Midway through Sally Rooney’s Normal People, we encounter this conversation among friends: At the table they’re talking about their day trip to Venice…. Marianne tells Connell he would like the…
Contemporaries Essays
Wet Newspaper
Getting punched went with the territory. Between adolescence and adulthood, I got hit hard a couple of times a year. One day, I walked through the doors of my school…
What Are Feelings For?
If you read Sally Rooney, I wish you would read her as I did: bent into the seat of an airplane, flying from the city where I live as a…
Victoria Falls
Near the end of Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends, our twenty-one-year-old narrator, Frances, reads George Eliot in a gynecologist’s waiting room: “I sat there tapping my pen against the front…
Sally Rooney’s Couple Form
The publishing industry has for some time now been heavily publicizing a few figures whose success is keeping the whole thing afloat. Sally Rooney is one of those figures. Her…
So-Called Normal People
A dozen or so years ago, when she and I still shared a home, I gave to my oldest stepdaughter what I think both of us would now agree was…
The Sweet Stuff
Straight sex is not a disaster. That’s the plot of Sally Rooney’s novels. This is perhaps hard to take. After all, as Peter Coviello notes, Eve Sedgwick taught us that…
Introduction: Sally Rooney Cluster
Sally Rooney is the harbinger of a literary world yet to come! Or she is evidence of that world in its crumbling decline. It depends who you ask. Upon her…
Exodus: Beshalach: Omari, May 27
This piece first appeared in Jewish Currents. Beshalach Exodus 13:17 – 17:16 Portland, OR Dear friends, I have taken to wandering lately. I’ve had to. My apartment is small…
Exodus: Bo: Briallen, May 21
This piece first appeared in Jewish Currents. Bo Exodus 10:1 – 13:16 Elmhurst, Queens Dear readers, The locusts are swarming, the darkness is descending, and the Lord is…