How she loves scrolling through the app for its stupid jokes.
How she can’t seem to quit it.
“I read my timeline obsessively,” she admits.
Credit: Illustration by Meryl Rowin for EW
“I’m always looking at tweets and liking tweets.”
“Very, very minor”?
If she says so.
Her novels locate tension primarily in dialogue, propelled by the nuances and revelations of everyday interaction.
He’s working-class, she’s beyond rich; he’s popular, she’s an outcast.
The aftermath of an economic downturn looms quietly but persistently.
Rooney has the confidence to choose email over Facebook for her twentysomething heroes' mode of communication.
“They don’t have Instagram accounts or Snapchat or whatever,” Rooney explains.
The couple eventually break up.
Then they try being friends.
They get back together.
They break up again.
Every sex scene is distinctive, no small feat in the age of Bad Sex in Fiction awards.
Every eloquent email they send to each other is more charged intellectually, spiritually, sexually than the last.
When Rooney speaks about her work, she speaks about her world.
She radiates curiosity about politics, people, behavior about life.
She writes with spare, unfussy clarity, developing vivid images and feelings out of a few words.
“Her characters and their situations are specific, but their psychological and emotional experiences are universal.”
But she wroteNormal Peoplein total anonymity, too, beforeConversationswas published.
This book," she wrote ofConversations.
“I read it in a day.
I hear I’m not alone”), while Lena Dunhamdid the sameon Twitter.
She’s still getting nominated for awards.
“And [Normal People] hasn’t even come out in the United States yet!”
“[It’s] reached a level of attention that I was not prepared for.
It’s been very intense.”
(Production begins later this year.)
“But when this came along, I just loved it so much I couldn’t say no.
I really couldn’t get it out of my head.
It’s hard to say how she achieves this sense of depth and insight that she does.”
Another fan, in other words.
And Rooney is excited about the challenge of writing within a new form.
But anyway back to Twitter.
Then it’s back to real life.
She’s never done this before model the reclusive-novelist cliche because she’s never really had the chance.
Then Rooney corrects herself.
“To cut myself off completely wouldn’t be right for me.
It’s part of living in the world.
And the world is what I write about.”
