Sally Rooney Archive

Acceptance in Love

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Books by Sally Rooney, Anat Levit, and Daniel Sloss show us how to triumph over tension in relationships: rather than be at war with each other’s pet peeves, lovers share the pain—and perhaps a laugh—when admitting that love is anything but simple.

Soothing Existential Dread in Beautiful World, Where Are You

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Sally Rooney’s talent lies in her ability to capture millennial existentialism and dread while almost simultaneously soothing it—the experience of finding one’s own anxieties articulated so precisely on the page feels like a balm.

Silence in Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends

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Wordless acts of love that help alleviate pain, the intensity of conversations that build relationships, the depth of feelings that complicate them—Rooney makes it clear that such meaningful silences aren’t captured by the texts, emails, and messages in digital communication.

In the Hotel Lobbies of Sam Shepard and Sally Rooney

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Hotels by nature are spaces of temporary, transitory, and hard-to-classify encounters. Setting a story in a hotel frees characters to have discussions they might otherwise not have, to do things they might otherwise refrain from doing.

Girls Looking in the Mirror

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As a teenager, I suffered long bouts of gazing into the mirror. Time fell away and I went into a kind of deliberate stupor. I thought if I stared long enough, I might forget who I was looking at, and—for a moment—see myself as others saw me.