Conversations with Friends

by Sally Rooney

In times of crisis, we must all decide again and again whom we love. —FRANK O’HARA

Bobbi and I first met Melissa at a poetry night in town, where we were performing together.

Melissa took our photograph outside, with Bobbi smoking and me self-consciously holding my left wrist in my right hand, as if I was afraid the wrist was going to get away from me.

big fan of seeing the insides of other people’s houses, especially people who were slightly famous like Melissa.

Melissa asked us how we’d started out performing spoken word poetry together. We had both just finished our third year of university at the time, but we’d been performing together since we were in school. Exams were over by then. It was late May.

This is Frances, said Melissa. And this is Bobbi. They’re poets.

MC is Frances

Nick’s filming tomorrow morning in Cardiff, said Melissa. We already knew that the husband was an actor.

Melissa's husband

We went to a convent school, said Bobbi. It posed issues. Melissa grinned and said: like what? Well, I’m gay, said Bobbi. And Frances is a communist.

Bobbi and I had first met in secondary school. Back then Bobbi was very opinionated and frequently spent time in detention for a behavioral offense our school called “disrupting teaching and learning.”

I wasn’t betraying anyone’s loyalties by being Bobbi’s girlfriend.

When they were 17

I didn’t have close friends and at lunchtime I read textbooks alone in the school library. I liked the other girls, I let them copy my homework, but I was lonely and felt unworthy of real friendship. I made lists of the things I had to improve about myself.

</3 being a kid is hard

After Bobbi and I started seeing each other, everything changed. No one asked for my homework any more. At lunchtime we walked along the car park holding hands and people looked away from us maliciously. It was fun, the first real fun I’d ever had.

After school we used to lie in her room listening to music and talking about why we liked each other.

Cute

At our school graduation ceremony we performed a spoken word piece together. Some of the parents cried, but our classmates just looked out the assembly-room windows or talked quietly among themselves.

Several months later, after more than a year together, Bobbi and I broke up.

Melissa wanted to write a profile about us.

Alone in my room, I downloaded one of the files and opened it up to full-screen. Bobbi looked back at me, mischievous, holding a cigarette in her right hand and pulling on her fur stole with the other. Beside her, I looked bored and interesting.

Bobbi called me almost immediately after the e-mail arrived. Have you seen the photographs? she said. I think I’m in love with her.

We e-mailed her back saying we’d be delighted, and she invited us over for dinner to talk about our work and get some additional photographs.

She asked me if I could forward some copies of our poetry and I sent her three or four of the best pieces.

With other people I generally had a sense of what to take seriously and what not to, but with Bobbi it was impossible. She never seemed to be either fully serious or fully joking. As a result I had learned to adopt a kind of Zen acceptance of the weird things she said.

It was almost June now, but in April the blossoms were bright and silky like confetti.

Day of the dinner at melissa's

He had mainly worked in theater, but he’d also done some TV and film. He had once, several years previously, been nominated for a major award, which he didn’t win.

Melissa's husband, Nick

So you guys write everything together? Melissa said. Oh God, no, said Bobbi. Frances writes everything. I don’t even help.

Except in the sense of enriching my life, Bobbi didn’t help me write the poetry. As far as I knew she had never written creatively at all. She liked to perform dramatic monologues and sing antiwar ballads. Onstage she was the superior performer and I often glanced at her anxiously to remind myself what to do.

Although I couldn’t specify why exactly, I felt certain that Melissa was less interested in our writing process now that she knew I wrote the material alone. I knew the subtlety of this change would be enough for Bobbi to deny it later, which irritated me as if it had already happened. I was starting to feel adrift from the whole setup, like the dynamic that had eventually revealed itself didn’t interest me, or even involve me. I could have tried harder to engage myself, but I probably resented having to make an effort to be noticed.

Bobbi’s parents were going through an acrimonious breakup that summer. Bobbi’s mother, Eleanor, had always been emotionally fragile and given to long periods of unspecified illness, which made her father, Jerry, the favored parent in the split. Bobbi always called them by their first names.

Bobbi’s sister, Lydia, was fourteen and didn’t seem to be handling the whole thing with Bobbi’s composure.

My parents had separated when I was twelve and my father had moved back to Ballina, where they’d met. I lived in Dublin with my mother until I finished school, and then she moved back to Ballina too. When college started I moved into an apartment in the Liberties belonging to my father’s brother.

I had an internship in a literary agency at the time. There was one other intern, called Philip, who I knew from college. Our job was to read stacks of manuscripts and write one-page reports on their literary value. The value was almost always nil.

We worked three days a week and were both paid “a stipend,” which meant we basically weren’t paid at all.

This is how privilege gets perpetuated, Philip told me in the office one day. Rich assholes like us taking unpaid internships and getting jobs off the back of them. Speak for yourself, I said. I’m never going to get a job.

God is she privileged ?? I don't want to hate this book

Bobbi and I often performed at spoken word events and open mic nights that summer.

I had wanted Melissa to take an interest in me, because we were both writers, but instead she didn’t seem to like me and I wasn’t even sure I liked her.

At twenty-one, I had no achievements or possessions that proved I was a serious person.

You suffer, she said. Everybody suffers. Ah, Bobbi said. Profound.

I hadn’t been kidding with Philip about not wanting a job. I didn’t want one. I had no plans as to my future financial sustainability: I never wanted to earn money for doing anything.

I’d checked what the average yearly income would be if the gross world product were divided evenly among everyone, and according to Wikipedia it would be $16,100. I saw no reason, political or financial, ever to make more money than that.

I wish it was that small and would work

Our boss at the literary agency was a woman named Sunny. Both Philip and I really liked Sunny, but Sunny preferred me.

I could perform each poem for a period of about six months after I’d written it, after which point I couldn’t stand to look at it, never mind read it aloud in public.

Things matter to me more than they do to normal people, I thought. I need to relax and let things go. I should experiment with drugs.

I need to be fun and likeable, I thought. A fun person would send a thank-you e-mail.

Lol this is my inner dialogue

Bobbi’s father was a high-ranking civil servant in the Department of Health.

His name is Jerry.

Whenever I got a “brilliant” I took a little photograph of it on my phone and sent it to Bobbi. She would send back: congrats, your ego is staggering.

My ego had always been an issue. I knew that intellectual attainment was morally neutral at best, but when bad things happened to me I made myself feel better by thinking about how smart I was.

Hmmmmm

a genius hidden among normal people.

See what ya did here, Sally. Jk ;)

Sometimes I was good, sometimes I was just okay. But Bobbi was exact.

I’m twenty-one.

Frances

I knew from the Internet that he was thirty-two.

Nick

But the acclaim also felt like part of the performance itself, the best part, and the most pure expression of what I was trying to do, which was to make myself into this kind of person: someone worthy of praise, worthy of love.

Oh to be 21