Conversations with Friends

by Sally Rooney

already preparing compliments and certain facial expressions to make myself seem charming.

They’re communal, she said. There’s something nice about that for the neurotic individualist.

The pretence was so real to me that when I accidentally caught sight of my reflection and saw my own appearance, I felt a strange, depersonalising shock.

Though I knew that I would eventually have to enter full-time employment, I certainly never fantasised about a radiant future where I was paid to perform an economic role.

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.

I was relieved he had put the whole thing in lower case like he always did. It would have been dramatic to introduce capitalisation at such a moment of tension.

I felt soothed like I was an animal, and I cried harder.

Lydia had locked herself in the bathroom and screamed that she wanted to die. Deeply uncool, Bobbi said.

Nick told me he was ‘basically’ a Marxist, and he didn’t want me to judge him for owning a house.

Hi Frances, said Melissa’s voice. I said hello, though what I meant was: I hope you haven’t found out about me sleeping with your husband.

I felt out of place in these situations, ignorant and bitter, but also fearful of being discovered as a moderately poor person and a communist. Equally, I struggled to make conversation with people of my own parents’ background, afraid that my vowels sounded pretentious or my large flea-market coat made me look rich.

My mother favoured some species of birds over others; the feeder was for the benefit of small and appealingly vulnerable ones. Crows were completely out of favour.

But these were all things I did because I thought something was happening to me which turned out not to happen. The idea of the baby, with all its huge emotional gravity and its potential for lasting grief, had disappeared into nothing. I had never been pregnant. It was impossible, maybe even offensive, to grieve a pregnancy that had never happened, even though the emotions I’d felt had still been real at the time that I felt them.

When I let him in we looked at one another for a couple of seconds and it felt like drinking cold water.

He was happy to listen to me even when my thoughts were inconclusive, even when I told stories about my own behaviour that showed me in an unflattering light.

I was gripped by a sudden and overwhelming urge to say: I love you, Nick. It wasn’t a bad feeling, specifically; it was slightly amusing and crazy, like when you stand up from your chair and suddenly realise how drunk you are. But it was true. I was in love with him.

When I stood up out of the water he looked at me in a way that was not at all vulgar, the kind of look you can give someone’s body when you’ve seen it many times and it has a particular relationship to you.

he touched me cautiously like a deer touches things with its face.

I paid so much attention to myself that everything I experienced came to seem like a symptom.

It’s possible to feel so grateful that you can’t get to sleep at night.