Sally Rooney disappears up her own etc

Sinead O Connor received a major backlash in the States over the tearing up of the Popes picture all right including being booed off the stage when she supported Bob Dylan a couple of weeks later. I'm not so sure about being ostracised in Ireland. Certainly the usual suspects were outraged but I don't recall the Irish media going after her in a big way over it.

Guys, this is the Irish Times paraphrase, with few snippets of obviously incomplete quotes, of an interview with Rooney in Der Spiegel.

I'd hesitate to rush to judgment without actually, you know, reading the interview. (Which is paywalled. And is in German.)

Wish I was a euro behind her.

Fair play to her, successful author, new book getting great reviews, Normal People the TV show was great and I think they're making another series of one of her books. More power to ya Sally.

Just curious, have you actually read 'Conversations with friends' and 'Normal people'?

In my view, the TV adaptation of 'Normal People' was excellent. In fact, it was significantly superior to the novel, which is somewhat repetitive and replete with pretty uninspiring prose.

Cool. I'm not their target audience either, but read both novels, due to the Booker prize buzz around 'Normal People'. I was distinctly underwhelmed by the caliber of the writing.

I'm not saying this to undermine Sally or out of begrudgery for her success. I was expecting more and simply did not enjoy the novels. I also found the studenty marxist discourse pretty grating. Thankfully, they minimized this dialogue in the TV adaptation of 'Normal People'.

Having said all that, 'Conversations with friends' just wrapped filming and I'm sure I'll take a look when it's released.

her books are just very ....tiresome

I don't think it's right to say "we didn't know". Seems more like "we didn't want to know".

People in Tuam knew of the graveyard back in the 1970s when two children found the remains of all those children, but the locals did not investigate it further. Catherine Corliss brought it to the wider public attention through years of effort.

Stories of abuse were largely ignored by the populace. I believe a book was written in the 1980's but never published.

The last Magdalen Laundry was closed in the mid-1990's in Waterford, with a lot of controversy about the use of women as unpaid (read-slave) labour for Hasbro.

Sinead O'Connor was written off as a crank and an attention seeker.

People didn't want to know, and people didn't care. The attitude is the same now as it was back then. The perpetrators are still alive and walking the streets. How many priests have been charged with abuse? How many higher-ups who aided and abetted were ever charged? Sean Brady is still walking around, having participated in the Brendan Smyth cover-up.

The Church put 100million in a survivors fund in the early 2000's, but anyone who accepted the money was forbidden from taking legal action or naming their abuser. Absolutely shocking stuff and the government of the time allowed it.

So I have no issues with Sally Rooney, or anyone else taking a shot at the Church. The organization is rotten from the top down.

A stopped clock is right twice a day.

I know somebody who vaguely knew Sally in Trinity. Apparently, she heavily involved in student politics and debating and sees herself as a Marxist. This person said that she is clearly very bright. She won ‘schols’ for English in the early 00’s, which entitled her to free tuition and college accommodation. Despite her obvious intelligence, she’s a tiresome person to be around by all accounts.

The team who developed ‘Normal People’ made a very wise decision to subtly modify the Marianne character. In the novel, she espouses stridently immature political views. All round, she is quite dislikable and possibly semi autobiographical. Instead, the TV series pretty much ignored the politics angle and used a very pretty actress (Daisy Edgar Jones), who elicited sympathy for the plight of her character. This sympathy would surely not exist if the audience had been exposed to the more ‘raw’ Marianne of the novel.

Anyway, agree with other posters here. I’m also from a similar background to Sally Rooney. From the west and went to university in Dublin. The only difference is that I’m 8/9 years older than her. The Catholic Church had very little influence throughout my life. In fact, I’ve recently returned to it a little, by choice, due to family circumstances. It’s safe to say that it played an even less significant role in Sally Rooney’s life and it’s totally disingenuous of her to claim that it’s been a vehicle of oppression for her at any stage, throughout her relatively privileged existence.

In my view, Sally should stop with the personal deep-dive portraits in the media and focus on becoming a better rounded, more durable writer. If she doesn’t manage to evolve from a literary perspective, she’ll find that the appetite for her millennial oeuvre will be satisfied in the very near future.

Lookit, back to the point I made in post #5 of this thread:

First, we haven't seen the interview with Rooney; just a rather piecemeal account of it in the Irish Times.

Second, going on what's in that account, it doesn't appear that Rooney brought up Catholicism or that she complained that Catholicism had restricted or constrained her in any way.

The interviewer brought Catholicism up; they asked her if she had experienced any pushback from "Ireland's Catholic milieu" (so appealing to a trope about Ireland which no foreign journalist has ever been known to resist).

It seems that in response Rooney talked about how this had been a factor in the past, affecting people like Sinead O'Connor (again, an example brought up by the interviewer, not by Rooney); that things were dramatically different now; but that the "pivot away from the Catholic era" is not quite complete.

Nothing in the OT report suggests that she suggested that Catholicism had at any time been a "vehicle of oppression for her" .

And, when she talks about the break with the Catholic past being still incomplete, it seems - based again only on what's in the IT article - that Rooney may be suggesting that we have too conveniently identified "the Catholic church" as the villain; they did all these horrible things to us; we, the Irish people, were victims. And therefore we as a people are no way responsible for or complicit in the things that were done, and we do not need to examine our own values, our own culture, our own attitudes to ask why as a community we went along with this.

Rooney is perhaps hinting that maybe the Irish catholic church was conservative, judgmental, puritanical, etc because it emerged from the Irish people, who were conservative, etc, due to various socioeconomic issues that need to be unpacked and explored (Rooney is a Marxist, remember).

And, the implication is, as long as we don't confront that, and take the easy option of blaming those men in black suits over there, we have failed to break completely with the conservative, judgmental, etc attitudes and values that gave rise to the problem in the first place.

On edit: Fr what it's worth, I think she's a terrific writer. I have loved both her novels. If she has a "target market", which I seriously doubt, I am definitely not part of it. I cannot understand the view that she writes "trashy fiction", unless perhaps you take the view that any fiction that deals with sex/sexual relationships is automatically trashy — which would be a neat illustration of the very point that I think Rooney is making about Ireland not having come to terms with its puritan values and attitudes

[Voiceover: Those who clicked through to the linked article discovered that it did not call Rooney a white supremacist. It said nothing about her that could, on the most extravagant interpretation, be summarized by saying that it called Rooney a white supremacist.]

I can't comment on her work, but someone in the Irish Times seems to have a real obsession with her, publishing regular pieces either directly about her, or tangentially, as above. It reminds me of when Amy Huberman was never out of the Indo with pieces being published about her for the flimsiest of reasons.

I'm only speculating, but maybe it's the same publicist.

I haven't read it yet, but after your earlier review, I think I'll give it a miss 😀

I thought 'Normal People' was solid. On the other hand I was bored to tears of the two protagonists by the end of 'Conversations with friends'.

Indeed, and one piece of advice often given to aspiring writers is "write about what you know". That appears to be what she is doing. I can imagine the outcry if she wrote a book from the POV of a member of an ethnic minority. "How dare she...white privilege...cultural appropriation"...etc

What is your problem, exactly? That I expressed an opinion that you don't like? Are you assuming that I was agreeing with the thread title?

See below for details of how much I care about whether or not you agree with my subjective opinion: