Why do people get so wound up by Sally Rooney? It's an interesting question, and one that reveals more about our values as a society than it does about Sally Rooney. For a novelist who does her best to live a quiet life, emerging into the public eye only when a new book is published to do a handful of contractually required Zoom interviews against a featureless white wall, she evokes bewilderingly strong feelings.
"Surely there are better literary heroes for our generation than Sally Rooney," shouted a recent piece in the Sydney Morning Herald, likening her novels to "white bread" and bemoaning the fact that "you can't criticise it, lest you be accused of blasphemy". Actually, precisely the opposite is the case. The "current cultural moment" as Rooney might call it all but demands that you criticise.
Rooney is presented to us as the literary equivalent of the viral blue-gold dress – you either see it or you don't, but you are presumed to have a view
Rooney is presented to us as the literary equivalent of the viral blue-gold dress – you either see it or you don't, but you are presumed to have a view. Anne Enright suggests in the Guardian that the division around her work is "possibly manufactured". She may be right. The website TheJournal.ie recently ran a poll simply asking, "Are you a fan of Sally Rooney's books?" Half of the respondents hadn't read any of them – not that it put them off praising or deriding her in the comments.
If the criticism was focused on her work, that would be fair enough. It is not for everyone. For the record, I am a fan of her crisp and exacting prose, her forensic and affecting exploration of the bonds between people. But much of the commentary is of the how-dare-she variety. How dare she be so successful writing about, of all things, relationships? How dare she use language that is so superficially spare and unadorned? How dare she be so private? How dare she be so political? How dare she complain? How dare she not seem to care?
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A lot of the griping seems to stem from a perception that she isn’t adequately astonished and indebted for all her good fortune. In an interview in the New York Times this week, she said she didn’t think she should be paid “multiples more” to write books than her husband does to teach maths.
Talking to Róisín Ingle in this newspaper today, she describes the challenge of "preserving the boundary between my public and private lives". In the Guardian, she wondered "why should someone have to disclose facts about their upbringing and family life to the public, just because they've written a novel?" If you don't want to read novels about writers, or women, or Irish people, she went on, "don't read my novels. I won't mind."
Women writers frequently get asked more intrusive questions than male writers in interviews. Their novels are mined for clues as to which parts are autobiographical
The combined effect has been to immediately typecast her as Difficult Sally Rooney. “Have you noticed that the people that whine the loudest about how terrible fame is are living very comfortable lives because they’re famous? I’d gladly deal with annoyances like paparazzi, intrusive interview questions and a few crazy fans over worrying about becoming homeless,” one woman complained on Twitter.
“She is setting herself up for an awful letdown. Heard from publishers that the book is complete rubbish. Her notions are extraordinarily odd. She is not an academic, and pretentious thinking gets you nowhere,” went another, as though thinking small and avoiding odd notions are the ideal conditions for making art.
The Sally Rooney hot takes aside, recent events have exposed some of the ridiculous and unsustainable demands our society makes of creative people. We want them to tinker away quietly, pouring their heart and soul into great work that makes us feel good about ourselves, unmotivated by the prospect of money or even – lately – an audience for their work. They’re so passionate, we say indulgently, as though passion fills fridges and pays mortgages. It’s a measure of our values that the creative sector was the last without a roadmap to reopen.
Successful women
When it comes to successful creative women, the demands are even more outrageous. We feel they owe us something of themselves. Women writers frequently get asked more intrusive questions than male writers in interviews. Their novels are mined for clues as to which parts are autobiographical.
The nature of the attention economy is that our mild and passing interest has become a valuable commodity. They may never have sought that attention – never wanted to be a lifestyle brand or an influencer, or even to do more than the bare minimum of contractually required publicity – but we have nonetheless chosen to bestow it, and they’re supposed to be grateful.
Sitting down every day to compose an 80,000-word story about people entirely invented in your head takes self-belief, but there’s an unspoken rule they never betray any of that self-belief publicly. Instead, they’re supposed to be astonished and humbled that anyone ever read a word of it. If it works out and they are commercially successful, it is held up as evidence that it didn’t actually work out at all, because now they’re not really artists.
I googled Sally Rooney when I was writing this, and the search engine reveals the questions other people are asking about her. “Does Sally Rooney have endometriosis?” “What is Sally Rooney’s salary?” “Is Sally Rooney married?”
As a successful woman, this is her lot. She is expected to be brilliant at what she does, likeable, self-effacing and so-very-surprised-and-delighted-to-be-here – oh, and also willing to share details of her gynaecological health, finances and love life on demand.
Sally Rooney winds people up simply because she refuses to play that game. Who can blame her? It’s hard not to agree with Alice, a character in her latest novel, when she says that “people who intentionally become famous – I mean people who, after a little taste of fame, want more and more of it – are, and I honestly believe this, deeply psychologically ill”.