Normal People By Sally Rooney

Published By Faber and Faber

Buy It: here

What The Blurb Says:

Connell and Marianne grow up in the same small town in rural Ireland. The similarities end there; they are from very different worlds. When they both earn places at Trinity College in Dublin, a connection that has grown between them lasts long into the following years.

This is an exquisite love story about how a person can change another person’s life – a simple yet profound realisation that unfolds beautifully over the course of the novel. It tells us how difficult it is to talk about how we feel and it tells us – blazingly – about cycles of domination, legitimacy and privilege. Alternating menace with overwhelming tenderness, Sally Rooney’s second novel breathes fiction with new life.

What I Say:

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me, says Marianne.  I don’t know why I can’t be like normal people.”

It’s about Marianne and Connell.

It’s about what it means to be part of the in-crowd and what it means to be on the outside looking in.

It’s about finding a best friend and a lover when you least expect it. 

It’s about holding them close and pushing them away because you don’t believe you deserve to be happy or that you can make them happy.

It’s about worrying what everyone else thinks and being so absorbed in each other that you don’t care what anyone else thinks as long as you are together.

It’s about believing that together you are invincible and that apart you are rootless.

It’s about doubting everything you say and think and believing you have no worth. 

It’s about realising that you mean something to someone and that their belief in you is enough but still not enough.

It’s about thinking they are everything and without them you are nothing, and finding out that you can survive without them but feeling guilty for doing so.

It’s about believing you are worth nothing and that you always deserve to be treated that way.

It’s about feeling so overwhelmed that you can’t move and finding that the person who knows you best will lie with you until you can.

It’s about understanding that you can never completely be together and that you will never be apart.

It’s about being too scared to say what you truly want and having the confidence to say enough.

It’s about understanding there may be others, but knowing they will always find their way back to you.

It’s about facing the truth about the families we come from and the families we wish we had.

It’s about realising that you can just survive when you are apart and that you only truly exist when you are together.

It’s about loving someone so much that you put the rest of their life first, even though it means you are not part of it.

It’s about every imperfect perfect all consuming wonderful heartbreaking relationship you have ever had.

It’s about Marianne and Connell.

“You should go she says. I’ll always be here. You know that.”