Conversations with Friends

by Sally Rooney

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.

Yeah, men love telling me I’m cool, I said. They just want me to act like I’ve never heard it before.

As a woman I have no county,

When it came to sordid or mundane things, she might be slow to notice, but real changes that occurred inside me were never hidden from her.

After that I put some cold water on my face and dried it, the same face I had always had, the one I would have until I died.

The baby looked up at me with her wet hand in her mouth and blinked. I held her tiny body against my chest and thought about how small she was. I wanted to talk to her, but the others would have heard me, and I didn’t want anybody else to hear.

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.