This piece first appeared in Jewish Currents. Mishpatim Exodus 21 – 24 Brooklyn, NY Dear fellow subjects of the law, As I confessed in the introduction to this series,…
Contemporaries Essays
Conversations with Friends about Normal People
I read Conversations with Friends alone and loved it; reading Normal People with friends was an unrelieved frustration. I’d picked it for a book club soon after finishing Sally Rooney’s…
Race and Romantic Realism
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…
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…