The New Yorker Radio Hour - An Irish Novelist’s Début Explores Friendship and Adultery in the Digital Age

Episode Date: August 1, 2017

An Irish writer explores friendship and adultery in the digital age in her début novel.  New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

Hi, it's David Remnick. Now, the last few weeks, if you're a regular listener, you've probably noticed a slight change in the podcast. Change can be hard, but I think the results are worth it. We're delivering two episodes to you every week, each about a half hour long. And it's the same exact contents of the radio hour that we're broadcasting, but we've rearranged it for the best listening experience. Let's go to it.

I basically just think it would be interesting to look at the emergence of a criminal economy. And also, I'm always amazed that there aren't. more profiles of her out there. This really subversive, strange thing, in rap, especially, and see what their lives are like on both sides of the border. From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour,

a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. I'd like to introduce you now to a young writer from Ireland named Sally Rooney. Rooney is a classic overachiever. In college, she

got into competitive debate and ended up as the number one debater in all of Europe. At 23, Rooney sat down to write a novel, which she did writing most of the novel in just three months. That novel got published and has been getting tons of buzz and excited reviews, including a great review in The New Yorker from staff writer Alexandra Schwartz. It's been a long time since I've been as excited about a novel and particularly a debut novel as I've been about conversations with friends. It is a story. It is a story about a young student at Trinity College, Dublin, named Francis, and her best friend Bobby. They are brainy, brilliant, very talkative young women who have a ton of ideas about the world. And they

become wrapped up in the lives of an older couple, Melissa and Nick. Francis starts an affair with Nick and her life changes suddenly. So this novel felt very true to me about a particular time in the early 20s. You're about to go off into the adult world. You have all sorts of ideas and theories about how things work, but you have not yet had to go through any kind of intense personal or moral struggle. And it's a confusing moment. Francis is a really principled person. She is a smart, hyper-articulate narrator, but she's not always so smart about herself and about what she is about to face. And I asked Sally Rooney to read a passage in which Frances explains her thinking about what comes next for her. I hadn't been kidding with Philip about not wanting a job.

I didn't want one. I had no plans as to my future financial sustainability. I never wanted to earn money for doing anything. I'd had various minimum wage jobs in previous summers, sending emails, making cold calls, things like that. And I expected to have more of them after I graduated. 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. Sometimes this felt like a failure to take an interest in my own life, which depressed me.

On the other hand, I felt that my disinterest in wealth was ideologically healthy. I'd checked what the average yearly income would be if the gross world product were divided evenly among everyone, and according to Wikipedia, it would be $16,100. I saw no reason, political or financial, ever to make more money than that. I love this passage because it seems so true to me. And it also, it seems both very knowing and accurate and also totally misguided, which I love. And that's something that I love about this character as well.

Is that a feeling that you had ever about money and jobs sort of wanting to opt out of the whole corrupt system? Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, one of the funny things for me in having these discussions is that when I began writing the book, and in fact, even when I finished the first draft, I was 23 years old and Francis, the narrator, is 21. So the gap between us was really pretty narrow. I was writing very closely, not about my personal experiences, but about a vision of the world that I identified with really closely. And the more that the years go on, and of course, I'm only 26 now, so it's still not a huge gap. I begin to look at Francis's way of seeing the world. with a bit more distance. And I obviously see that in a way, her performance of integrity and of rejection of, you know, systems like capitalism.

She's also trying maybe in a way to defer her adulthood. And I don't mean that in a sort of trite way. I think she enjoys the adult world. She enjoys navigating challenges some of the time. But I think she hates the idea of having to compromise her principles and that adulthood will always necessarily

involve compromise. Yeah, it seems to me that she is right in her ideas and that her ideas are accurate about the world and some of the world's cynicism and she wants to avoid participating in it. But, you know, how? That's the real question. Well, we should say for listeners who are concerned that this is a novel only about ideas, that it's also a novel about love and desire as a very real and experienced thing. What was it like to write about that kind of visceral experience of attraction and betrayal that may come from attraction. That for me was definitely the motivating sort of key behind the book. And it was when I was writing a scene, a scene early on in the book where they're at a dinner party that I realized,

Francis is going to fall for Nick, the married man, that it suddenly, everything opened out in front of me. And it was almost kind of like having an affair because I was thinking about the book all day. And when I was in class, I just wanted to get back to the book. And so it was almost like I was infatuated with the idea of being with this book all the time. And so for me, it's inextricable, the kind of the substance of the book about desire, about infatuation is so linked for me with the experience of writing it that I couldn't possibly separate the two. There is one moment that I really love in the novel where, and feels just so true to me about the way we all live our lives now, where Francis sees a Facebook video of Melissa and Nick singing in their home

and it's like this really tender moment between them as a couple and all their friends are there and they're laughing. And it's just part of a life that doesn't include her at all. And we all, of course, take it so much for granted at this point, but that we have these really intimate windows into both banal and extremely momentous moments in other people's lives through Facebook, sometimes on Twitter, definitely on Instagram. What was that like to try to write the way we live now through all these different platforms? I wasn't really aware of myself doing it. I guess because I spend so much time on the internet and do so much of my communication, even with very close friends over the internet,

that it felt second nature to me to draw those things into the book. It's not just that some of the conversations occur in real life and some occur online. It's that Frances has a particular relationship, I think, with textuality. Like she feels like she has a measure of control when she's writing emails.

But she's also very concerned with archiving her relationships. And at one point she's quite frustrated that she doesn't have a satisfying archive of messages with Nick because obviously most of their affair has at this point been conducted in real life. So it's very, very important for her to have a sort of permanent case file of her relationships. The closest thing to which in history and in the history of the novel, I guess, would be a trove of letters. And there's, you know, just as the letter has been hugely significant in the development of the novel, I think probably the email and instant. message and text message are going to be increasingly significant because the novel is so much about

communication and because the way that we communicate has radically changed. Yeah, of course, one thing that you can do, all of us are walking around with an archive of our personal conversations and relationships, and you can search them. It did occur to me in my early 20s when I had a very intense friendship that took place a lot over email. I have a record of those years that I didn't keep in any other form. I didn't keep it in a diary or a a journal and I don't know what to make of my own personal archive. I wonder if you know what to make of yours. I know it's there, but do I want to really read it? Unclear. Oh, I don't want to read it. Most of the time I'm sort of, I would hate to think of myself reading it. And yet, if someone was

to tell me that it was all deleted, I would feel like a sense of loss. I would be like, oh my God, all my emails, all my correspondence with friends, all the sort of archive of what I was doing. I expect to that now. I expect to have this archive, this daily detailed archive of my entire life. And if it were taken away from me, I think I would feel almost sort of bereaved. Yeah. And yet we walk around with that possibility sort of at all times. What if what if Gmail doesn't exist? What if what if the server is hacked? It's, I think about this a lot. And your novel made me think about it even more. you were a university debater. You wrote a really wonderful essay about that experience, and you were more than a university

debater. You were a champion debater. You were number one in Europe. And you write in your essay about this feeling of competition and wanting to prove yourself the best. Can you talk a little bit about that, what it was like for you to debate, what that kind of intellectual performance was like? Yeah.

It was a very challenging experience. And part of getting acclimatized to it was sort of getting to know a new social environment, which I'd never had any contact with before. So I had never done debating in school. I went to school in the West of Ireland. And when I got to college, a lot of the people who were participating in it

were people who had been to private schools in Dublin and elsewhere and who had come from a sort of hot-house culture of debating. I kind of wonder what it was that drove me to spend or potentially waste so much time doing something, the only reward for which was being good at it, being told you're good at this. And I obviously craved that and I spent a lot of time looking for it and I eventually got it and then felt that maybe it hadn't been worth all the time that I spent in it.

But I certainly, in making such an effort to try and fit into a social milieu in which I didn't kind of naturally belong, I think I learned a lot and I got a lot of experience that probably in very indirect ways, ended up in the novel. So it's a very particular thing to have your first novel published because basically before you publish your first novel, you get to do everything in secret, and now you're not in secret anymore. The veil has been pulled away, and here you are. Does that change how you live in the world? Does that change how you write your next novel? How is it to be a published author for the first time.

It's stranger than I thought it would be. I think I sort of anticipated in my wildest dreams, I sort of thought maybe the book will get, you know, a lot of attention and how wonderful that would be. And people will be reading the book and talking about the book. And what I didn't anticipate is that people would start taking an interest in me personally and sort of the story of how I wrote the book and sort of my thoughts and even my personal life my experiences. And I think it's like talking, having to speak about myself so much. It's like, it's like, you know, when you hear a word so often that it kind of stops making sense, it's like

that, but the word is my personality. Now I'm like, what kind of, what kind of person am I? I, I don't know. So it's, it's been a little bit strange. And obviously it does mean that I can never, I can never do it again. You know, I can never have that first book where I just write it and I tell people I'm writing a novel and, you know, they kind of laugh. But so it has. It has changed a lot. And in 99% of ways, the change has been immensely positive.

And maybe with 1% of the change, I'm still kind of trying to get my head around what it means. Thank you, Sally. It was a total pleasure. Thanks so much. This has really been lovely. Novelist Sally Rooney, talking with the New Yorker's Alexandra Schwartz.

Conversations with Friends is out now. So that wraps it up today or just about. Before we go, why don't we go visit the museum. And of course we'll pay for the audio tour because it's read by a celebrity, Taryn Killam, formerly of Saturday Night Live. Thank you for purchasing this museum audio guide. Your tour will begin shortly. This frenetic painting by Jackson Pollock is typical of his drip style, which features gestural splatters of paint across the canvas, and I know what you're thinking. You're thinking

that this type of painting is easy and that you could do it. it. It's not. And you couldn't. Here it is the Mona Lisa. It's not very big. You're now surrounded by 70 people, all trying to catch a glimpse of it. One of them just elbowed you while you were taking a photograph of it. What I'm trying to say is, it's okay to feel disappointed. As you can see, this room is a bunch of rugs hanging on a wall, so we can skip it. This sculpture, you'll notice is a tube sticking out of an orange cardboard box. You're wondering, is there something I'm missing? No, there is not.

This is a bad sculpture. Oh, look at this guy. Strolling through the museum without an audio guide. Not even a map. Oh, God. Now he's stroking his chin and nodding thoughtfully at a Rembrandt. Christ. Let's keep moving.

We don't need him. Paul Cizan completed this landscape in 1879. And you can touch it right now if you want to. Quick. No one's looking. The gift shop dates back to 1983, but was made bigger in 1997. I'm sorry. What am I doing with my life? I have to go. I'm sorry.

Taryn Killam performing Honest Museum Audio Tour, written for the New Yorker by River Clegg. That's The New Yorker Radio Hour for today. Thanks for listening. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards with additional music by Alexis Quartado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Rianne & Corby, Jill Duboff, Karen Frill, David Krasnow, Sarah Nix, Michael Rayfield, Mithelie Rowe, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Susan Morrison, Emma Allen, Jessica Henderson, and Terrence Bernardo. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.