Normal People by Sally Rooney didn’t feel like just reading a novel—it felt like eavesdropping on two people’s lives so closely that I ended up feeling a little exposed myself. It’s quiet, almost deceptively so, but it crept into my head and stayed there. It reminded me of how messy love really is—not the sweeping cinematic kind, but the kind that’s built on silences, miscommunications, glances across a room, and the things you don’t say even when you should.
It bothered me with Marianne and Connell that they seemed to be so excruciatingly real. They are not composed to be perfect or even generally likeable at all times - they are flawed, insecure, even cruel without any intention of being so. And that was the reason why I could not take my eyes off. It is this tangle of closeness and distance, of sensitivity and hurt, of seeing them move towards and away, that made their relationship so beautiful and tiresome in the most wonderful way possible.
I had some moments that hit me in the stomach. Similar to Connell, who is depressed and totally helpless in silence and Marianne, who appears to be a tough guy, carries bruises and scars of her own. Rooney does not melodramatize these matters; she makes them in a very subdued way which makes the effect all the more forceful. I was sitting there and thinking about the moments when I could not find words to describe what I was experiencing, or when I misunderstood the silence of someone. It is disturbing, the familiarity with it.
And there were times that made me smile in that bittersweet manner, such as when Connell and Marianne were able to permit themselves to be sweet with one another. When they lowered the walls, when they had fallen, and when their talk ran in that fluent manner in which you believe that you are regarded,--those periods made me remember the heady sensation that intoxicating understanding that you have of any one, even of a transient one. It was not funny enough and laugh-out-loud, but there was this vein of warmth that ached me on their behalf.
The experience was what was made complete by the writing itself. Rooney can reduce it all to nothing, even quotations, no ornament, no flourish, just dialogue and thought, back to back, bleeding into one another. This was at first jarring, but then it got. That style mirrors the way we think, the way conversations actually feel in real life—messy, overlapping, intimate. It made me feel like I wasn’t just reading their story, I was living inside their heads.
The silence of it all remained in my head most of all. Not tragedy as we normally understand it, but that two individuals can love one other so much, and yet continue to miss out on each other. The ways time, fear, ego, and situation can cut these small distances that become further as time goes on. It made me consider how so many times in life love was not enough, that people would not be able to close the gap, although they would have liked to do it.
I was not wrecked or even angry by the time I was through--it was rather that I had this silent ache, that which comes in the knowledge that some of our links are too strong to ever entirely fade away, yet not strong enough to remain in its places where we wish to have it. And something spooky about that.
Thus, reading Normal People did not feel like escapism, more like a reflection. It did not provide the satisfaction of a clean-up or even happy ending, but it provided me with something different, a reminder of the frailty, complexity, and necessity of human interconnection. I never forgot it because it seemed accurate, disheveled, and achingly ordinary.
The last three images was gotten from web:
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