Conversations with Friends

Description

NOW A HULU ORIGINAL SERIES • From the New York Times bestselling author of Normal People . . . “[A] cult-hit . . . [a] sharply realistic comedy of adultery and friendship.”—Entertainment Weekly
 
SALLY ROONEY NAMED TO THE TIME 100 NEXT LIST • WINNER OF THE SUNDAY TIMES (UK) YOUNG WRITER OF THE YEAR AWARD • ONE OF BUZZFEED’S BEST BOOKS OF THE DECADE • ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Vogue, Slate • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Elle

Frances is a coolheaded and darkly observant young woman, vaguely pursuing a career in writing while studying in Dublin. Her best friend is the beautiful and endlessly self-possessed Bobbi. At a local poetry performance one night, they meet a well-known photographer, and as the girls are then gradually drawn into her world, Frances is reluctantly impressed by the older woman’s sophisticated home and handsome husband, Nick. But however amusing Frances and Nick’s flirtation seems at first, it begins to give way to a strange—and then painful—intimacy.

Written with gemlike precision and marked by a sly sense of humor, Conversations with Friends is wonderfully alive to the pleasures and dangers of youth, and the messy edges of female friendship.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD

“Sharp, funny, thought-provoking . . . a really great portrait of two young women as they’re figuring out how to be adults.”—Celeste Ng, Late Night with Seth Meyers Podcast

“The dialogue is superb, as are the insights about communicating in the age of electronic devices. Rooney has a magical ability to write scenes of such verisimilitude that even when little happens they’re suspenseful.”—Curtis Sittenfeld, The Week

“Rooney has the gift of imbuing everyday life with a sense of high stakes . . . a novel of delicious frictions.”—New York

“A writer of rare confidence, with a lucid, exacting style . . . One wonderful aspect of Rooney’s consistently wonderful novel is the fierce clarity with which she examines the self-delusion that so often festers alongside presumed self-knowledge. . . . But Rooney’s natural power is as a psychological portraitist. She is acute and sophisticated about the workings of innocence; the protagonist of this novel about growing up has no idea just how much of it she has left to do.”—Alexandra Schwartz, The New Yorker

“This book. This book. I read it in one day. I hear I’m not alone.”—Sarah Jessica Parker (Instagram)Praise for Conversations with Friends:

A Publishers Weekly Pick of the Week
Vogue’s 10 Best Books of 2017 
Slate’s 10 Favorite Books of the Year 
Elle’s Best Books of the Year 
The Cut’s Best Books by Women
Vulture‘s “Best New Paperbacks”

“A writer of rare confidence, with a lucid, exacting style… [O]ne wonderful aspect of Rooney’s consistently wonderful novel is the fierce clarity with which she examines the self-delusion that so often festers alongside presumed self-knowledge… But Rooney’s natural power is as a psychological portraitist. She is acute and sophisticated about the workings of innocence; the protagonist of this novel about growing up has no idea just how much of it she has left to do.”
– The New Yorker

“Rooney has the gift of imbuing everyday life with a sense of high stakes…a novel of delicious frictions.”
– New York Magazine

“I love debuts where you just can’t believe that it was a debut… Conversations with Friends paints a nuanced, page-turning portrait of a whip-smart university student in the throes of an affair with an older married man.”
– Zadie Smith, Elle 

“The dialogue is superb, as are the insights about communicating in the age of electronic devices. Rooney has a magical ability to write scenes of such verisimilitude that even when little happens they’re suspenseful.”
– Curtis Sittenfeld, The Week

“Sharp, funny, thought-provoking . . . a really great portrait of two young women as they’re figuring out how to be adults.”
– Celeste Ng, “Late Night with Seth Meyers Podcast” 

“This book. This book. I read it in one day. I hear I’m not alone.”
– Sarah Jessica Parker (Instagram)

“The self-deceptions of a new generation are at the core of Sally Rooney’s debut, Conversations With Friends (Hogarth), which captures something wonderfully odd-cornered and real in the story of an Irish millennial…”
– Megan O’Grady, Vogue‘s 10 Best Books of 2017

“The debut novel of a young Irish writer whose forthcoming novel Normal People earned her rave reviews and a Booker Prize nomination, Conversations With Friends is one of those campus novels in which all of the real education takes place off campus. When two young women, best friends but former lovers, become friendly with an older married couple, their lives intertwine and explode in a coming-of-age story that’s weightier and wiser than you might expect.”
– Maris Kreizman, Vulture‘s “Best New Paperbacks” column

“[A] bracing, miraculous debut.”
– The Millions

“Sally Rooney’s debut novel is a remarkably charming exploration of that very uncharming subject: the human ego…Conversations With Friends sparkles with controlled rhetoric. But it ends up emphasizing the truths exploding in the silences.”
– Slate

“In this searing, insightful debut, Rooney offers an unapologetic perspective on the vagaries of relationships… a treatise on married life, the impact of infidelity, the ramifications of one’s actions, and how the person one chooses to be with can impact one’s individuality. Throughout, Rooney’s descriptive eye lends beauty and veracity to this complex and vivid story.”
– Publishers Weekly (starred)

“Readers who enjoyed Belinda McKeon’s Tender and Caitriona Lally’s Eggshells will enjoy this exceptional debut.”
– Library Journal (starred)

“A smart, sexy, realistic portrayal of a woman finding herself.”
– Booklist (starred)

“An astonishing assured debut.”
– The Bookseller 

“The book of the summer…the wider issues underscoring her book – including race, sex and gender – which in her careful treatment, emerge far more complex and often funnier, than we could have ever imagined.” 
– Refinery29

“A very funny, very humanly messy tale of sexual and artistic self-discovery in which every page reveals shrewd emotional insight. Caught between laser-eyed irony and heart-melting sincerity, the book is a masterclass in narrative tone that left me desperate to read whatever Rooney writes next… ​An addictive, funny and truthful first novel about love and literature​.​”
– Metro 

“[Sally] Rooney has managed to take something old, the romance novel, and make it new: Frances is a bisexual communist student, allergic to expressing emotion, and her love affair is with a married man, and yet the book makes no attempt to make a moral stand on fidelity or punish its characters for their passions. The effect is, frankly, riveting, and creates a peculiar sensation of danger…An addictive read.”
– Rufi Thorpe, author of The Girls From Corona del Mar and Dear Fang, With Love

“Sally Rooney’s writing is cool, wry and smooth, and gives the reader a sense of being in the lucky position of overhearing not only what fascinating strangers are talking about, but also what they’re thinking. I was riveted til the last page.” 
– Emily Gould, author of Friendship

“Fascinating, ferocious and shrewd. Sally Rooney has the sharpest eye for all of the most delicate cruelties of human interaction.”
– Lisa McInerney, author of The Glorious Heresies (winner of the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction)

“[Sally] Rooney captures the mood and voice of contemporary women and their interpersonal connections and concerns without being remotely predictable…A clever and current book about a complicated woman and her romantic relationships.”
– Kirkus 

“Rooney writes so well of the condition of being a young, gifted but self-destructive woman, both the mentality and physicality of it. She is alert to the invisible bars imprisoning the apparently free. Though herself young – she was born in 1991 – she has already been shortlisted for this year’s Sunday Times EFG short story award. Her hyperarticulate characters may fail to communicate their fragile selves, but Rooney does it for them in a voice distinctively her own.”
– The Guardian

“A novelist to watch: An addictive debut, with nods to Tender is the Night, heralds a bright new talent.”
- Sunday Times

“A contemporary love story so powerful, graceful and honest it left me reeling. [Conversations with Friends] is, by turns, astonishing, heart-rending and perfect; there’s not a word out of place.”
– Luke Kennard, author of The Transition

“Sally Rooney is a writer going all the way to the top. Conversations with Friends features the 21st century, Irish descendents of Salinger’s guileless wiseasses brought to life in prose as taut and coolly poised as early Bret Easton Ellis.”
– Colin Barrett, author of Young Skins

“There’s not a beat out of place in Sally Rooney’s astonishingly poised writing. Conversations with Friends is the most sophisticated and perceptive novel I’ve read about relationships in the 2010s.”
– Gavin Corbett, author of This Is The Way and Green Glowing Skull

“Written with such precision and perceptiveness, full of arid humour and reckless despair, a novel of spine-tingling salience.”
– Sara Baume, author of Spill Simmer Falter Wither and winner of the 2015 Geoffrey Faber Memorial PrizeSally Rooney was born in the west of Ireland in 1991. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta and The London Review of Books. Winner of the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, she is the author of Conversations with Friends. In 2019, she was named to the inaugural Time 100 Next list.In order to provide reading groups with the most informed and thought-provoking questions possible, it is necessary to reveal important aspects of the plot of this novel. If you have not finished reading Conversations with Friends, we respectfully suggest that you wait before reviewing this guide.

1. Bobbi tells Frances that she doesn’t “have a ‘real personality,’” but she insisted it was a compliment. What do you think Bobbi meant by this?

2. How did your perceptions of Frances and Bobbi as individuals change, if they changed at all? Do you sense their self-perceptions—or egos—changed as well?

3. Were you surprised by Frances’s attraction to Nick? In what ways did their affair and attractions meet or subvert your expectations?

4. Melissa suggests that Frances’ relationship with her own father affects how she views her relationship with Nick. In what ways do the characters’ parents shape their views on love?
 

5. Frances claims to be “anti-love,” and she and Bobbi compare love to a “social value system.” Do you think their actions reflect this belief?

6. Towards the end of the novel, Frances decides to publish a story that Bobbi feels exploits their friendship. Do you agree or disagree with Frances’s decision? How could she have communicated about this with Bobbi?

7. Why do you think the author chose to omit quotation marks in dialogue? How did the different forms of communications (i.e. text, instant message, email) used throughout impact the characters’ impressions of one another and their actions? Do you think the relationship between Frances and Nick would have evolved differently without technology?

8. Consider Frances’ professed “disinterest in wealth,” Bobbi’s frequent assertion that Frances is a communist, and the other discussions surrounding employment, money, and economic systems throughout the book. What role do these ideas play in the novel? How do you think Frances’s beliefs about work and money inform her relationships?

9. The relationship between Frances and Bobbi evolves throughout the novel. How does their power dynamic shift, and what factors affect it? Where do you see their relationship heading?
 

10. Frances struggles with endometriosis and self-harm throughout the novel. How would you characterize her relationship with her body? In what ways does this affect her relationships with those around her?
 

11. The novel ends on an ambiguous note. Were you surprised by the last lines? What do you think will happen with Frances and Nick’s relationship?

Chapter 1

Bobbi and I first met Melissa at a poetry night in town, where we were performing together. Melissa took our photograph outside, with Bobbi smoking and me self-consciously holding my left wrist in my right hand, as if I was afraid the wrist was going to get away from me. Melissa used a big professional camera and kept lots of different lenses in a special camera pouch. She chatted and smoked while taking the pictures. She talked about our performance and we talked about her work, which we’d come across on the internet. Around midnight the bar closed. It was starting to rain then, and Melissa told us we were welcome to come back to her house for a drink.

We all got into the back of a taxi together and started fixing up our seat belts. Bobbi sat in the middle, with her head turned to speak to Melissa, so I could see the back of her neck and her little spoon-like ear. Melissa gave the driver an address in Monkstown and I turned to look out the window. A voice came on the radio to say the words: eighties . . . pop. . . classics. Then a jingle played. I felt excited, ready for the challenge of visiting a stranger’s home, already preparing compliments and certain facial expressions to make myself seem charming.

The house was a semi-detached red-brick, with a sycamore tree outside. Under the streetlight the leaves looked orange and artificial. I was a big fan of seeing the insides of other people’s houses, especially people who were slightly famous like Melissa. Right away I decided to remember everything about her home, so I could describe it to our other friends later and Bobbi could agree.

When Melissa let us in, a little red spaniel came racing up the hall and started barking at us. The hallway was warm and the lights were on. Next to the door was a low table where someone had left a stack of change, a hairbrush and an open tube of lipstick. There was a Modigliani print hanging over the staircase, a nude woman reclining. I thought: this is a whole house. A family could live here.

We have guests, Melissa called down the corridor.

No one appeared so we followed her into the kitchen. I remember seeing a dark wooden bowl filled with ripe fruit, and noticing the glass conservatory. Rich people, I thought. I was always thinking about rich people then. The dog had followed us to the kitchen and was snuffling around at our feet, but Melissa didn’t mention the dog so neither did we.

Wine? Melissa said. White or red?

She poured huge, bowl-sized glasses and we all sat around a low table. Melissa asked us how we’d started out performing spoken word poetry together. We had both just finished our third year of university at the time, but we’d been performing together since we were in school. Exams were over by then. It was late May.

Melissa had her camera on the table and occasionally lifted it to take a photograph, laughing self-deprecatingly about being a ‘work addict’. She lit a cigarette and tipped the ash into a kitschy-looking glass ashtray. The house didn’t smell of smoke at all and I wondered if she usually smoked in there or not.

I made some new friends, she said.

Her husband was in the kitchen doorway. He held up his hand to acknowledge us and the dog started yelping and whining and running around in circles.

This is Frances, said Melissa. And this is Bobbi. They’re poets.

He took a bottle of beer out of the fridge and opened it on the countertop.

Come and sit with us, Melissa said.

Yeah, I’d love to, he said, but I should try and get some sleep before this flight.

The dog jumped up on a kitchen chair near where he was standing and he reached out absently to touch its head. He asked Melissa if she had fed the dog, she said no. He lifted the dog into his arms and let the dog lick his neck and jaw. He said he would feed her, and he went back out the kitchen door again.

Nick’s filming tomorrow morning in Cardiff, said Melissa. We already knew that the husband was an actor. He and Melissa were frequently photographed together at events, and we had friends of friends who had met them. He had a big, handsome face, and looked like he could comfortably pick Melissa up under one arm and fend off interlopers with the other.

He’s very tall, Bobbi said.

Melissa smiled as if ‘tall’ was a euphemism for something, but not necessarily something flattering. The conversation moved on. We got into a short discussion about the government and the Catholic Church. Melissa asked us if we were religious and we said no. She said she found religious occasions, like funerals or weddings, ‘comforting in a kind of sedative way’. They’re communal, she said. There’s something nice about that for the neurotic individualist. And I went to a convent school so I still know most of the prayers.

We went to a convent school, said Bobbi. It posed issues. Melissa grinned and said: like what?

Well, I’m gay, said Bobbi. And Frances is a communist.

I also don’t think I remember any of the prayers, I said. We sat there talking and drinking for a long time. I remember that we talked about the poet Patricia Lockwood, who we admired, and also about what Bobbi disparagingly called ‘pay gap feminism’. I started to get tired and a little drunk. I couldn’t think of anything witty to say and it was hard to arrange my face in a way that would convey my sense of humour. I think I laughed and nodded a lot. Melissa told us she was working on a new book of essays. Bobbi had read her first one, but I hadn’t.

It’s not very good, Melissa told me. Wait till the next one comes out.

At about three o’clock, she showed us to the spare room and told us how great it was to meet us and how glad she was that we were staying. When we got into bed I stared up at the ceiling and felt very drunk. The room was spinning repetitively in short, consecutive spins. Once I adjusted my eyes to one rotation, another would begin immediately. I asked Bobbi if she was also having a problem with that but she said no.

She’s amazing, isn’t she? said Bobbi. Melissa. I like her, I said.

We could hear her voice in the corridor, and her footsteps taking her from room to room. Once when the dog barked we could hear her yell something, and then her husband’s voice. But after that we fell asleep. We didn’t hear him leave.

 

Bobbi and I had first met in secondary school. Back then Bobbi was very opinionated, and frequently spent time in detention for a behavioural offence our school called ‘disrupting teaching and learning’. When we were sixteen she got her nose pierced and took up smoking. Nobody liked her. She got temporarily suspended once for writing ‘fuck the patriarchy’ on the wall beside a plaster cast of the crucifixion. There was no feeling of solidarity around this incident. Bobbi was considered a show-off. Even I had to admit that teaching and learning went a lot more smoothly during the week she was gone.

When we were seventeen we had to attend a fundraising dance in the school assembly hall, with a partially broken disco ball casting lights on the ceiling and the barred-up windows. Bobbi wore a flimsy summer dress and looked like she hadn’t brushed her hair. She was radiantly attractive, which meant everyone had to work hard not to pay her any attention. I told her I liked her dress. She gave me some of the vodka she was drinking from a Coke bottle and asked if the rest of the school was locked up. We checked the door up to the back staircase and found it was open. All the lights were off and no one else was up there. We could hear the music buzzing through the floorboards, like a ringtone belonging to someone else. Bobbi gave me some more of her vodka and asked me if I liked girls. It was very easy to act unfazed around her. I just said: sure.

I wasn’t betraying anyone’s loyalties by being Bobbi’s girlfriend. I didn’t have close friends and at lunchtime I read textbooks alone in the school library. I liked the other girls, I let them copy my homework, but I was lonely and felt unworthy of real friendship. I made lists of the things I had to improve about myself. After Bobbi and I started seeing each other, everything changed. No one asked for my homework anymore. At lunchtime we walked along the car park holding hands and people looked away from us maliciously. It was fun, the first real fun I’d ever had.

After school we used to lie in her room listening to music and talking about why we liked each other. These were long and intense conversations, and felt so momentous to me that I secretly transcribed parts of them from memory in the evenings. When Bobbi talked about me it felt like seeing myself in a mirror for the first time. I also looked in actual mirrors more often. I started taking a close interest in my face and body, which I’d never done before. I asked Bobbi questions like: do I have long legs? Or short?

At our school graduation ceremony we performed a spoken word piece together. Some of the parents cried, but our classmates just looked out the assembly-room windows or talked quietly amongst themselves. Several months later, after more than a year together, Bobbi and I broke up.

US

Additional information

Weight	8.4 oz
Dimensions	0.6800 × 5.1800 × 7.9400 in
Imprint	Crown
Format	General Trade
ISBN-13	09780451499066
ISBN-10	0451499069
Author	Sally Rooney
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	FIC044000, FIC043000
Subjects	gifts for friends female, Female friendship, gifts for readers, gifts for her, gifts for book lovers, bisexuality, actor gifts, friendship gifts for women, young women, booker, dublin, love affair, irish gifts for women, gifts for young men, irish gifts for men, gift for girlfriend, slam poetry, sally rooney, normal people sally rooney, poetry, actor, affair, love triangle, FIC044000, FIC043000, Irish, Man Booker, ireland, sexuality, Summer reads, gifts for women, trinity college, France, girlfriend, poems, gifts for photographers, photographer gifts