Normal People and Conversations with Friends, by Sally Rooney

Reading books where the author articulates thoughts you've had is meant to make you feel better about your life. There's a quote by some famous novelist -- I think a CS Lewis type? -- that says, roughly, "to pick up a great book is to feel: ah, I thought it was only me!"

I don't know if it's just my present mood, but picking up Rooney -- who writes about people whose lives are largely like mine, and whose writing does That Thing of articulating small moments and observations about other people's behaviours which you've had in the privacy of your own mind and suspected other people share, but never actually discussed with anyone -- for me, right now, is having the almost-opposite effect of making my life feel just a little more meaningless.

It's like meeting that person at a party who charms everyone, and feeling charmed by them, but not feeling special for it -- you know this is just a way they have, that they connect with everyone, that if they weren't articulating a secret thought you've had and never discussed with anyone they'd be articulating a secret thought of someone else's to someone else. And somehow, then, them making you feel special therefore makes you feel less-special than if you'd never met them at all.

I found Rooney's relationships well-wrought, often-real; she catches glimmers of truths about romance that feel very perceptive to me, which is to say (more truthfully) they remind me of my own past relationships. (For me the great sin of most book-reviewing is this pretended universalism: the reader feels that X, where really the reviewer just means: I feel X). Reading her two books in succession, I started to feel like life is just a bingo-card, we're all recombining various elements of existing patterns in different combinations. And that made me feel sad, and dull.

The last night before I finished Conversations I dreamt about one of my exes -- I'm not being secretive here, for once, I actually don't remember which one. In the dream I took my sleeping pill and asked her if last time we'd slept together I was taking the pills already, yet, which feels very Rooney-ish: in other writers it might be a metaphor, induced sleep as a metaphor for deliberate forgetting or whatever, and it would eventually be explicated in a too-explicit way, but in Rooney it would happen like in my dream, I would just say "was I taking my sleeping pills already, when we were together?" -- in a gorgeous Irish accent, incidentally -- and she would say "Yeah," or "No," and that would be it, and it would sort of speak to the passing of time, and couples falling apart and getting back together.

But it's my inability, now, to remember which of my exes it was, that gives me even-more-so this feeling of life being like a bingo card, or a washing machine, a random-sentence-generator, just different combinations of the same few things in ever-new orders. And that makes life feel quite pointless, and I'm going to blame Rooney, because she'll never find out, and it's easier than blaming myself.