Recently I revisited Sally Rooney’s second novel Normal People, this time in the original English, while simultaneously watching the TV adaptation with the same name.

This was nearly a year after I first read and enjoyed the book, in French translation, at the beach on holiday at the French Mediterranean.

Normal People is the compelling narrative of the emotional journey of two outsiders and the equally intense and fraught connection they share.

The main characters are two insecure Irish teenagers: Marianne Sheridan, from an affluent, albeit dysfunctional bourgeois family, and, Connell Waldron, the son of a loving, working-class single mother.
In their fictional small hometown of Carricklea, Marianne is a social outcast and Connell the well-liked school athlete. They become secret lovers during their last year of high school, until their relationship is blown apart in the weeks leading up to the 2011 high school debs ball.

Months later they meet again as freshmen at Trinity College in Dublin. Marianne is thriving socially in the urban, cosmopolitan setting. Away from home, in a for myself all too relatable way, Connell is now the one struggling to connect with their new peers, making the intersection of intimacy, belonging, class, and education a central theme to the book.

The novel goes on to follow their friendship(s) and romance(s) during their next four years of university, as the two heal and grow into secure individuals, all while drifting in and out each other’s lives time and again.

Sally Rooney, Normal People
288 p.
Éditions Points - Éditions de l’Olivier, 2021
ISBN 9782757888124
Orig. Normal People (Faber & Faber, 2018)
Translated by Stéphane Roques