Conversations with Friends

by Sally Rooney

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

Author does a great job showing the protagonists age with their uncertainty in themselves

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.

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.

He was the first person I had met since Bobbi who made me enjoy conversation, in the same irrational and sensuous way I enjoyed coffee or loud music.

Her hands were large and sallow, not at all like mine. They were full of the practicality I lacked, and my hand fit into them like something that needed fixing.

This information was morbidly interesting to me.

She reminds me so much of the protagonist in “My year of rest and relaxation” that this text almost feels like a continuation of Ottessa, herself.

Was “kindness” just another term for submission in the face of conflict? These were the kind of things I wrote about in my diary as a teenager: as a feminist I have the right not to love anyone.

It was impossible, maybe even offensive, to grieve a pregnancy that had never happened,

I’m sorry that you feel like I lied to you about Nick, I said. You’re sorry that I feel that way, okay.

After her reading, Melissa beamed while we all applauded. When she sat back down Nick said something in her ear and her smile changed, a real smile now, with her teeth and the sides of her eyes. He was always calling her “my wife” in front of me. At the beginning I thought it was playful, maybe kind of sarcastic, like she wasn’t his real wife at all. Now I saw it differently. He didn’t mind me knowing that he loved someone else, he wanted me to know, but he was horrified by the idea that Melissa would find out about our relationship. It was something he was ashamed of, something he wanted to protect her from. I was sealed up in a certain part of his life that he didn’t like to look at or think about when he was with other people.

I loved them both so much in this moment that I wanted to appear in front of them like a benevolent ghost and sprinkle blessings into their lives.

So. Anyway. Maybe we could all have dinner together some time. (I’ll invite Bobbi too.)

This also meant I was Bobbi’s evil twin, which didn’t seem at the time like taking the metaphor too far.

That’s intense, he said. Thank you for saying that. I have to laugh now or I’m going to start crying.

Gradually the waiting began to feel less like waiting and more like this was simply what life was: the distracting tasks undertaken while the thing you are waiting for continues not to happen.

A certain peace had come to me and I wondered if it was God’s doing after all. Not that God existed in any material way but as a shared cultural practice so widespread that it came to seem materially real, like language or gender.

You underestimate your own power so you don’t have to blame yourself for treating other people badly. You tell yourself stories about it. Oh well, Bobbi’s rich, Nick’s a man, I can’t hurt these people. If anything they’re out to hurt me and I’m defending myself.

You live through certain things before you understand them. You can’t always take the analytical position.