former university-level debate champion. It misses how Conversations marks Rooney at her most darkly observant when it comes to her own age group. But though that naturalistic formula allowed for a rich examination of intimacy in Normal People, it sanitizes Conversations, perhaps the trickiest entry in Rooney’s oeuvre. Sensual, realistically choreographed sex scenes abound, as do heavy silences and meaningful looks. The limited series is atmospheric, evoking the melancholia of the not-quite-adult space in which Rooney’s characters usually exist. Hulu’s adaptation of Conversations With Friends was made by some of the creatives behind the streamer’s hit take on Normal People, and thus feels much like that first venture.

But they exhibit a cerebral interiority that has led to Rooney being hailed as “ the first great millennial novelist.” Through them, she captures the way her generation strives to be cool and insightful while being laden with the anxiety of awareness. Her protagonists are often aloof, even unreadable, in person. Then again, the subconscious tends to be unsubtle-especially the subconscious of Rooney’s characters across her three books, including Normal People. The dream provides a dramatic metaphor for how the reserved Frances has been feeling voiceless next to her gregarious ex-girlfriend turned best friend, Bobbi. “I could feel it, vividly, running back down my throat.”

“The blood tasted thick, clotted and salty,” she recounts. Frances, a college student, dreams that a tooth has come loose in her mouth, leaving a hole that pumps out so much blood, she can’t speak. Early in Sally Rooney’s debut novel, Conversations With Friends, the heroine has a nightmare.

Rooney conversations with friends