Interview

'I have an aversion to failure': Sally Rooney feels the buzz of her debut novel

She has been called the ‘Salinger for the Snapchat generation’. Sally Rooney explains how she wrote Conversations With Friends in a flat-out creative frenzy, and how being a former debating champion helped with the dialogue

Paula Cocozza
Wednesday 24 May 2017

T

o listen to Sally Rooney, you would guess she has always been a great talker. As an undergraduate at Trinity College Dublin, she became Europe’s No 1 student debater. Now she has written her debut novel – Conversations With Friends – which motors along thanks to its brilliant, funny and startling dialogue, most of which is played out between two college students (ex-girlfriends, now best friends) and an older married couple.

One of the students – Frances, the narrator – specialises in barbed retorts and has an affair with the husband. “You’re really handsome, you know,” she tells him. “Is that all I get?” he says. “I thought you liked my personality.” “Do you have one?” she asks. None of Rooney’s characters is ever lost for words, though quite often they find the wrong ones. Their exchanges revolve around what they withhold as much as what they share.

“Dialogue is the most fun to write,” Rooney says. “It’s kind of like a tennis match. Do the first one,” and then ping, ping, “it has to go back and forth.” Across instant messenger, email, text and face-to-face exchanges, her four protagonists play out their relationships, sometimes interested, sometimes opposed, yet as stitched into each other as a thread drawn through a four-hole button. In some ways, these characters are all victims of their own irony. A chasm grows between the spoken and the thought word: “I tried to explain that I felt vulnerable,” the narrator says, “but I did so without using the word ‘vulnerable’ or any synonyms.”

Rooney and I are sitting in the lounge of London’s Grosvenor hotel (she has just flown in from Dublin where she lives) and Rooney’s coffee isn’t getting much of a look-in. Has she always liked to talk? “That’s an interesting question,” she says, which sounds like the sort of reply you might find in a champion debater’s armoury, but in fact she is endearingly open. “I’m very introverted. Easily a few days could go by where I would not really leave the house or talk to anybody other than my partner.” But she has “always been drawn to intense people who like to talk”. Conversations with friends, as well as discussions of feminism, masculinity, gender and politics, helped to fuel the book.

Rooney is 26 and her youth, and the youth of her sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued narrator, have led her editor at Faber to describe her as “Salinger for the Snapchat generation”. The older characters have money, hold parties “full of people wearing long necklaces” (a brilliant condemnation of a generation’s approach to day-to-night dressing), and cook with aubergine and chorizo. But in their use of technology, the generations are more intricately bound, surprisingly conservative. All age groups favour email, as does Rooney. No one has Snapchat. No one takes a selfie. And young Frances is 21 but likes linen dresses and blouses. In many ways, she is an old head on young shoulders.

The book sold in a seven-way auction last year and Rooney, perhaps with the same energy she has in conversation, worked with “huge speed”, writing 100,000 words of Conversations With Friends in three months, while also meeting the deadlines for her master’s in American literature. She had been approached by Tracy Bohan of the Wylie literacy agency, who represents Eimear McBride and Ali Smith, but held off sending her the manuscript.

 

I would rather do two things really well than do 16 and have 14 of them fail

“I would rather do two things really, really, really well than do 16 things and have 14 of them fail,” she says. “I wanted to get the novel as perfect as I could. I think it’s an aversion to failure.”

This is surprising, because perfectionists tend not to be so prolific. But Rooney has been writing constantly since late 2014. She thinks she was able to write so fast because she allowed her mind “to lie fallow for several years producing nothing, just kind of having experiences and thinking about them”. By “experiences”, she means having a coffee with a friend or reading a book – not backpacking in Peru.

Still, she is only 26, so this fallow period couldn’t have been that long. Before the master’s, she dropped out of a master’s in politics, also at Trinity. It was the year between then and starting to write the novel – the one with the coffees and the reading – that allowed her “to go on this incredibly prolific streak” in which she worked 16 or 18 hours a day, not even planning or plotting, just writing. “I can feel that winding down now,” she says. “I feel it’s going to be difficult to convince myself that I’m allowed to just not do anything.”

Why so busy? “I don’t think of myself as busy,” she says, “because I don’t even have to get dressed most days.” She sits at her desk in dressing gown or pyjamas or big jumper. “I guess I’m producing a lot, but I don’t look like I have a very active life to the outside observer.” I am wondering if that should be the other way round: that to the outside observer she seems incredibly productive, but “constantly castigates” herself for not doing enough.

Rooney grew up in Castlebar, “a run-of-the-mill small town in the west of Ireland”. Her dad worked for Telecom Éireann, her mum ran the arts centre. The Rooney children – Sally, her younger sister and older brother – “were always going to see plays and interpretive dance and visual arts”. At 15, she completed her first novel, and while she cheerily calls it “absolute trash”, it is a pretty impressive feat.

I suspect she has always been a high achiever, because at Trinity she won a “very lucrative” scholarship, which gave her space to write. Then, when she decided she wanted to enter into the “glamorous” world of debating, she became No 1 in Europe. “God, I know! I’m such an intense person,” she says. Her story Mr Salary, was shortlisted for the Sunday Times short story award. Trusted friends are already reading her second novel. It’s hardly surprising that Rooney is always being described as “precocious”.

Is there, I wonder, a cut-off for that – an expiry date for precocity? She doesn’t hesitate. “I can get more mileage out of it. Definitely!”

THE GUARDIAN