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. When I couldn’t make friends as a child, I fantasized that I was smarter than all my teachers, smarter than any other student who had been in the school before, a genius hidden among normal people.

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. He made me laugh.

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

ran my finger along his collarbone and said: I can’t remember if I thought about this at the beginning. How it was doomed to end unhappily.

If we were both going to die in a burning building and he could only save one of us, wouldn’t he certainly save Melissa and not me? It seemed practically evil to have so much sex with someone who you would later allow to burn to death.

You’re twenty-one, said Melissa. You should be disastrously unhappy.

She pronounced Liese’s name without any particular love or hatred, just a girl she had known, and for months afterward, maybe forever afterward, I was afraid that someday she would say my name that way too. The water was soapy and a little too hot.

He likes partners who take complete responsibility for all his decisions, that’s all. You will not be able to draw a sustainable sense of self-respect from this relationship you’re in. I’m sure you find his total acquiescence charming now, but over the course of a marriage it actually becomes exhausting. Fighting with him is impossible because he’s pathologically submissive, & you can’t scream at him without hating yourself.

I think I only appear smart by staying quiet as often as possible.

Things and people moved around me, taking positions in obscure hierarchies, participating in systems I didn’t know about and never would. A complex network of objects and concepts. You live through certain things before you understand them. You can’t always take the analytical position. Come and get me, I said.