Normal People

by Sally Rooney

And you spend all your free time reading.

She just let things happen, like nothing meant anything to her.

Connell always gets what he wants, and then feels sorry for himself when what he wants doesn’t make him happy.

She has never believed herself fit to be loved by any person. But now she has a new life, of which this is the first moment, and even after many years have passed she will still think: Yes, that was it, the beginning of my life.

Connell wished he knew how other people conducted their private lives, so that he could copy from example.

He understands now that his classmates are not like him. It’s easy for them to have opinions, and to express them with confidence. They don’t worry about appearing ignorant or conceited. They are not stupid people, but they’re not so much smarter than him either.

But there it is: literature moves him. One of his professors calls it “the pleasure of being touched by great art.”

It suggests to Connell that the same imagination he uses as a reader is necessary to understand real people also, and to be intimate with them.

I did used to think I could read your mind at times, Connell says.

Generally I find men are a lot more concerned with limiting the freedoms of women than exercising personal freedom for themselves,

With other people she seemed so independent and remote, but with Connell she was different, a different person. He was the only one who knew her like that.

When he left her building he did cry, as much for his pathetic fantasy of living in her apartment as for their failed relationship, whatever that was.

For her the scholarship was a self-esteem boost, a happy confirmation of what she has always believed about herself anyway: that she’s special.

That’s money, the substance that makes the world real. There’s something so corrupt and sexy about it.

Marianne was so totally uninterested in what people thought of her, so extremely secure in her own self-perception, that it was hard to imagine her caring for attention one way or another.

It was culture as class performance, literature fetishized for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterward feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about.

She feels pleasurably crushed under the weight of his power over her, the vast ecstatic depth of her will to please him.