Sally Rooney: ‘There is something Christian about my work, even if I would not describe myself as religious’

Two years ago, when Sally Rooney returned to her old campus, Trinity College Dublin, to discuss her novels in a public interview, her publisher asked event organisers to provide not one but two escape routes for the Irish novelist, should she require them.
Such is the price of fame. With six million sales of Faber editions alone, Rooney’s novels Conversations with Friends, Normal People and Beautiful World, Where Are You have become literary touchstones for a new generation of readers, and BBC adaptations of her first two books have only served to magnify interest. Named one of the 100 most influential people in global culture by Time magazine in 2022, Rooney has attained a level of celebrity rarely encountered by practitioners of the literary novel. But she herself is no fan of the spotlight, preferring the study and reading light.
In a matter of days, Rooney will publish her new novel, Intermezzo. It’s a big literary event, yet Rooney has done a bare handful of interviews to publicise the book. In truth, there have been times when she has regretted putting her name to her novels at all, perhaps looking to the example of Elena Ferrante, the Italian novelist who publishes her wildly successful novels of love and female friendship under a pseudonym.
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“I often think it would have been better if I had published my work under an assumed name and stayed out of the public eye,” says Rooney. “It’s not where I belong. I feel a lot of anxiety about my privacy and the privacy of my family and loved ones. But if I refused to speak to journalists or do any public events in connection with a new book, I think it would look as if I didn’t have faith in the book, and that would feel wrong. So I feel a bit trapped by that. On a personal level I’m just not cut out for life in the public eye. I’m a very private person and I like to go unnoticed. That has become harder in recent years, and I struggle with that.”
Rooney, still just 33, has long seemed destined for the spotlight. Even before the publication of Conversations with Friends, I had an early heads-up about Ireland’s most promising new literary talent: Rooney’s fans included the writer Thomas Morris, who first introduced me to Rooney at the launch of Kevin Barry’s novel Beatlebone in the Workman’s Club in Dublin in 2015, two years before her debut was published.
Attired in a long, striped dress and low-heeled court shoes. Rooney meets me this time in the grander surroundings of the United Arts Club in the heart of Dublin’s Georgian quarter. The venue seems like a good idea in part because of the new novel’s themes: the Dublin Chess Club meets here and Intermezzo focuses on Ivan, a 22-year-old chess prodigy.
In the beginning, the reader finds Margaret observing Ivan beating all-comers in a set of exhibition matches in the arts centre Margaret runs in Leitrim. They have a mutual attraction, which is complicated by a 14-year age gap. Ivan has a brother, Peter, who is involved with two women: Sylvia, his college lover now reduced to intimate friend because an accident has left her incapable of physical intimacy; and a connection with Naomi, nine years younger, which develops into something more serious.
Age gaps have surfaced in Rooney’s fiction before, but “I have no conscious thematic interest in that,” she says when I mention the age-gap affair in her debut novel. “I’m interested in relationships that aren’t simple because if they’re simple, it’s hard to get a whole novel out of them.” Fiction needs friction. At least part of Rooney’s success is built on her consummate gift for writing literary novels about friendships and intimate relationships. A lover’s bare skin is “like pared fruit”. “Who can explain such a thing, and why even try to explain: an understanding shared between two people. Her breath warm on his lips when she sighs, and when he kisses her again, a muted sound from her throat.”
Come for the romance; stay for the meaning of life, of which, of course, love is a fundamental part.
Ivan and Peter are grieving the recent death of their father. Their mother, never that maternal, has remarried. Ivan is finding solace with Margaret but Peter is “frighteningly unhappy”, struggling to square his love triangle with his respectable status as a barrister. Already an outsider as the son of an eastern European – “what they were born to, he has to work for” – he cannot bear becoming an outcast were it to become known he is effectively in a throuple.
The novel’s heart is Peter’s dark night of the soul, as his efforts to resolve his relationships only seem to make things worse. Reminiscent stylistically of James Joyce, there are questions of faith in the novel that trace their influence to the great Russian novelists. Rooney loved Dostoevsky’s The Idiot but his last novel made the deepest impression. “I don’t think I could have written this exact novel if I hadn’t read The Brothers Karamazov,” says Rooney. Ivan’s dog is called Alexei in ludic homage. “This book has its fingerprints all over it. Everything I read becomes part of a mental library, it’s almost like building vocabulary in another language. When you sit down to write a novel, the only tools you have are all the books that you’ve ever read.
“Dostoevsky’s works are so immersed in hand-to-hand combat with these difficult questions about faith, beliefs, the figure of Christ, philosophical and ethical questions about life, how is it possible to live by a Christian ethic and abide by our sense of community with other people, the big supernatural questions about whether there is order, a structuring principle, in this universe. I find the world of Dostoyevsky’s novels so incredibly immersive and compelling, and they’re beautifully plotted and paced. It’s intricate like clockwork. As a reader, you enjoy how smoothly it runs. But as a writer, you want to get in there and start taking the little gears apart and thinking, How is that done?”
Religion has a place in Rooney’s previous work – Frances in Conversations with Friends finds comfort in the Gospels, and Simon in Beautiful World Where Are You is a practising Catholic. But Intermezzo takes it to another level. Rooney, the famously Marxist writer, is also a cultural Catholic, intellectually too, who finds meaning and beauty in Scripture, ethical inspiration in Simone Weil and solace in the poetry of the Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins.
“I find his poetry really comforting, and I like to memorise it. That is almost like a little therapeutic practice for me. Memorising poetry is like something that I do for my nerves.”
Decades after Kate O’Brien, Brian Moore and John McGahern, faith is making a bit of a comeback in Irish fiction, with Mike McCormack’s This Plague of Souls, Niamh Mulvey’s The Amendments and now Intermezzo.
I had perhaps lazily assumed that Rooney’s home environment – the Trinity graduate was raised in Castlebar in Co Mayo – was lapsed Catholic as well as liberal, left-wing and feminist but it was more traditional, typical of the times. The family went to Sunday Mass and she attended convent school.
“Questions of faith and Christianity are important in my work from my first novel up till this one, for sure.” This is more than just the vestigial tail of Catholicism in Irish culture. “I think it is more.” As a teenager, influenced by her parents’ strong political convictions and values, she rebelled against what she saw as the authoritarian power of the church and its teachings on abortion and gay relationships. That was the first stirring of her political conscience, long before she read Marx and became more interested in economic inequality, geopolitics and imperialism.
Years later, however, while writing her first novel, she wondered whether she had been wrong to throw the baby Jesus out with the bathwater of the church’s more controversial teachings.
“I suppose I felt that brushing religion aside had been very easy because I was hearing things I didn’t agree with and still don’t agree with, I want to emphasise. Ergo, I don’t believe in any of this. I don’t believe in Jesus, don’t believe in God and I don’t care what any of those old books have to say. But later on I became more interested in rethinking religion as a source of ethics. If I’ve rejected all these things, where then am I drawing the moral lessons that are so important to me? I think it was just a process of becoming honest with myself and saying they do actually come from Christian teaching; that is the world in which I was raised.
“And I think it is a really beautiful, rich and worthwhile spiritual and intellectual tradition of thinking about ethics, about our relations with other people. I forgot to acknowledge its centrality to my ethical life. Not to claim that it’s a uniquely useful or beautiful tradition for thinking about ethics, but it was the one that I was raised in and that had formed so much of my thought, and I’d failed to come to terms with that. So I think part of what I’m doing in my fiction is trying to come to terms with that.
“I have gone from being a dogmatic atheist to being very interested in the intellectual and spiritual traditions of Christianity. That’s a heritage that it would be dishonest of me to say isn’t central to who I am as a thinker and as a writer. There is something Christian about my work, even if I would not describe myself as straightforwardly religious. Like, I still struggle with the more supernatural aspect of religious belief.”
Another key inspiration was Joyce’s Ulysses. Rooney had reached an impasse in Ivan and Margaret’s story. “I’m always down on the level of the sentence just creeping ahead, then reversing and then going again.” She doesn’t plan ahead but, like Zadie Smith, builds and decorates and furnishes the hallway as she goes, with no idea what might lie in the rooms off it.
She had to go to London for the launch of Beautiful World Where Are You and travelled by sail and rail. What in other circumstances might have been an unwelcome distraction from the creative process turned out to be just what she needed. On the ferry home, “it was like a bolt-of-lightning moment. I remember sitting up straight and thinking, [Ivan] has an older brother. I actually opened my laptop and wrote what’s now very close to the first page of the book. It was [Peter], his life, the two women in his life and the voice. And that then opened up the whole novel.”
She talks of encountering Peter for the first time. “I know that may sound affected, that I’m trying to pretend that there isn’t a process of intentional creation, but there really isn’t. I actually have to wait for the idea to come to me.”
Later she reveals what she was reading on the long return trip to London. To escape the travails of the present she had immersed herself in the world of Dublin in 1904 – June 16th, to be precise – and it unlocked a door for her. As Stephen Dedalus says in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, “the shortest way to Tara was via Holyhead”.
There is much in Intermezzo reminiscent of Ulysses: the clipped, elliptical sentences of interior monologue; the richness of the cultural references; the intertextuality; the brothers with their eastern European surname, Koubek; grieving over a close male relative. Rooney wasn’t conscious of any of that but realised at some point that Bloom, Dedalus and Molly were the same age as Peter, Ivan and Margaret. Peter is, like her, someone who sees the world through a cultural gauze, constantly reminded of lines from a poem or novel. It’s a natural symbiosis of creator and character. At another level, she loved what Joyce did with Ulysses and wanted to play with his toys.
“I am self-conscious when I talk about that because Ulysses is this gigantic work of genius that defined the modernist novel and broke the structure of the novel in a fascinating way. So I’m really anxious about trying to place my work in that lineage. I want to acknowledge the enormous influence that this beloved book has had on my work without in any way trying to make any special claims for my work. I feel like I’ve learned so much from Joyce and I’m still learning.”
A love of Joyce is something that connects Rooney and another famous Faber author, Edna O’Brien, whose Country Girls trilogy successfully explored female friendship and burgeoning sexuality. O’Brien, who died the weekend before this interview took place, was a huge inspiration for Rooney, if not a direct influence.
“I wish that I could speak more knowledgeably about Edna O’Brien’s work, particularly her novels, but her role in the culture was obviously so important. A couple of years ago I went to see her play, Joyce’s Women, at the Abbey, and I left so invigorated by its searching intellectual brilliance and feeling so in love with Joyce again.” She met O’Brien once through Faber and again in Listowel. “I was just completely in awe. It would have been early in my publishing career, and she was this towering cultural figure. So I was probably a bit petrified. What a great gift to be able to say that I did meet her and get to experience that incredible personality and charisma, however briefly.”
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Dublin is a real presence in Intermezzo, more than just a backdrop, another Joycean parallel. Some of her early readers have said it’s her most Dublin book yet, an interesting observation given Rooney has put the city behind her, moving with her husband, John, back to Castlebar, where he teaches maths. The couple met at Trinity, where they debated together, and married in 2020. In Intermezzo’s acknowledgments, she writes, “John, what a joy and a blessing it is for me to share my life with you”.
“It’s funny that I didn’t live in Dublin for any of the period that I was writing it,” says Rooney. “I almost think that I’ve preserved some of the romance of Dublin for myself by not living here. When I moved here first as a teenager, I felt very transfixed and captivated by the romance of Dublin, I felt like this was the beginning of my life.” We look out the window at the Georgian streetscape, the ornate lamp-posts and fanlights. “Peter lives not too far from here in the book, so this is kind of his neighbourhood. I did spend 10 years living in Dublin and I do really love it as a city, even though of course it has many problems too.”
The move home has enabled her to root down and concentrate on her work in a rewarding way. “It was a really enjoyable book to write, even though it goes to dark places. There’s a lot of grief, a lot of sadness. Maybe what I needed was the quiet and space to get to those places.”
Beautiful World by contrast was the hardest book to write as she was moving around a lot and travelling a lot for work. “That was still the era where I was doing book tours. I don’t do those any more.”
Whereas as a child she loved fiction for its escapist quality, its invention of magical worlds, since her teens she has loved realist novels, “that sense of being able to inhabit our world through the lens of fiction that allows us to access the interiority of other people, which we can’t do in real life”.
Growth through dialogue could be a slogan for her work. In these fractious times, it would make a good party political slogan.
“I love repartee, in real life and in fiction,” she says, but she would never use an overheard phrase, “because it doesn’t emerge organically from the world of the work. It would feel sacrilegious to real life and to the fictitious life of my characters.”
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She writes on the level of the sentence and the scene: there is no big picture. Only at the end does she have to step back and think: what is this book about? To pronounce upon that feels a bit fraudulent, as it is not intentional. It also makes the resolution hard.
“Every book that I’ve written, I began to feel like I had written myself into a corner and I couldn’t finish the book in a way commensurate with the stakes that I’d set up for myself. I just didn’t know how to stick the landing as I would say in the Olympics. For some reason I ended up reading Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, which I felt allowed me to finish writing Intermezzo.
“I’m really invested in the characters and the project of getting to know them, placing them in relationship to one another, following them through an important phase in their life that changes them, which is almost a way of saying what it is to write a novel. I’ve never written anything strictly autobiographical, and I don’t think I could, but my characters certainly become so real to me that they must be on some level a facet of my own dilemmas, something submerged.
“I think both Ivan and Peter realise they are driven by this desire for perfection. Ivan wants to play perfect chess, Peter wants to make the perfect argument, and I think that’s there for me, too, which probably sits uncomfortably alongside creative work. You can never write the perfect novel. It’s not even a legitimate artistic pursuit. My favourite novels [such as Ulysses] are gloriously imperfect, full of contradictions and ambiguities, things that don’t quite work or make sense.”
If she weren’t a writer, she thinks she could have gone, like Peter, from debating to being a barrister. “I love reading judgments.” “I wonder if in a sense he’s living like an alternate version of my life. When I was writing his sections, as I often feel with my characters, I felt myself getting into character.”
Rooney acknowledges her good fortune as a writer. “I am an extraordinarily privileged creature. But I’m a little bit hesitant to use the word because so many of the things that I’m trying to describe when I use the word ‘privilege’ are things that I wish were rights. I would love to live in a society where people have the right to do the work that is meaningful to them, the best way they can contribute to our shared society and not have to feel anxious about having a roof over their head.”
Christianity may have been rehabilitated but capitalism is beyond redemption. “I do not think that the capitalist system is compatible with an inhabitable planet in terms of the absolute chaos that the capitalist growth imperative has wreaked on our planetary ecosystems.”
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Can she genuinely envisage a transition from late capitalism to a better system? “You could reorient that question and say, can you envisage a way that capitalism can become compatible with an inhabitable planet? Every scientist who models carbon emissions, soil degradation, biodiversity loss, is telling us this economic system is simply not compatible with the continuation of human civilisation as we know it.”
She recommends Andreas Malm’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline, which visualises what the next phase of climate protest might look like, and Slow Down: How Degrowth Communism Can Save the Earth by Japanese Marxist academic Kohei Saito.
Rooney has written critical opinion pieces for the London Review of Books on abortion and for The Irish Times on the Government’s housing policy and its failure to challenge the US over its military support for Israel’s invasion of Gaza. How does she conceive of herself as a public figure?
“I feel a little bit conflicted. I am an expert in nothing. I rarely feel that I have anything original and interesting to say about the real world. As a novelist, I invent fictitious people and write about their lives in a way that I hope might be original and interesting. But even if it is, why should that qualify me to pontificate about politics or culture in real life?
“On the other hand, I feel very strongly about certain political and cultural issues, as many people do; and because of my prominence as a writer, I have a platform that most people lack. So I sometimes feel a kind of moral pressure to make use of my privileged position and speak about certain things.
“I am very far from an expert on the Israeli occupation of Palestine. I don’t feel I have any new or original analysis of the problem to contribute personally. But I also don’t want to stay silent in the face of genocide. The horrors unfolding in Gaza feel to me like a turning point in history. How are we allowing this to happen? How is it possible that we have collectively failed to stop such a flagrant and unconcealed campaign of mass murder? These are extremely serious questions, maybe more serious than we have realised yet. In the meantime, I just hope and pray for peace.”
In respect of Palestine, Rooney has learned much from reading the work of writers such as Isabella Hammad, Mohammed el-Kurd, Rabea Eghbariah, Raz Segal, Nathan Thrall. In fiction she also speaks with great admiration of the contemporary writing scene. “Some of my all-time favourite writers are alive and working today – Sheila Heti, for instance, whom I admire and love with all my heart. And I feel lucky to be writing at the same time as Isabella Hammad, Colin Barrett, Zadie Smith, Thomas Morris, Miranda July, and many others.
“On the other hand, I often feel discouraged by the publishing industry. I often see new novels marketed as ‘for fans of Sally Rooney’. I find that so dispiriting – the invention of a certain type of person for the purposes of book marketing. And it makes me feel complicit in the commodification and cheapening of literary culture.”
Rooney edited the Stinging Fly literary magazine but for just two issues. Was it too time-consuming? “I really enjoyed my time at the Stinging Fly and I learned a lot there. But yes, ultimately I wasn’t able to manage the hefty workload as well as other editors have! I think Lisa McInerney is doing wonderful work there now.”
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How important is it to share work-in-progress with fellow writers? “When I was writing my first novel, I was reluctant to share sections with anyone before I had completed a first draft. These days, I have to restrain myself from sharing too much of a project too early. My friend John Patrick McHugh has been a particularly important presence in my working life from Normal People onward. We exchange drafts from the early stages of a new project, and more than once his feedback has helped me to find a new pathway through a problem in my work. And as a reader, I cherish the opportunity to read his writing.”
Reviewing the French translation of her work – “Superbe! Cinq étoiles”, I joke – she was struck by how often things were described as “compliqué”. (Complications with Friends could be an alternative title.) “Things are complicated and don’t get simpler. That, to me is life. Death is extremely simple and pure. And life is, in all its richness, full of complexity. The will to live itself is the love of that complexity and I think the characters are trying to make peace with their own complexities, their own inability to understand themselves and also the complexities of other people.
“Some of the project of a novel is coming to understand your characters and through that process, allowing them to understand themselves, but it’s also allowing them to make peace with not understanding themselves. And that’s something that I think is part of the complexity of life itself, and certainly of writing a novel. It’s like making peace with complexity, allowing things to be more complicated. Things can’t always be made sense of in that very clear kind of argumentative way that a debater or lawyer or chess player might want to make sense of them. And realising that is the essence of life as a human being in community with other human beings. There’s something really beautiful in that if you can accept it.”
Intermezzo is published by Faber & Faber on September 24th