“Now that my life is different, I don’t know to what extent I can keep doing that or how much of my social world I can now accommodate in my writing.” Reading Rooney’s latest, you can feel her struggling to reconcile her own strange reality with the ideals that have become so much part of her image.īeautiful World, Where Are You builds on the conventions of Rooney’s prior work, exploring themes of millennial romance, female friendship, post-2008 economic precarity, class differences, and the existential malaise of how a (white middle-class) person should be. “Up till now, the books that I’ve written have been about people kind of like me,” reflected Rooney upon the massive popularity of her first two novels. Following that was the predictable backlash, especially around Rooney’s self-proclaimed Marxist politics (which she frequently cites in interviews) and the lack of Marxist praxis in her mostly orthodox romance novels. The 30-year-old Irish writer has published two novels before this - her 2017 debut, Conversations With Friends, quickly followed by Normal People - each to a tide of adulation. It’s a scene that one could easily read through the lens of Rooney’s reputation.
“You probably wrote it yourself.” But Alice rejects this collapse between her internet persona and her personal life.
“Anyone can have one of those,” he says to Alice.
In front of Alice, they list the details of her Wikipedia page, from “Literary work” to “Adaptations” to “Personal life.” Felix, growing visibly uncomfortable, deflects by downplaying the fact that Alice has a Wikipedia page at all.
Early on in Sally Rooney’s novel Beautiful World, Where Are You, a young man named Felix introduces the semi-famous writer he’s semi-seeing to a room full of his friends: “This is Alice … She’s a novelist.” His friends do what anyone confronted by a supposedly well-known person would do: They Google her.
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