Sally Rooney’s brilliant writing in Normal People will leave readers with a sense of nostalgia and love for their own everyday normal lives.
The 2019 British Book Award Book of the Year by Sally Rooney does not have the climax like other books but has a story that really sticks.
It seems at first that it may be the young love that makes the book interesting, or the components of grief and loss. However, it may just be the fact that the story resembles all our lives so closely, that we are unable to set the book down until we know how it ends.
Marianne and Connell, the protagonists, spend years of their lives either trying to be apart but ending up together or trying to be together but being separated. The two characters meet in school, where Connell is popular, and everyone thinks Marianne is strange.
Marianne comes from a rich family and Connell’s mother works as a housemaid at Marianne’s family home. This pain of differences in their social status seems to be the foundation of their friendship as well as a significant crack in their relationship throughout.
Despite their differences, the two of them find each other – the driving force being either of love or teenage curiosity, the reader cannot determine for the first few chapters of the book. However, as time goes on, one can tell that their relationship, although characterized by frequent sexual encounters and a strong importance given to the inability to commit or even think of being serious, is in fact love.
The book has also been made into a tv series, with 12 episodes. Some may have noted from the tv series that the character growth that Marianne and Connell go through is immense.
Author Sally Rooney shows us that Connell’s life has more meaning to it than just being a popular kid in school who does not want his friends to find out about his friendship with Marianne. We learn more about Connell as time passes – we see him as an intelligent student, a loyal and loving friend, and a soft person in general.
Connell’s battle with depression towards the latter half of the book also introduces to us the troubles he has been facing apart from all the drama with Marianne.
At the same time, Marianne goes through her own journey of finding friends and finding her place in the world.
There are many elements to the story, but the book is really about these two kids growing up. The readers find out at the end that the story was not about their love or their journey, but about life.
It was about the various uncertainties that we face as people who are living, breathing, and bound to find sadness and joy in things every day. It is about dreams and how we cope with the loss of these dreams.
Rooney has done a wonderful job of telling readers that Normal People is not about two people who are not ‘normal’ or ‘ordinary’, but rather about what life looks like for all of us normal people.
The storytelling is brilliant, and while simple, the story is able to capture us in a way that keeps us wanting to know more. There are no intricate tropes or life-changing losses in this book that would keep a reader at the edge of their seats, but it is successful in doing so anyway.
