![]() ![]() Rooney’s attentiveness to physical suffering is in some ways incongruous with her novels’ other concerns. When Connell, one half of the couple at the novel’s center, fills out the intake form at a campus mental health clinic, he reads a prompt - “I feel my future is hopeless and will only get worse” - and finds that “its syntax seems to have originated inside him.” Marianne, Connell’s on-again-off-again lover, often seeks sexual partners willing to damage her, not because she likes the feeling but because “it relieves her somehow.” ![]() In her new work, Normal People, due out in the United States in April, pain comes in the form of depression and masochism. After traumatic experiences - a visit to a callous doctor’s office, bad sex with a bad date - she levies small, precise attacks on her own body: pinches “on the soft part” inside her elbow, scratches she lets bleed for a three-count before “carefully” bandaging them. Frances, the protagonist of Rooney’s 2016 debut novel, Conversations with Friends, suffers from endometriosis, her body frequently wracked to the point that she loses consciousness. PAIN IS AN EVERYDAY THING for Sally Rooney’s characters. ![]()
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