The Booker Prize Podcast, Episode 31: Why Normal People is more than just a love story

• Consider how the book became so popular
• Whether the haters have a leg to stand on
• Share a brief biography of Sally Rooney
• Summarise the plot of Normal People
• Discuss the themes explored in the novel

• Normal People by Sally Rooney
• Conversations With Friends by Sally Rooney
• Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney

Transcripts of The Booker Prize Podcast are generated using both speech recognition software and human transcribers, and as a result, may contain errors.

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Jo Hamya:

Hello and welcome to The Booker Prize podcast with me, Jo Hamya.

James Walton:

And me, James Walton.

Jo Hamya:

And today it’s Booker Novel of the Month for February, where our chosen book is linked to Valentine’s Day. It’s one of those 21st century bestsellers like Susanna Clarke’s, Johnson Strange and Mr. Norell, Room by Emma Donna-Hugh or Mark Haddon’s, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time that you may not realise is a Booker Novel, but that was indeed long-listed for the UK’s top literary award in 2018.

James Walton:

But this one, Jo, I would suggest, made a bigger cultural impact than any of them. Because as that opening clip might have rather given away, the February Booker Novel of the Month is Normal People by Sally Rooney, published in 2018 in Britain and Ireland, where it became a huge literary sensation. And in 2019 in America, where Beatles-like it became, if anything, even huger once it crossed the Atlantic. Oh, yes. And as well as being shortlisted for the Booker, Normal People was the Costa Novel of the Year, the British Book Awards, Book of the Year, the Waterstones Book of the Year, the winner of the Royal Society of Literature Encore Award for best second novel. And I really could go on, but I imagine you get the idea.

Jo Hamya:

But perhaps most pertinently, Normal People is one of the very first ever literary TikTok sensations. But perhaps more pertinently, to me, the book is also one of the earliest instances of a TikTok literary sensation. As you can hear here.

Speaker 3:

This book has been my personality. I love this book.

Speaker 4:

Ally Rooney is some sort of genius about noticing how people really think. We all know that Sally Rooney writes about class, but what I didn’t know is that she’s a full on Marxist and that Normal People is a searing critique of capitalism.

Speaker 5:

Every time I go into a bookstore, I go straight for Normal People by Sally Rooney.

Jo Hamya:

And the book also has plenty of celebrity fans, including Lena Dunham, Emily Ratajkowski and Taylor Swift. These days, it has around 7 billion mentions on TikTok. And then, of course, there was the 2020 screen adaptation co-written by Rooney herself, which conquered much of the known TV world during COVID lockdown. In fact, our producer Kevin, was working at BBC Studios at the time and was telling us just before we started recording today that the makers of the show were completely taken aback by its success. So yes, apparently BBC thought it would be a modest small drama rather than the global smash hit. It turned out to be with Daisy Edgar-Jones, who plays Marianne and Paul Mescal, who plays Connell sending social media into something between a frenzy and a total meltdown.

James Walton:

So, among other things, what we’ll be asking today is how on earth did all this happen, and why? To a novel written by a serious-minded, at times almost punishingly thoughtful young Irish Marxist. After all, it’s a long way from the Communist Manifesto name checked early on in Normal People to say this clip from The Late Late Show With James Corden on the American CBS Network, where Edgar-Jones and Mescal were asked to perform bits of other TV programmes in their best Normal People’s style. And this is a bit where they perform a recipe for a hot mushroom sandwich.

James Corden:

Okay. It’s your turn. Take it away.

Paul Mescal:

What are we making?

Daisy Edgar-Jones:

The hot mushroom sandwich. We’re making the brown for the pickled celery. It’s going to be part of the slaw. White vinegar, sugar, coriander seeds, turmeric, mustard seeds, salt.

Paul Mescal:

And then, pour this hot brine over the celery and the onions. Well, how long are we going to let this steep?

Daisy Edgar-Jones:

Overnight.

Paul Mescal:

And this gets combined with what?

Daisy Edgar-Jones:

[inaudible 00:03:58] sliced cabbage.

Paul Mescal:

Dig it.

James Corden:

I’ve got actual chills. I’ve genuinely got actual chills.

James Walton:

I mean, as I said that at this point, the book is almost in the realms of pure showbiz. But, maybe let’s start right at the beginning, Jo, with the young Irish Marxist who was responsible for all of this top showbiz. Can you tell us a bit about Sally Rooney?

Jo Hamya:

Yeah. It almost feels weird to tell people about Sally Rooney now at this point. That’s how big she’s gotten, although she keeps a fairly low profile these days. She’s the author of three novels, Conversations with Friends in 2017, Normal People, which we’re discussing today, which came out in 2018. And most recently, Beautiful World, Where Are You, in 2021? And like Normal People, Conversations with Friends was also adapted into a BBC miniseries. Although, I think slightly less successful than Normal People. I think Sally Rooney is, if we’re going to use these categories, firmly, what you might call a millennial. She was born in County Mayo in 1991. She incredibly completed her first novel at 15, which I find astonishing. She calls it trash. She began her debut novel Conversations with Friends while she was studying for her master’s degree. And shortly into the period of its writing was signed by the Wiley Agency. For those who don’t know, the Wiley Agency run by Andrew Wiley is, it’s where most book authors come from, actually.

James Walton:

It’s a biggie. It’s a biggie, isn’t it?

Jo Hamya:

It’s got your Atwood’s, your Rushdie, et cetera. So it’s amazing to have not even published your first debut and to have already been signed.

James Walton:

No. And she was at Trinity College, wasn’t she? In Dublin with the-

Jo Hamya:

Yes, she was.

James Walton:

What’s this stuff about she got into debating, but in true Sally Rooney style, ended up as the European champion debater of something or other.

Jo Hamya:

Yes. Yes. She seems to be the person who, when she does something, she does it extremely well.

James Walton:

It is an extraordinary story. Because I don’t remember a novel having this level of impact the last 20 years, really. And, this debating champion, intellectual Marxist suddenly finds herself at this, eye of this mad storm. And I think you probably know better than me, but as is the way, that’s also led to a backlash with a lot of love for her, a lot of hate for. What’s the hate for her from?

Jo Hamya:

Well, I think we can talk about this probably more substantially when we talk about the book itself. But I think in general, as far as I can see, there are three categories of it. One is quite vague and generalised as I say, I.E. if something gets really, really big, you will have your crowd of very trendy niche people who go, “Well, I don’t like that stuff.” Who will automatically reject it and go, “I don’t like Sally Rooney.” I remember having a conversation with a friend, unintended pun.

James Walton:

Oh, yeah? Is she a normal person?

Jo Hamya:

No, she’s not.

James Walton:

Oh, okay.

Jo Hamya:

I remember having a conversation with a friend a few years ago. She said that she really, really objected to Sally Rooney, and I kept saying, “Tell me why. Tell me. Give me a specific instance in which Sally Rooney or her novels are objectionable.” And she just couldn’t. She really couldn’t. So there’s that level to it. There are two more specific aspects. I think some people really object her on a feminist level. And with this book, I think there are certain themes of sadism and masochism that Marianne encounters, which I don’t know a certain cohort of readers find objectionable. And also, in all Sally Rooney novels, there is a predilection for describing extremely thin, pale women, which I think some people have found… I don’t even know how to describe this? Because to me, that was always just a signifier of how depressed these women were.

It’s never pointed at, in my eyes as something desirable. But I guess some people may think that she’s romanticising the idea of being thin and pale and attracted to a oppressive force in your life. And then there’s a third category of people who believe that the politics of a Sally Rooney novel, which again, we’ll come onto later, are just really thin and insubstantial and not properly enough hashed out pop culture politics. Which again, I don’t really buy, because if you listen to a Sally Rooney interview or you read a piece of hers, you can see that she knows what she’s talking about. And, I don’t even think that the class ideology in Normal People is particularly subtle or thin. It’s there in every single sentence.

James Walton:

There’s so much I’m going to say about all of this.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah. But the fact that it’s interwoven through this quite flat prose with a love story is… I think I was talking to a judge from 2018 who helped long list Normal People, and he said that while he really likes the book, he doesn’t consider it a proper novel. Which I think is a popular sentiment for people who take issue with. Although to that, I would say A, what is a proper novel? And B, why on earth doesn’t Normal People fall under the remit of proper literature?

James Walton:

Well, we’ve set up about, well, at least five things. I’d add another fourth objection to it, which seems to be incredibly widespread on TikTok. Which my daughter showed me that. She doesn’t want me to say that she put together that clip of TikTok things.

Jo Hamya:

And now you’ve said it.

James Walton:

Oh, yes, I have. Well done Beth. She’s 13. But anyway, she showed me was one thing that people object to, okay, there’s the Marxism. Okay, there’s the feminism. But then there’s absolutely tonnes about the lack of quotation marks on the speeches.

Jo Hamya:

Oh God, yes.

James Walton:

What the hell? I mean, Joyce didn’t have quotation marks. Rodney Doyle doesn’t. It’s quite a lot of Irish writers don’t. But anyway, she gets-

Jo Hamya:

Yeah, but this is how I feel about, you remember you were objecting in our short list analysis to long sentences.

James Walton:

Yeah.

Jo Hamya:

It’s all just a matter of taste, of literary taste. I think it’s fine to object to the lack of quotation marks, that I actually don’t take issue with. I personally don’t have a problem with it. I don’t like using them either. But, that to me, is a better objection than the other three.

James Walton:

I’m not convinced by any of the objection. But we’ll come onto to them all. Shall I just do a summary of Normal People?

Jo Hamya:

Yes.

James Walton:

So it opens in Carrickley, which is a fictional town in County Sligo in the west of Ireland, where Sally Rooney is from, the west of Ireland. Where we meet the two main characters straight away, aged 18. So there’s Marianne, who’s clever, posh, and living in a great big house with their mother, Denise and their brother Alan. Their father having died when she was 13. And then there’s Connell, who’s clever, not posh, and has never known who his father is, but his single mother Lorraine works as a cleaner for Marianne’s family, which is why he’s come to the big house to pick her up in his car. Marianne and he get talking and there’s an obvious, slightly odd and hesitant connection between them. Especially after Marianne says that she likes him.

And then from then on, each successive chapter plonks us down every now and then, usually a few weeks later, sometimes a few months, sometimes a few days as their relationship progresses and quite often regresses. So in chapter two, they have their first kiss, which is also Marianne’s first ever kiss. Then they start having regular sex, which Connell rather ungallantly insists they must keep secret because Marianne is regarded at their school, not altogether inaccurately in fact. That’s quite strange. And then they apply for universities, quite an important thing. She changes his life really. He was going to go to study law in Galway, again in the west of Ireland. And then basically live the same life that he has with the same, around the same area, with the same friends. Marry a local girl or whatever that. But she persuades him to go for Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland’s leading university to study English.

By the time they get there, though, they’ve split up following his pretty brutal decision to take somebody else, somebody more popular, to the school dance at the end of their school year. And then by the time they get to Dublin, their roles are reversed because now it’s Marianne who’s popular, lots of friends, and she fits in well, because she’s richer, I think. He’s largely friendless and feeling out of his social depth. And then one night he’s invited to a party by a posh bloke called Gareth, who when he gets to Gareth’s house says, “Oh, my girlfriend’s from the west of Ireland. You must meet her.” And who should it be, but Marianne, of course.

And the connection is still obviously there. And before too long they start sleeping together again, then break up again, then start sleeping together again, then break up again. Pretty much all while remaining best friends and confidants, which we, often to the dismay of their new partners. I won’t spoil it by saying where they’re up to by the end of the book, in that process. But I can say that famously, Normal People, together with Conversations with Friends earned Rooney, the never very welcome tag, i don’t think. Or voice of a generation. And Jo, you are of that generation. So at the risk of turning you into the voice of it, what did you make of Sally Rooney when you first read it? Did Normal People have a big impact?

Jo Hamya:

Yes, it did. I just finished my undergraduate degree in 2018. That’s a really depressing sentence for both of us to hear.

James Walton:

Mainly me.

Jo Hamya:

And I was having… God. I don’t even know what to call it anymore? Let’s diminish it so I still have some dignity left by the end of this podcast. A dalliance we with a boy who quite ritually managed to humiliate me in ways that I’m not even sure he’s aware of.

James Walton:

Let it out, Jo.

Jo Hamya:

It’s all good. I’m engaged now.

James Walton:

You showed him.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah, and I was just fairly heartbroken, I think. So I picked up Normal People and I was working as a bookseller at the time. So it was in the air if you were a bookseller, there was always someone coming into the shop going, “Have you got Sally Rooney’s Normal People?”

James Walton:

So this is when Rooney mania is taking off, is it?

Jo Hamya:

Yeah. I mean, it already had taken off with Conversations with Friends because that I remember really clearly always being. I worked at Waterstones Piccadilly, which for people who don’t know, is eight floors of books. And it’s massive and it’s impossible to… As a bookseller, you have a sort of generalised knowledge of where everything is. And month by month you have a shifting knowledge of where books that are selling really well are. And I just remember with Conversations with Friends, knowing where it was for longer than… Usually where a book is for a month to three months. With Conversations with Friends, I think I knew where it was for about six. And then even more so with Normal People. So, I picked up Normal People loose, and then just really unexpectedly found myself dry heaving and sobbing a few pages in. And it was one of those times where I think for the first three reads, I couldn’t really tell you what the book was about, except that I had cried at every page.

James Walton:

Sorry, the first three reads is an interesting phrase in itself.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah, I read it really compulsively. I kept… Because it-

James Walton:

How many times?

Jo Hamya:

… a really easy book to read. Probably more than 10 times. I remember the first time… Not in a row though. But I remember the first time I read it, it was summer I was still in London. And then, somewhere around that time I moved back in with my parents for the summer and I was still reading it. And then I remember when I started my Master’s at Oxford, I was still reading it. It was a long heartbreak, James.

James Walton:

Okay.

Jo Hamya:

But yeah, I just sobbed over it for months, genuinely months. Maybe even close to a year. And it’s been really interesting reading it now, however many years later with an engagement ring on my finger because I still cried. But I’m in a happy relationship, about to get married. And yet, I didn’t cry as much. I only cried twice this time. But it still does the same thing to you. So it’s interesting, heartbroken or not, it still gets under your skin. Did you cry, James?

James Walton:

I didn’t, Jo.

Jo Hamya:

Oh.

James Walton:

And in fact, I mean I do really like it and we’ll get into lots and lots of aspects of it and found very compelling. But no, didn’t shed a manly tear. But, in fact, so heartless of mine. I can’t quite imagine which were the bits that you cried at?

Jo Hamya:

I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that Marianne… It’s very heavily hinted that she was abused by her dad, physically hit by her dad, and that her brother enacts the same violence on her.

James Walton:

Yeah.

Jo Hamya:

And her mother is totally okay with this. So there’s a point for the first time ever where Marianne calls Connell after something like this has happened. She’s never really confided in him at this level before. And he immediately drives over to her house, picks her up, goes in and tells her brother in no uncertain terms that if he lays a hand on her again, Connell will kill him. The brother’s name is Alan. Connell will kill Alan. And then he gets back in the car and just flips and says to Marianne… I mean flips as in, becomes completely calm and says, “I will never let anyone hurt you.” But the grand irony of that is that actually the person who’s probably hurting Marianne the most in her life is Connell. So that made me cry this time around.

James Walton:

Actually, there is one bit where there might’ve been a tear pricking in my eye. I’m not ashamed to say. Quite early on where Marianne is hanging out with the other girls for the first time, really. And some older bloke comes and grabs her. And Rachel, who’s the popular classic mean girl in a way, most popular girl in school, laughs and Connell, at this point is still keeping their relationship a secret. And Rachel says, laughs at Marianne making a fuss about this. And Connell springs to her defence and says, “Rachel, will you ever just f off?”

Jo Hamya:

Yeah.

James Walton:

And that’s a very cheering moment I think.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah. I think also this time around, I mean I can say for certain that the first 10 times around, the crying wasn’t just motivated by the book. But there’s also another point where, by the end, Marianne, she’s on a year abroad through the Erasmus programme and she’s in Sweden and she’s having one of very many questionable relationships or situationships with a guy called Lucas who takes photos of her in the nude and ties her up and tells her that she’s worthless. And there are multiple moments where Marianne disassociates, and I think this is partly down to her childhood trauma of being abused and having an utterly permissive mother while that was happening. But, it gets described in quite shocking detail the extent to which she disassociates, and this is quite a long passage, but I’m going to read some of it.

So she and Lucas have had an arrangement for a few weeks now. Lucas calls it the game. Like any game, there are some rules. Marianne is not allowed to talk or make eye contact while the game is going on. If she breaks the rules, she gets punished later. The game doesn’t end when the sex is finished, the game ends when she gets in the shower. Sometimes after sex, Lucas takes a long time before he lets her get in the shower, just talking to her. He tells her bad things about herself.

It’s hard to know whether Marianne likes to hear these things. She desires to hear them, but she’s conscious by now of being able to desire in some sense what she does not want. The quality of gratification is thin and hard, arriving too quickly and then leaving her sick and Shivery. “You are worthless,” Lucas likes to tell her. “You are nothing.” And she feels like nothing, an absence to be forcibly filled in. It isn’t that she likes the feeling, but it relieves her somehow. Then she showers and the game is over. She experiences a depression so deep it is tranquillising. She eats whatever he tells her to eat. She experiences no more ownership over her own body than if it were a piece of litter. Passages like that get to me.

James Walton:

Yeah. Maybe we should, just because we seem to have come to it, where we did have a rather cunningly put together running order. But let’s just go where it leads us maybe. And obviously, this question of Marianne’s masochism, there’s one bit where she’s trying to explain it to Connell and she says, “It’s not that I get off on being degraded as such,” she says, “I just like to know that I would degrade myself for someone if they wanted me to.” That’s a really fine distinction to me. And also, I don’t get it basically. She then says, “Des that make sense?” And it doesn’t quite to me. But what’s the deal with female masochism? Because obviously the biggest selling book of, I think the biggest selling book of the 2010s, even more than Normal People, 50 Shades of Grey, which is female masochism, was bought almost exclusively by women in a way that I don’t Normal People-

Jo Hamya:

I don’t think it’s comparable to 50 Shades of Grey. And I think one of the reasons that this book is so good is because, to understand Marianne’s masochism. And the reason that I think that using Marianne’s masochism to object to the book is a really lazy conceit, is that it’s so specific to her, as a person. So first, you have to understand, I know I keep drilling this in, but you have to understand the extent to which she is abused by the men in her family.

James Walton:

Yeah.

Jo Hamya:

And then I think it’s also really important to know about another female character in this book who’s actually Connell’s mum, who is possibly one of the only people in this book who stands up for Marianne when Connell doesn’t take Marianne to the Debs. His mother, she queries it in the car with Connell, and at the end of the conversation she says,” I think you’re a disgrace and I’m ashamed of you.”

James Walton:

Yeah, she more than queries it, she absolutely-

Jo Hamya:

Yeah. She really nails into him. But the thing about Lorraine, she’s a sparingly mentioned character. But I think she is another representation of the extent to which, specifically in Ireland, there’s a very limited agency that women have with their bodies. So you find out essentially that Lorraine had Connell when she was 17.

James Walton:

Yeah.

Jo Hamya:

Probably not even out of school, and that the father is completely out of the picture even before she’s given birth. And she had no other option because, as we mentioned, abortion is illegal in Ireland at that time. And so, you have to understand the massive degrees to which Marianne, even without her relationship with Connell, lacks a sense of agency in her body. That’s only compounded on in a social sense when she gets to school and she’s called a freak and different and bullied by her classmates. And then when the first person she’s ever fancied tells her, “I don’t want anyone to find out about us.” Even though, I think the reason he does that, are deeply rooted in a sense of class shame, but we’ll come onto that later.

The reason that Marianne’s masochism is so deeply affecting, to me at least, is that, it’s not at all rooted in any sense of sex. And this is why I don’t think it’s comparable to 50 Shades of Grey where… It’s a long time since I read 50 Shades of Grey. But there is a tangential pleasure or desire or joy in those books. There’s none at all in Marianne’s character. She’s essentially rooted being degraded into her ability to be at all perceived. And that starts very early on in her childhood. And that’s why I don’t think it’s a insufferable or questionable aspect of her character. It’s a deeply psychosocial and political one. If that makes sense.

James Walton:

No, I do agree with that. But there is some, because one of the people she goes out with when not going with Connell is this posh guy called Jamie.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah.

James Walton:

She says, “I suggested it to him,” again, she’s explaining it to Connell. “That I could try being more submissive. And it turns out he liked to beat me up. He hits me with a belt sometimes.” Things like that. Connell’s pretty shocked, as I think as are we. I mean a lot of it to me is recognisable about being in your 20s. But I did wonder if the Twitter world where everything is either really good or really bad, the phrases, “Good person and bad person,” are used quite starkly in the book, aren’t they? And there’s one bit, for example… Actually, I’d like to take a bit of a run-up at this.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah, okay.

James Walton:

Okay. So, whether this is new or not, I think people on the left particularly have always been pretty ruthless on themselves and pretty disappointed in their own reactions, which don’t live up to their ideals. I think maybe that’s always been true. Here is one point, “Marianne, she tries to be a good person, but deep down she knows she’s a bad person. Corrupted, wrong, and all her efforts to be right, to have the right opinion, to say the right things. These efforts only disguise what is buried inside her, the evil part of herself.” Now, say she has an evil part of herself, but covering it up by trying to be right and do the right things and do the right thing, it seems a pretty good way of dealing with it. It seems about the right thing to do, pretending to be nice, is being nice.

Jo Hamya:

But do you not think, because that is at the level of the character. But at the level of the novel itself, in which these two people, however clever and educated they may be, are consistently sustaining quite massive personal failures over the course of their lives. At the level of the novel, do you not think Rooney is saying that this is an unsustainable system. That actually this-

James Walton:

So what’s the dis in that?

Jo Hamya:

Splitting things into categories of good or bad or thinking of yourself as a good or evil person. That fundamentally what she’s saying is that, essentially this is what leads to no end of trouble on the level of Connell and Marianne’s relationship to themselves, as a couple, but also internally. Because both of them have quite severe mental health issues. Towards the end of the book, we have this protracted scene in which Connell’s doing a checklist for symptoms of depression. And he keeps trying to mitigate, he doesn’t want to scare his therapist who he’s about to see. So he keeps going, “Oh, actually I have this really extreme feeling. But I don’t want to be thought of as mad. So I’m just going to say that it’s a bit less.” Where in fact if he actually just spoke honestly.

James Walton:

Yeah, yeah.

Jo Hamya:

He Would get treated, it would be fine.

James Walton:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, no, I agree that the book possibly does question that idea of good person versus bad person. But again, I wonder if that’s almost… Do you think there’s times almost where the book slightly satirises Marianne’s Marxism? I’m thinking of two moments in particular. There’s one bit where Connell meets her for coffee and he’s held up by a demonstration. And Marianne says, she says, “What was it about?” He says, “I’m not sure.” She hopes it’s about abortion, but I think it’s probably about household taxes or something. And she says, “May the revolution be swift and brutal,” and then they have a cup of coffee and chat. Or more so, there’s one bit where she’s talking to her a friend Joe, who gets a job, and Marianne’s rather scornful that she’s working for the man. And she says to Joe, “Money’s just a social construct.” But Marianne’s able to say that because she’s got loads and loads of it. So I think there’s sometimes in which Marianne’s Marxism is almost satirised, almost comically.

Jo Hamya:

I think actually this is my one issue with the novel. And it pertains to Connell as a working class boy, as well. Which is that, I don’t know if they’re so much satirised as, to me from time to time, they become caricatures of the conflicting ideologies that Sally Rooney is trying to put into conversation. So Marianne is this rich Marxist who lacks a self-awareness. Especially when it comes to the influence that she has of Connell’s life. You said in your introduction that she’s the person who convinces him to go to Trinity. What you didn’t say is that before that, Connell was considering a law degree that probably would’ve furnished him much more adequately with the resources he needed.

James Walton:

[inaudible 00:29:01] go away and he would’ve lived a local life.

Jo Hamya:

Yes.

James Walton:

And he, at that point is realising, he decides which of two people he’s going to be.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah.

James Walton:

The guy who stays in the west of Ireland, or the guy who goes to Trinity and takes his chances.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah. There’s another point at which Marianne has a friend of hers hook Connell up with a job at a restaurant that’s doomed to close. And everyone knows this, but Connell still takes the job because he’s with Marianne and he can just stay with her at her house. He doesn’t really need money when he’s with her. And then on the other hand, you have Connell who doubts his own ability to say something because of his class background so much, that it feels like a caricature of a working class person.

When he gets to Trinity, there are these descriptions of how he feels inferior to everyone around him that keep recurring. So this is one. “This is what it’s like in Dublin. All Connell’s classmates have identical accents and carry the same size MacBook under their arms. In seminars they express their opinions passionately and conduct impromptu debates. Unable to form such straightforward views or express them with any force, Connell initially felt a sense of crushing inferiority to his fellow students as if he had upgraded himself accidentally to an intellectual level far above his own.” I do wonder sometimes if the thing that you described as satire, to me, is just sometimes characters becoming more narrative devices for Sally to make certain points about class or the woman’s body in Ireland more than they are characters.

James Walton:

Let’s be honest, Jo. Interesting though, the Marxism aspect of the novel is that that’s not the reason it conquered the world.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah.

James Walton:

The reason it conquered the world is the love story between Marianne and Connell. And given that they’re not… And they’re not the most obviously lovable of people, are they. When we first meet her, she’s got complete contempt for everyone around her at school. He does that horrible thing of not wanting anybody to ever find out about them. And yet, somehow, I think it’s true that we do root for them all the way. So let’s just talk about it as a love story. Why is it such an affecting one?

Jo Hamya:

I think Normal People is a love story, of course. But, this is the only point at which I oscillate between what do I think of this book, truly? I can never work out whether, and this might be an explanation for its massive success. It is a story about love that’s so great, that it transcends love and speaks to all these other things that we’ve been discussing. Or, whether love, in this book, is simply as much of a narrative device as the school setting, the college and university setting that allows Sally Rooney to talk about all these other things.

Because, love, as with the age that you are when you’re at school or university, is a good device with which to intensify conversation and feeling to a point where you can really drive it home to the reader. So the interesting thing about Normal People with me, I don’t know if other people would agree? Is that I’ve actually never really been so hugely invested in whether Connell and Marianne will get together and stay together, so much as the dynamic of their relationship and what insight it offers me about other aspects of my life in a social or economic sense.

James Walton:

Okay, Jo.

Jo Hamya:

Which I’m making it very boring again, I realise. But-

James Walton:

Okay, all those things are all true. But they are not the reason this book conquered the world. The reason this book conquered the world is people wanted Connell and Marianne to get together.

Jo Hamya:

If you say so.

James Walton:

Don’t you think?

Jo Hamya:

No.

James Walton:

Do you think they conquered the world because people wanted to know about agency and Marxism and stuff? Well, okay, let me put forward some absolutely standard love story things that I think lie at the heart of this book’s success, okay? I’ll try. First of all, it does somehow create the feeling that these people belong together. Which is very love story, almost Heath Cliff and Cathy. They talk about the parts of themselves belonging to each other. There are some points when I’m reading the book, I was thinking, obviously it wouldn’t make much of a novel, but why didn’t they just get together at the start and stay together? Because they obviously belong together. So they create that. Another possible rom-com, I was going to say trick device. No, but just method is that, every time they go out with someone else, that someone else is rubbish. I think that’s a technique. Like Jamie is unbelievably horrible and Lucas, the guy in Sweden. Connell does go with Rachel, the mean girl.

And there’s someone he goes out with called Helen whose, there’s not much wrong with her really, except that she calls him a [foreign language 00:34:08]. [foreign language 00:34:08] is derogatory slang for west of Ireland people or country people, particularly used in Dublin. But also the main thing that’s wrong with her is that she doesn’t like Marianne much. Thinks Marianne craves mail approval and is self-obsessed and so on. And she doesn’t get, she’s jealous of his friendship with Marianne. And she’s also a bit bland. And also linked to that, is the fact that only Marianne and Connell in this book, feel completely real and rounded. The minor characters are all pretty sketchy, aren’t they?

Jo Hamya:

Again, I have rebuttals for this. But does anyone want to hear them at this point? I think the reasons that the, as you described them, rom-com tropes work so well in this book are directly tied to what she’s doing on a social, psychological, political, economic level. So the feeling that Connell and Marianne should definitely be together is only there because there’s this innate huge tension bound up in all the reasons why they perhaps can’t be together. Starting with, at the very beginning of the book, the class and wealth disparity between the two of them and leading all the way up to the way that Marianne believes her body is deserving of being treated in Ireland, which culminates in this really heartbreaking scene where she asks Connell in the middle of sex to hit her and he goes, “No, Marianne, I’m sorry, I can’t do that.”

And he fundamentally in that moment does not understand why she would say something like that. And he can’t, he can’t. And hat is one of the reasons why they can’t be together. This idea that they are always going for other people who are not as great as they are together, I think those other people are actually chosen or written with great care by Rooney. There’s a reason why they are not as good as Connell and Marianne, and they are to do with the internal conflicts that each character has. So, Connell getting with Helen, he thinks, “Oh, she’s a nice girl. I can take her home to my mom,” etc. It’s like that split that you were talking about earlier that really describes of what if he had been the person who stayed in Dublin or went to Galway and did law, etc. He would’ve ended up with a girl like Helen rather than… And that is a massive root part of his character, which is representative of all of these themes in the novel.

And then this idea that other characters aren’t as well sketched out. I mean, to that I say, I think, perhaps, they don’t feature as heavily in the novel. But, someone like Lorraine, feels to me, by the few gestures that she imparts, incredibly important to our understanding of these people. And actually I know her intimately. When I saw her, when I saw the actress playing her in the TV show, I immediately thought, out of anyone else, not about Connell, not about Marianne, not about any of the other characters. I thought, “Thank God they got Lorraine right.”

James Walton:

Let’s move on to maybe a different thing altogether, which is just the title. Why is she calling it, Normal People?

Jo Hamya:

I think the part of the book is essentially about the consequences of what happens when you try and slot yourself into a position of social conformity. Which is what Connell and Marianne are constantly doing. Right from the moment where Connell says, “I don’t want anyone to know that I’m sleeping with Marianne after school, because it would be embarrassing for me.” And down to Marianne, suddenly playing the part of the cool girl at college after being a weirdo. Cool girl at university, sorry, after being a weirdo all the way through college. The idea that when Connell gets a scholarship at Trinity, the first thing he does is go travelling and acclimatise himself to all the other things that people take for granted. And then he gets a lovely girlfriend called Helen and tries to be a normal person. And then after that, ends up deeply, deeply depressed and trying to lie to his therapist about his suicidal impulses. They’re just inherently not normal people. But the book is kind of about what happens when you put yourself outside a zone of conformity or comfort.

James Walton:

So Jo, we started by reminding people who didn’t know that this was a book long listed for The Booker Prizes, is why we’re doing it on the Booker Prize podcast. In 2018, do you think A, it should have been? B, it should have been shortlisted? C, it should have won. I mean, how big of a novel in traditional literary terms do you see Normal People as?

Jo Hamya:

Well, just to situate it in context of the prize, I think actually the shortlist that we ended up with 2018 isn’t that far removed from what Normal People is like. And actually, one of the other books that features on it, or two of the other books that feature on it, actually also, I remember being quite trendy at the time, not as big a hit as Normal People, but definitely written by young women, by quite conscious young women. So The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner and Everything Under by Daisy Johnson. Not exactly the same, but there was a trend that I think is starting to wane a little bit now. At the time, it was really popular in publishing for these millennials/GenZ books by women with things to say. I guess this is kind of a tired concept now. But the winner we ended up with was Milkman by Anna Burns, which is another very quiet feminist Irish-

James Walton:

Northern Irish.

Jo Hamya:

Northern Irish, yeah, novel. I think we did end up with a shortlist in 2018 that you could trace a legacy between Normal People and it.

James Walton:

It did catch literary world by surprise, Normal People, from memory. Even though, actually Conversations with Friends, as you say, had already caused quite a stir. So maybe it should have been?

Jo Hamya:

Do you know what? The interesting thing is, I think Conversations with Friends is the better novel.

James Walton:

Yeah.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah.

James Walton:

I very nearly used the phrase, “When Harry met Sally without jokes,” but I thought that it’s not fair. But I’m sticking to my idea that essentially the book wants to tell a love story, and Sally Rooney occasionally remembers it’s got to be more than that and throws things in. But that’s where we disagree, don’t we?

Jo Hamya:

Go on. Have the final word then, James.

James Walton:

So that’s it for this week.

Jo Hamya:

You can find out more about the 2018 book, a long listed, Normal People by Sally Rooney at thebookaprizes.com.

James Walton:

And remember to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Substack, @thebookerprize. Until next time. Goodbye.

Jo Hamya:

Bye. The Booker Prize podcast is hosted by me, Jo Hamya and by James Walton. It is produced and edited by Kevin Meola and the executive producer is John Davenport. It’s a Daddy’s SuperYacht production for The Book of Prizes.