9. Normal People: Class, Ireland, and Heartbreak

Is Sally Rooney's hit novel really a love story? How does class division impact the love Marianne and Connell feel for each other? Is Rooney creating a relatable story of miscommunication during first loves, or a tale of heartbreak and loss? Join Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett as they delve into the fascinating story behind the writing of Normal People, the world it was born of, and the novel itself. Email us: ⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠ Instagram: ⁠⁠@bookclubpodhq⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠@thebookclubpodhq⁠⁠ X: ⁠⁠@bookclubpodhq⁠⁠ YouTube: ⁠⁠@TheBookClubPodHQ⁠⁠ Senior Producer: Nicole Maslen Assistant Producer: Alfie Norris Social Producer: Harry Balden Video Editor: James Clayden Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  When you're building a company, you learn that trust is what closes deals. You may have the best product, but buyers won't sign without proof that your product is secure, especially if it has AI. Vanta gets you compliant fast with SOC 2, ISO 27001 and more, and keeps you secure with continuous monitoring. Hyperbound, a YC-backed startup, used Vanta to unlock the Fortune 100 in under a year. Snowfire got audit-ready in a month and closed a multimillion-dollar deal. Trust matters. Get started at vanta.com.

• 0:28Speaker 01

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC dot com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 1:09Speaker 02

  Connell took Marianne into his arms and kissed her. She could feel like a physical pressure on her skin that the others were watching them. Maybe people hadn't really believed it until then, or else a morbid fascination still lingered over something that had once been scandalous. Maybe they were just curious to observe the chemistry between two people who, over the course of several years, apparently could not leave one another alone. Marianne had to admit that she also probably would have glanced. When they drew apart, Connell looked her in the eyes and said, "I love you." She was laughing then, and her face was red. She was in his power. He had chosen to redeem her. She was redeemed.

• 1:51Speaker 02

  It was so unlike him to behave that way in public that he must have been doing it on purpose, to please her. How strange to feel herself so completely under the control of another person. But also how ordinary. No one can be independent of other people completely. "So why not give up the attempt?" she thought. "Go running in the other direction, depend on people for everything. Allow them to depend on you. Why not?" So... Hello everybody. That was from Sally Rooney's bestselling novel, Normal People, published in 2017 to critical acclaim, made into almost a cultural phenomenon by the popular TV show adaptation starring Daisy Edgar Jones and my old friend Paul

• 2:34Speaker 02

  Mescal in 2020. And remarkably, it was only her second novel, published when she was only 27. And it was long listed for the 2018 Booker. It was awarded the Novel of the Year at the Costa Book Award. It was a very big deal. It's fundamentally a coming of age story, chronicling the very complicated on and off romance of two young Irish people, Marianne and Connell. We move with them from secondary school to university over the course of about five years. And both are troubled and sensitive and intelligent. And though they share this kind of strangely deep connection, both sexually and emotionally, it's also a book that's

• 3:15Speaker 02

  a really wonderful window into kind of Ireland in the early 2010s and class and kind of abusive relationships and anxiety in the modern day. So there's a lot going on there.

• 3:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  So Normal People, as you say, Tabby, is a massive phenomenon, especially with the TV series which came out in 2020 during Covid. So loads of people watched it. It made a big star of Paul Mescal and also of Daisy Edgar Jones. And Sally Rooney, a lot of people in their twenties and thirties see her as a touchstone, don't they? Something that she's always resisted. People see her as the voice of a generation, somebody who speaks for a generation that came of age after the financial crisis, that have grown up with emails, texting, digital communication, online dating, all of this kind of thing. And that Normal People in particular is the work that captures what it feels like or what it felt like to come of age in the 2010s and then to discover yourself in a world where people are very anxious about the state of the world, their

• 4:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  mental health, all of these kinds of things.

• 4:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. And she does have an uncanny ability to kind of climb into the mind of a late adolescent, you know, someone in their early twenties. I was at university when the book came out and it was a massive, massive deal. I mean, it was kind of describing A period of life that I was actually living and people kept kept telling me to read it and kind of being an insufferable contrarian. I didn't. So reading it this time for the podcast was the first time I'd ever read it. And yeah, I did find it very touching. I I love Rooney's writing style, but I may not have fallen in love with it to the extent that maybe I hoped I would.

• 4:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh.

• 4:51Speaker 02

  I know. Sad. We'll touch on that more at the end, of course, but I did really like the way that she structured it and I really liked her writing in it.

• 5:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  I didn't read it when it came out. I think partly because I thought, well, it's obviously not aimed at me and it's not a subject that really grabs me.

• 5:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  So I was a bit resistant to it. And actually, this is one of the beauties of doing this show.

• 5:11Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 5:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  One of the only good things about it, Tabby, is that I get to read a lot of things that I wouldn't normally read. And this was one that was on the list quite early on. And I thought, you know, I would never normally read normal people. And rather like you, I am quite contrarian. So the more the people would say, oh, you should read it.

• 5:28Speaker 02

  Mm.

• 5:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  I would resist. But I was determined not to approach it in the spirit of a sort of grumpy, you know, middle aged man looking down on it, you know, to approach it open mindedly.

• 5:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. Bring all your Marxist proclivities into play.

• 5:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  Precisely. Well, you have to. I mean, Sally Rooney herself, of course, is a bit of a Marxist. Let's explain it for people because not everyone will have read it. You can divide it very roughly into three parts. So the first part, they are at secondary school, these two characters, Connell and Mary Anne, in a small town in County Sligo, which is in the kind of far west of Ireland. Then they both go in the second part to Trinity College Dublin, at which point the relationship between them, specifically the power dynamic between them begins to shift. And then the third part is the end of their time really at Trinity. They're travelling abroad. They are now really no longer teenagers, but they are young adults and they're graduating from university and thinking what they are going to do next. And the way it's structured is it's not a continuous flowing narrative.

• 6:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  Basically, what she does is she takes a series of moments, snapshots almost in their lives, which are infrequent intervals, so irregular intervals. They're kind of staggered. Sometimes they're days apart, sometimes months pass.

• 6:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  Offstage and we, the readers, I think it's one of the very clever things about the book. We have to kind of fill in what has happened in between those moments. And then actually, within each section, there will be flashbacks. They'll be thinking about things that have happened, as it were, offstage. Or they'll be looking at things that we've already encountered, but in a different light. So telling it from a different perspective. And so we're understanding the characters and their relationship in a different way. And we're getting new insights and new perspectives with every page that we turn. And I think it's a, it's a very clever way of constructing it. The architecture of the book, a lot of thought has gone into it.

• 7:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, I massively agree because you know, that's what real life is like. Like, life isn't made up of a series of kind of great totemic moments. It's lots of small incidents that happen and gradually unfold. And then even when the big moments do come along, they're often more mundane than they seem. So I thought it was really clever. It was kind of grounded in reality. And her writing style is too. It's very, very intimate. It's very unadorned. She very rarely uses metaphors or anything like that. Life is what it is and the writing is just as direct. But also she never uses quotation marks. So it feels like kind of one long conversation between the reader and the characters. And she does this wonderful thing where she'll focus on mundane kind of physical actions.

• 7:56Speaker 02

  So making tea at one point, moving a small piece of tinsel. And this anchors these really high emotional stakes in the real world consistently. And that brings great depth to kind of the minute moments of real life. And this is also really effective in showing how our main characters know and understand each other. They can recognize that something has changed in the other one from the tiniest action or eyebrow raise or whatever it is.

• 8:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, which is exactly how things work in a couple or in any kind of very close relationship.

• 8:28Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 8:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  With the blink of an eye, you know, the raising of an eyebrow or something. That may speak volumes to you and nobody else will notice. And there's this sort of sense that they're engaged in, I mean, you could call it a dance, the two characters, or a chess game or a debate. So it's a very, very intimate book. It's really. Focused on these two people and Sally Rooney, as we will discuss, was a champion debater, something that in every single profile always brings up and which she is very proud. And there's a slight sense that the the rhythm of debating, the back and forth, the prepared speeches, the the sort of rebuttals and counter arguments, that sort of almost very straightforward, simple exchange, the sort of transaction of a debate, or indeed

• 9:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  of a chess game, is reproduced in the dialogue and in the relationship of the two characters. Although, I have to say, a huge theme of the book, again, something that somebody who's interested in debating, you can see why they'd be interested in this, is miscommunication and things that go missing and things that are misunderstood and that end up having a kind of toxic effect on their relationship.

• 9:35Speaker 02

  But particularly in the modern age, you know, a world in which communication has been carried out through technology a lot of the time these days, so phones, emails, whatever it is. And I think that's slightly reflected in the writing, you know, the way that people speak, whatever, there's like a spareness and a flatness to it.

• 9:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, agreed.

• 9:52Speaker 02

  As you would text or whatever, you know, you're not going to go into great detail or great depth, it's going to be almost quite Spartan.

• 9:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  She has said herself, she used to use Twitter a lot, she doesn't use it anymore, and she's actually talked about how Twitter influenced her writing, you know, very, you've got very few characters, you are very direct and to the point, but there's also a kind of irony often there, which I think is there often in her writing. You know, when you first encounter it, especially if you've been doing what we've been doing, which is basically reading Wuthering Heights and, you know, The Great Gatsby or something. So you then come to normal people, gosh, it's very plain, it's very unadorned, it's very stark, the writing, but that's part of the point. She wants to capture the honesty and the authenticity of these teenagers' lives without kind of artifice or contrivance. And that's not to say there's no art in the book, of course, there is loads of art in the way it's constructed.

• 10:39Speaker 02

  Speaking of that, so let's get into the plot a little bit.

• 10:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  Sure.

• 10:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the book, as we said, it's charting this very complicated relationship between these two Irish teenagers, Marianne Sheridan, Connell Wadron, and from their final year at secondary school in a small town to university and then kind of briefly beyond. So we start in Sligo, the Secondary school. Connell is popular, he's athletic, he's well liked, he's kind of a bit of a jock.

• 11:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 11:02Speaker 02

  And Marianne is intelligent, she's outspoken, but she's a total social outcast.

• 11:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  Not a nerd exactly.

• 11:08Speaker 02

  She just speaks her mind.

• 11:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  She's an intellectual and she's self-conscious and she's aloof and she

• 11:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  Sort of sits a bit apart from the rest of the class and the rest of the school, I guess.

• 11:18Speaker 02

  But then the funny thing is that these statuses, Connell being above her, slightly inverted in their actual social statuses because Connell's mother is a cleaner in Marianne's home, which is kind of wealthy, but their family is emotionally cold, whereas, you know, Connell has this lovely, warm, young mother. But this creates a sort of strange social connection between them. And despite their differing statuses at school, they begin having a secret sexual relationship. Connell won't acknowledge it in public because he's embarrassed and ashamed. He cares deeply what people will think of him.

• 11:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 11:51Speaker 02

  And so he doesn't want people knowing that he's kind of going out with a school weirdo.

• 11:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  Because she's uncool and he wants to be very cool and he wants to be liked by his friends. He wants to be, crucially, and we'll come back to this, he wants to be perceived as normal. And she's not normal and he's embarrassed that she's basically his girlfriend.

• 12:07Speaker 02

  But he does care very deeply for her. He just doesn't, he just can't show it. Anyway, finally, he goes a step too far and he invites another girl to their school dance and Marianne is very, very upset and she stops going to school. She does her exams and stuff from home and they stop talking.

• 12:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  And so then we leap forward in time, don't we, to Trinity College Dublin. So they've both gone to the most prestigious university in Ireland, the longest established. I think set up by Elizabeth the first, I might be wrong.

• 12:31Speaker 02

  Oh, look at that, that's a fun detail.

• 12:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  So here, the power balance shifts. Marianne is now very socially confident. There are lots of people like her. There are lots of middle-class students from professional parents and whatnot.

• 12:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, wealthy intellectuals, basically.

• 12:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, as we will discover, there are some people there with some very, very red trousers indeed.

• 12:54Speaker 02

  Yes, very red trousers.

• 12:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  Connell is there in his trainers. Now, he'd been very cool at school, a sporty boy, but now he feels he's the cleanest son who is out of his depth and he feels very awkward and he struggles to adjust. Over time, they reconnect. They become friends again, they sort of slip back into their sexual relationship. But they don't become a happy, settled couple because the relationship is constantly being undermined by their own insecurities, their own misunderstandings and their own miscommunications. There's one particularly sort of sad misunderstanding which we'll come to. I think it's the saddest scene in the book, actually. Marianne believes that Connell's rejecting her, even though he's not, he's appealing to her.

• 13:32Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 13:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  And they end up separating.

• 13:34Speaker 02

  It's so relatable that, like, being too afraid to say how you really feel because you're afraid of rejection, essentially. Yeah.

• 13:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly, exactly. So you ensure your own rejection, actually. And then Marianne ends up in a series of relationships with terrible men who treat her very badly. There's a sort of masochistic element to these relationships. She thinks she has very low self-esteem. And she thinks she sort of deserves to be punished or whatever, and she's very submissive and all of this. Connell ends up getting another girlfriend. They all go to Italy.

• 14:05Speaker 02

  Disastrous trip to Italy. Oh.

• 14:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  Marianne ends up in a very strange relationship with a bloke in Sweden who's, you know, this is a very sadomasochistic relationship.

• 14:14Speaker 02

  It's a dominant submissive thing, essentially.

• 14:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  And Connell, one of his mates from school, takes his own life and Connell becomes depressed and has to seek counselling. So there you have the sort of the mirroring of the mental health crisis that, you know, we've seen so much about in the last 10 years or so. And then finally, the last section of the book, Marianne has a sort of reckoning with her family, who it turns out have not treated her terribly well. And the question that hangs over the last pages of the book, are they going to get back together? Are they going to find fulfillment?

• 14:46Speaker 02

  I mean, it's the ultimate will they, won't they?

• 14:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 14:48Speaker 02

  Which is why we'll also kind of explore whether or not this is in fact a love story.

• 14:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  Is it truly a love story? Exactly.

• 14:53Speaker 02

  Now, let's talk a little bit about the woman behind it, Sally Rooney, because I actually think it's quite rare that writers have big profiles these days. So she was born in Castlebar, County Mayo in 1991, where she also grew up. Her father was a technician for the National Telecoms Company and her mother worked at the local arts centre. She didn't have a particularly wealthy upbringing, but she said that the family. Would often kind of engage in discussions about left wing politics at the dinner table. And Rooney has maintained this kind of interest about politics the rest of her life. She's she often speaks out publicly.

• 15:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, most controversially, she's a very, very keen supporter of the Palestinian cause. And this has got her into hot water because of her support for groups that in Britain are more controversial. We're not going to go into all that, but you can Google it if you're interested.

• 15:41Speaker 02

  And then she went on to study English at Trinity, so the same university that Marianne and Connell attend in the novel. And she was elected a scholar in two thousand and eleven, also like Marianne and Connell. Then she graduated in two thousand and thirteen. She did a master's in American literature, also at Trinity. And it was there that she received the greatest accolade, well, of all time, won by anyone in the course of history. She became the European universities debating champion.

• 16:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, so this is often brought up and she's very proud of it. Now, some people would say refreshingly, she's not excessively modest about it. So, you know, I mean, why should she be? So, in fact, she wrote an essay about how good she was at debating. And this essay was the foundation of her career. So it's called Even If You Beat Me. And she basically said, I'm the best competitive debater on the continent of Europe. And this was seen by a literary agent and then she was catapulted to stardom, wasn't she?

• 16:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's actually quite a cool story behind how the book was discovered and became what it is now. And in a piece in The Guardian that I read from two thousand and twenty one, she was described as the most talked about novelist of her generation. And I think certainly from my experience of university in two thousand and nineteen and two thousand and twenty, that was definitely true in that moment in time. And she was only in her twenties when she wrote her first novel, Conversations With Friends. So she was young, like Donna Tartt. There is a slight commonality between them, both kind of young, they both have quite a recognisable aesthetic. They're both kind of waspfish and known to be a little bit spiky. I think that Sally Rooney's spikiness is probably sort of born of an entirely natural and probably pretty healthy intolerance for public scrutiny and the limelight.

• 17:25Speaker 02

  So I kind of respect that, but she can. I have to say, an interview's come off as a bit defensive. So I read in one interview, she said of people kind of prying into her politics. She said, well, it's my job to write about whatever comes into my head to the best of my ability. If as a reader, you were to exercise control over the kinds of things that are depicted in novels, try writing one. That's what I did and it worked out for me.

• 17:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, nice. So we can talk a bit about how her own persona and her politics colour the book. You know, because some people on the left say, oh, she's writing about working class people. She's not really working class herself. There are a lot of people, including, there may well be people who listen to our show, who are resistant to her. So Harry, our digital guru, is not a Sally Rooney, is not a Sally Rooney fan. And I think that may be particularly pronounced, my guess, is among men. She's perceived as a writer for women and older listeners. So she's perceived as, you know, the voice of her generation and all that kind of thing. And she's perhaps easily dismissed by a certain generation of reader, which I don't think is entirely fair.

• 18:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  Because if nothing else, actually, her book is very interesting about the context of its times.

• 18:35Speaker 02

  It is.

• 18:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  This story that you've described, Tab, is set in Ireland after the great crash of the late 2000s, which took a massive toll on the Irish economy. Basically, Ireland was subjected to a kind of EU imposed austerity programme. So there was this great downturn. There'd been this period before known as the Celtic Tiger, where Ireland had prospered as never before in Irish history. And then there was this sense that it had all come crashing down. And Sally Rooney's book is one of many published in Ireland in the 2010s that reflects the sort of shock of that. So it's born out of the anger and a sense of frustration of a generation who can't get housing, can't get the opportunities they thought they were going to get. But at the same time,

• 19:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  She's talked about this a lot herself. There's a whole load of Irish writing, the writers like Eamonn McBride and Claire Keegan and so on, that comes out of this context of there's all these little magazines, one of which Sally Rooney herself edited called The Stinging Fly, magazines that are supported by government grants and things. And actually, writers get support from the government. You can apply for scholarships and things like that. So the paradox is that while Irish society was struggling with the austerity programme, writing was really booming. And you get a sense of that in the book because there's a literary event, isn't there, where a writer comes to Trinity to give a talk and everybody goes and it's very exciting. But at the same time, there's all the stuff about the kind of ghost estates, which are housing estates left unoccupied because of the crash.

• 20:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  And of course, the class dynamic between Connell, who is working class, and Marianne, who is much richer and more socially confident and moves very easily in a world of people who travel to Europe and read books and do all these kinds of things.

• 20:16Speaker 02

  One of the things they bond over is their politics. You know, at one point, the fact that they are so well suited to each other is highlighted by the fact that Connell's sort of quite dull girlfriend at the time, she wonders whether Marianne's interest in politics is performative, whether she's genuinely interested in the Middle East because she thinks that's kind of odd and slightly inconceivable. And they're both broadly left wing, though, again, the way that they approach politics is really interestingly illustrative of their classes because for Marianne, politics is kind of an intellectual exercise. You know, it's all about studying Marxism, commenting on capitalism.

• 20:55Speaker 02

  Whereas for Connell, it's personal and it's experimental. It affects the way he actually live. So, yeah, in this sense, it serves to emphasise their class disparities.

• 21:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. And although it's a book about a relationship, the book is laced with politics and Sally Rooney's own politics. So they talk about Edward Snowden, they talk about the war in Syria, they go on kind of protest marches, Gaza was mentioned, so all of this kind of thing. This is sort of laced throughout the book. And when they go to the ghost estate, there's a very telltale Line.

• 21:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  They're kind of puzzled about how there's this housing estate and nobody knows, you know, why it's there and why it's deserted. And she says, it's something to do with capitalism. Yeah, everything is. That's the problem, isn't it?

• 21:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, such a throwaway comment. It's so young person trying to be not knowing about politics.

• 21:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, exactly. So let's talk about the two characters because basically I think you can admire the book and you can admire its architecture. But if you don't buy into the relationship of the characters, as in if you don't care about them, you probably won't enjoy the book as much as its great devotees do. And we'll start with the character who, the first character to speak, Connell, the boy. He is, as you say, he's sporty. I think what Sally Rooney captures very well is the vulnerability, the contrast between outwardly, he seems very impressive, he's well liked, he's popular, and yet, deep down, he's struggling to work out what he's meant to be, what normal people do. He seems shy of expressing his true emotions. The fact that he's keeping

• 22:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  this relationship with Marianne secret from his friends tells us an enormous amount about his kind of social insecurities. He has this great desire, I think, which anybody who's been a teenage boy, I mean, I don't want this to become the therapy club, but if you've been a teen-

• 22:43Speaker 02

  No, it's all right. This is a safe space.

• 22:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  Thanks, Tappy.

• 22:48Speaker 02

  Feeling like an outsider looking in.

• 22:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  Feeling like an outsider looking in. I think not all teenage boys feel that at times. A, feeling like an outsider, worrying about being taken seriously, worrying about being cool enough, all of those kinds of things. Sally Rooney captures that very cleverly, I think, very well in Connell. And actually, the title, Normal People, again and again, we are told that he wants to be normal. He just wanted to be normal, to conceal the parts of himself that he found shameful and confusing. He says he feels trapped. He feels that he cares too much about what people think of him. There's a wonderful line, actually, when he thinks about going to Trinity College. Marianne encourages him to go to Trinity College because she can't see why, for a working class boy, that might actually be, it might be, of course, exciting.

• 23:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  We're told, you know, he would start going to dinner parties and having conversations about the Greek bailout, and he could sleep with some weird looking- Girls who turn out to be bisexual. What's not to like? Well, what's not to like is he worries that he will lose himself and he'll be out of his depth. The old Connell, the one all his friends know, that person would be dead in a way, or worse, buried alive and screaming under the earth. I think that's really well observed, that fear that the true you will be lost because you'll be trying to be something you're not.

• 23:59Speaker 02

  But also these very profound thoughts and feelings that he experiences, like he is very emotional. He really struggles with his anxieties and stuff. They never show on the surface. He's very laconic in his behaviour. He's constantly described as being big. His physicality is emphasised and as having quite a hard face, whereas beneath the surface, he's writhing and worrying and stressing and just out of inaction, sometimes he proves to be cruel.

• 24:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes.

• 24:23Speaker 02

  That's such a telling and pertinent portrait of modern masculinity or millennial masculinity or whatever, because people are encouraged to be open more now in a way that they never were. But also Connell is never not a boy. He's never not male. He's very boyish. He's very masculine.

• 24:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  One of the themes of the book is how you're not truly yourself or you're not living a fulfilled life if you're not in relation to others, that you cannot live an independent, separate, atomised kind of life. Everything is about your connection to other people. But he doesn't really know how to make that connection to Marianne. He doesn't even know what their relationship is. He can't be honest with himself or with her about his emotions. And part of that, I guess, is because he, I mean, both of them in their different ways come from broken homes, don't they? He doesn't have a father figure as a sort of role model of how to treat women and so on.

• 25:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, he says at points that he kind of, he wishes he had an imprint to follow, to know how to behave in his relationships. He doesn't know how to behave in his personal life.

• 25:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 25:23Speaker 02

  And I think that's quite relatable too, to people, possibly particularly men, growing up and entering into your first relationships, navigating the grown up world. And there is a way of doing it that you're told about and that you were aware of, but it doesn't necessarily seem to be how you are doing it. And there's something that feels wrong with that. You have to have great confidence to believe that you are doing what is right or you were living right all the time.

• 25:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, you get that in the, in the school sequences, which are very true to life, where there's a contrast between the tenderness and the vulnerability that he shows when he's alone with Marianne. And then the sort of joshing, bantery way that he talks about girls. With his friends, there's a massive contrast between those two things, which of course reflects how teenage boys talk about their relationships to this day and arguably always have.

• 26:12Speaker 02

  But also, he writes Marianne these long and very personal and very emotional emails when he's not with her, but when he's with her, he'd never speak like that.

• 26:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 26:22Speaker 02

  So that, you know, that's really interesting. I mean, you can tell that Sally Rooney is very interested in the idea of like an unassuming boy like this. It's suddenly having great power over another person because he does have this incredible power over Marianne. And, you know, power is definitely a feature of all human relationship. And so you get this guy with a limited experience of life. And so how's he going to negotiate this sudden rush of power that he has over another person? So it's interesting to see how he goes from kind of handling that when he's 18 and then 22, having a slightly more complex and kind of profound understanding of that and how to use it.

• 26:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  All right, we're talking about Connell's power. So the person who's in his power, as it were, who puts herself in his power is of course Marianne. And she's the character that I think a lot of readers of the book love the most, particularly female readers, I guess. Did you warm to Marianne as a character, Tabby?

• 27:14Speaker 02

  There's a lot about her I admired. I liked her kind of relentless defiance and the way that she never allows herself to be a victim. And we'll explain why in a second. I actually often found her quite annoying, I'm afraid to say.

• 27:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, no.

• 27:26Speaker 02

  She comes across as quite arrogant, but then you understand why actually that's more of a front than anything else.

• 27:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes.

• 27:32Speaker 02

  In the same way that Connell is unwaveringly kind of masculine, she's always very feminine and delicate. She has these beautiful slim hands and a feminine dress sense and stuff. And so that means that when she feels vulnerable and she, she's really, really pitiable and that's quite touching. Because on the other hand, she comes across as quite cocky, like a little bit insufferable. It's almost like her sex, being a woman, gives her a confidence that Connell's sex, being a man, takes away from him. But in reality, she's clever, she's shy, she's sensitive, she's awkward. She says to her friend Peggy at one point that she's not easy to like because there's a coldness in her.

• 28:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  But the coldness is partly because she's anxious, no?

• 28:11Speaker 02

  We learn over the course of the novel that she really doesn't believe that she is worthy of love and kindness. She kind of thinks it's her lot to be used and abused or to be totally within the power of another person and kind of their creature.

• 28:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, that's why in her sex life, there's the submission element, right?

• 28:28Speaker 02

  As her relationships progress, she gets more and more extreme in how submissive she is in her sex life. You know, her second boyfriend, we discover, kind of beats her up, which is horrible. But it's almost what she wants because it's what she believes she deserves. But unlike Connell, she doesn't really care what people think. This is a really wonderful feature of her. So at school, she argues with her teachers or she's kind of passive aggressive with her bullies. And I like how there's this inconsistency in her portrayal because in real life, no one is consistent. No one is one thing day to day and no one is one thing on the surface.

• 28:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  I think that's true of both characters, actually.

• 29:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, definitely.

• 29:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  Even the people who don't necessarily like the book or like the characters cannot deny that they are complicated. And they are, as you rightly say, they're not reducible, either of them, to caricatures.

• 29:13Speaker 02

  No.

• 29:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  About her security and insecurity, it kind of ebbs and flows. So on the one hand, she feels that she, like Connell, that she's not normal and she can't be like normal people. From a young life, her life has been abnormal. She knows that. She tries to be a good person, this is a quotation, but deep down, she knows she's a bad person, corrupted, wrong. And all her efforts to be right, these efforts only disguise what's buried inside her, the evil part of herself. So that makes it sound like she's absolutely crippled with low self-esteem and self-loathing. And yet, at other times, she will strike people as immensely poised and clever and socially confident and whatnot.

• 29:52Speaker 02

  Unusually confident. And you know, the implication is slightly that she isn't bullied because she's genuinely weird. Or that her bullies are just straightforwardly awful people. It's because she comes across as kind of unknowable and chilly. But also because, whereas most teenagers are just desperate for social acceptance. She is not, and she refuses to conform and they resent her for this. And They're kind of threatened by her intelligence and the way that she wittily responds to her abusers in a sense.

• 30:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  Which anyone who's been at school as a teenager will remember, right? That if there's somebody who stands apart from the rest of the group, who seems not to care what the others think, who, that can be quite intimidating to everybody else because they can basically just think this person's a bit of a weirdo, a bit of a loner. But also that threatens everybody else who feels that terrible gnawing need to conform. You kind of think, why don't they feel it as well? What's so special about them?

• 30:47Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 30:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  Tabby, how much do you think Sally Rooney is Marianne or Marianne is Sally Rooney? Because people have really debated this, haven't they?

• 30:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I was going to say, because in their argumentativeness and their defiance, obviously there's a common thread there. So in many ways, yeah, she is a projection maybe of Sally Rooney. You know, both a little bit spiky, both intellectual, possibly a little bit difficult or certainly in the way that they speak to people could can be a bit difficult. Both debaters, both, you know, kind of willing to joust with the world. So I mean, Sally Rooney has said of herself, I have opinions and I'm fairly ready to stand by them and defend them. And obviously to be challenged and to accept counter arguments and whatever, I think that's all part of normal life. She's also said that she wasn't massively popular at school, neither is Marianne. She has described herself as a Marxist. Marianne too expresses kind of Marxist leaning opinions.

• 31:37Speaker 02

  And Rooney has also admitted that she was extremely insecure when she was young. And you, you see this in Marianne. She said, I had low self-esteem and a predilection for hero worship and I was extremely determined. Equally have a like, what character, particularly a character rooted in the real world, is not in some way going to be a slight.

• 31:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  Projection of the author.

• 31:56Speaker 02

  Not intentionally, it's not that the writer's trying to create like a dream version of themselves. How can you not draw upon your own experiences?

• 32:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  So Sally Rooney has said, you know, I don't, I have no interest in writing characters who don't share my way of seeing. I have to be there with them. I don't want to look down on my characters. I don't want to insist upon the distance between me and them. And I think in Marianne's case, it's, it's not hard to see the resemblances. However, I think it's too simplistic to say, well, Marianne is merely a self-portrait or a wish fulfillment fantasy or any of these kinds of things. Because particularly when it comes to the issue of class. There are massive differences. And also, there is one other thing about Marianne, isn't there? So, Marianne, we kind of get a sense of this from the beginning. It's never fully explained, but we start to discover more and more about it as we go on. There is a kind of trauma, a secret, that lies behind her very low self-esteem. And so,

• 32:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  maybe, Tabby, after the break, we can explore exactly what this trauma is. And we can also talk about the theme of class, which is a massive issue throughout this book. And we can reveal what people are obviously gagging to know.

• 32:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  Which is whether these star-crossed lovers will end up together.

• 33:02Speaker 02

  Will they or won't they?

• 33:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  So we'll be back after the break. Will they or won't they?

• 33:07Speaker 04

  When you spend enough time around great companies, you notice that the best ones treat trust as a growth strategy, not a box to check. Vanta helps companies build and prove trust from day one. Its Agentic Trust Platform connects compliance, risk, and trust at enterprise scale. Vanta delivers a 526% return on investment over three years and pays for itself in just three months. Learn why over 16,000 of the fastest-growing companies use Vanta at vanta.com.

• 33:37Speaker 01

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' healthcare to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the HouseMajorityPac.com, not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 34:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  Welcome back to the book club, everybody. Now, before the break, we were talking about Marianne and Connell, the lovers at the centre of Sally Rooney's normal people. And we were getting to grips with Marianne's quite contradictory, complicated personality. The gulf between the inner Marianne that we sometimes see in her kind of interior monologues, and the outer Marianne that she presents to the world. Because she has this secret, she has this thing in her past that explains her vulnerability and her sense Of low self-esteem. So Tabby, do you want to take us through this?

• 34:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we gradually horribly discover kind of why Marianne is the way that she is. And there is nothing blunt or on the nose about this. You're kind of drip fed this horrible knowledge. And it's never explicitly stated. You kind of get it from pieces of conversation. She's had a very abusive upbringing. Her father would hit her mother and herself. Her brother is horribly aggressive to her, says things like, I'd love it if you killed yourself. And at one point actually breaks her nose. But equally, there's another form of abuse on show here. And that's kind of just inaction, saying nothing, doing nothing, being a silent observer to the suffering of, in this case, your child.

• 35:20Speaker 02

  And that's Marianne's mother. So there's this passage, and this is so Sally Rooney, to say this very dark, deep thing in the most stark matter of fact terms. So it's, she says, Denise, this is Marianne's mother, decided a long time ago that it is acceptable for men to use aggression towards Marianne as a way of expressing themselves. As a child, Marianne resisted, but now she simply detaches as if it isn't of any interest to her, which in a way it isn't. Denise considers this a symptom of her daughter's frigid and unlovable personality. She believes Marianne lacks warmth, by which she means the ability to beg for love from people who hate her. So these horrifying experiences have conditioned Marianne to enter into kind of unhealthy relationships

• 36:04Speaker 02

  and expect a degree of control in the way that she's treated, but also violence during sex. It's really, really horrifying, but it's also horrifying because it's kind of in the back of your mind. And then you're reminded. And she's so matter of fact in the way that she refers to things. So at one point, you know, Marianne says, oh, that her boyfriend Jamie is, oh, you know, he likes to hit me during sex. And she's so unemotional about it. And I actually think that so much of this book is actually about kind of the long-term impact on trauma, the way that people carry it afterwards. These don't have to be extreme instances, or you know, particularly out of the ordinary. And Sally Rooney has said, it seems to me like almost everyone has endured some

• 36:48Speaker 02

  kind of pain or suffering that has changed their life. That change can take the form of damage or of learning and growth or some combination of the two, an ability to adapt better in certain ways and worse in others. And you can definitely, definitely see that in Marianne, her sort of chilliness and her willingness to be abused in relationships.

• 37:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 37:08Speaker 02

  It's, it's actually just a form of survival.

• 37:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  But then her lifeline, as it were, her escape from that, certainly when she was at school, was the relationship with Connell.

• 37:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  And that was the first, I mean, this is what gives the relationship so much of its power and its value, is that he was the first person to ever show her any tenderness or warmth. It's when Connell says to her explicitly, I would never hurt you. And, and this is the moment when he says to her, I love you. I'm not just saying that, I really do. There's this passage, even in memory, she will find this moment unbearably intense. And she's aware of this now while it's happening. She's never believed herself fit to be loved by any person, but now she has a new life of which this was the first moment. And even after many years have passed, she will still think, yes, that was it, the beginning of my life. The extraordinary thing about this, actually, it's so well done, this scene.

• 37:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  Because he says, I love you in a slightly throwaway way.

• 38:04Speaker 02

  That's the thing.

• 38:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  And later on, he remembers this, and he remembers it differently. He remembers that he said it almost accidentally, involuntarily, kind of without, you know, having premeditated it. And I wonder if he almost said it because, you know, we've, we've been told he's trying to figure out what it is to be someone's boyfriend. He says it because it's the thing you say, and there's a point when you say it, and he feels odd when he says it. He has this rush of feeling himself, but it has a different significance for the two of them. And I think that's really, really well observed.

• 38:39Speaker 02

  But also because of this thing that we said about him earlier, which is that he doesn't know how to express this overwhelming emotions that he feels. So Marianne tells him this terrible thing, you know, she, her dad used to hit her. And it's like, he doesn't know how to express that. He hasn't learnt how. So he kind of goes. Oh, I want her to feel better, so I'll tell her I love her. Which is not to say that he doesn't, but it's also, I think, this thing that I I mentioned earlier, which is that he is kind of working out how to exercise this power that he has over her. As a young man, he just doesn't quite know how that looks. And he's slightly in love with it and slightly terrified of it, terrified of what it could be in himself. Because Connell has his fair share of trauma as well. And, you know, this affects how he behaves.

• 39:23Speaker 02

  And a massive part of his arc is is coming to terms with the depression and anxiety that he battles with, particularly later on in the book, when he's very, very badly affected by the suicide of a of a school friend.

• 39:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 39:36Speaker 02

  And Sally Rooney has said of this, I created this young man or teenage boy. And I really think now, looking back, when we meet him, he's already deeply racked by social anxiety. He doesn't have the name for it necessarily, but he feels so uncomfortable in his own self with regards to what's perceived as normal. So in this, he's a very millennial hero.

• 39:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  He is. It's hard for him, precisely because he's a sporty young man or boy.

• 40:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  From a close knit kind of working class community in which confessing weakness or vulnerability is not the done thing.

• 40:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  Um, I mean, he ends up actually taking support from a councillor at the university, which again is very of its time. You know, a character in the 1990s would not have done that.

• 40:18Speaker 02

  And also helps on offer.

• 40:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, helps on offer. Exactly. Sally Rooney has said herself, you know, in that scene, what I, one of the reasons that scene is there is because, you know, she's reflecting the social realities that are there in the 2010s that would not have been there earlier on. And actually, this brings us, actually, the pressures on him brings us very neatly to what I think is probably the most powerful theme of the book, which is class. I think you and I might disagree about how well or not she observes this. But, you know, because Sally Rooney is a self professed Marxist, it's really important to her. And she thinks people don't exist independently. They exist in relation to other human beings and to the society of which they're a part and the economic power relations and so on.

• 40:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, it shapes their confidence, it shapes their behaviour.

• 41:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  Absolutely.

• 41:03Speaker 02

  It's like one of the great determining forces of every human life.

• 41:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's the air they breathe, it's the scene which they swim, all of that. And you get this from the very, very beginning. Connell is the cleaner's son. Marianne lives in the white mansion with a driveway. Her family is is professional, middle class. And so, and so the interesting thing is it works sometimes counter to their social standing in the school, for example, he's the working class boy, is popular, well liked. She, the middle class girl, is disliked and is a loner and whatnot.

• 41:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  But there's always that sort of tension there. And then when they get to Trinity, to Dublin, then it changes because at Trinity, there are loads of basically posh or middle class students.

• 41:48Speaker 02

  Red trousers, gilets, pinky rings.

• 41:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes. And I'm just trying to speculate, Tabby, on how you would have fitted in at Trinity College Dublin.

• 41:58Speaker 02

  I have never worn red trousers. I've never even owned, I don't know anyone that owns a gilet. How dare you.

• 42:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  I don't believe that's true. You know, a lot of people who wear those quarter zip things.

• 42:07Speaker 02

  I do, I do. Yeah. Our producer, Callum, for one.

• 42:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  I think the quarter zip is very gilet adjacent. I'm just gonna come out and stay it.

• 42:14Speaker 02

  I think cashmere cardigans are gilet adjacent and.

• 42:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  I'm not wearing a cardigan. I'm wearing a V-neck jumper. Get it right.

• 42:21Speaker 02

  That's so cool.

• 42:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  Come on, work on your, work on your, work on your repartee. So actually, Connell goes to, and this is precisely the kind of repartee, by the way, that Connell would have disliked. He would not care for this. So he goes and he says, basically, all the guys in his class wear wax jackets and plum coloured chinos.

• 42:39Speaker 02

  This is terrible.

• 42:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  Those tipped up Irish fashions. And actually, there's one passage that really did make me laugh because I did think so much about my own time as a student. He goes to these seminars and basically he feels massively inferior because there's all these other kids in the seminars who appear to be on an intellectual level far above him because they talk with such confidence and, you know, fluency.

• 43:02Speaker 02

  Oh, this is so gorgeously well observed. It's just so true to real life.

• 43:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  It is, it is. Let's hope people don't say that about this podcast. He starts to realise they haven't actually read the books. They're just talking at a very abstract level. He understands now, and I quote, 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. And of course, that's so true. I mean, that's what people always say.

• 43:31Speaker 02

  That was my university experience, sitting around in seminars, listening to people like wax lyrical about.

• 43:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  A book they haven't read.

• 43:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, or, or like a vague sense of philosophy or whatever, with such confidence. And you could tell that they were incredibly hungover and they literally like didn't even know what Marxism was.

• 43:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly.

• 43:48Speaker 02

  Not like me, of course.

• 43:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right. Well, I mean, frankly, I mean, I don't think I'm going to amaze the listeners to the show when, to be completely honest, neither you nor I are from colossally underprivileged backgrounds. And so we're very familiar with the kind of people who have a fluency and a social confidence and an intellectual confidence.

• 44:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  That perhaps is more a result of their educational institutions.

• 44:15Speaker 02

  And privilege, I guess.

• 44:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  And privilege than it is of native ability. And Sally Rooney is very caustic about that. And she actually observes the way in which these things matter brilliantly, I think, with the scholarship.

• 44:28Speaker 02

  Oh, it's so, it's so well done. Yeah.

• 44:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  Because getting the scholarship at Trinity, which she, of course, the author did, is a huge thing. It's an incredibly prestigious thing. And Marianne really wants that scholarship because, as, and I quote, she would like her superior intellect to be affirmed in public by the transfer of large amounts of money. So basically, she doesn't need her rent paying or tuition because her family do that. She will get paid tuition, free accommodation, free meals, all of this kind of thing with the scholarship. And she really wants it because she's clever and she wants the scholarship to say to everybody, look how clever I am. This is the affirmation I need. Connell, the self-esteem boost of the scholarship is not as important as what Sally Rooney calls the gigantic material fact of it.

• 45:14Speaker 02

  It actually changes his life.

• 45:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. He needs the rent. He needs the food, the free meal in college.

• 45:20Speaker 02

  Suddenly has possibilities, whereas before he could only do what he was able to do within the limits of his financial restrictions.

• 45:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  Even if you're like our social guru, Harry Bolden, and you don't like Sally Rooney's writing, there is a real human sympathy to the way she understands what that would mean to somebody like Connell. The liberation from anxiety and from financial pressure that the scholarship brings. And then you contrast that with the slight glibness of Marianne's attitude to the scholarship.

• 45:51Speaker 02

  And ditso the casual way that Marianne says, oh, you should apply to Trinity, which is obviously a huge deal for a boy like Connell. And I actually thought there's this bit where they Go abroad for a while and Connell is only able to go because of this scholarship. The way that he observes the incredible things that he sees, I thought that was actually oddly touching, but also very well done. Obviously, coming from a much humbler background than Marianne, his world has always been, you know, quite small. And so, you know, when he goes abroad and he's seeing places that he's only ever heard of or read about, the size and reality of them seems almost surreal to him. You know, so for instance, he says, it's like something he assumed was just a painted backdrop all his life, has revealed itself to be real. Foreign cities are real and famous artworks and underground railway systems

• 46:36Speaker 02

  and remnants of the Berlin Wall, that's money, the substance that makes the world real. There's something so corrupt and sexy about it. Whereas, you know, Marianne in her kind of Italian family villa is so at home. She's so comfortable. She's so casual about this extraordinary experience.

• 46:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  I've actually changed my mind back again, Tabby, to your perspective. You said you felt that the depiction of class sometimes came a little bit too close to, not exactly caricature, but it was a bit heavy handed almost.

• 47:03Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, initially I thought it was a little bit on the nose. Everyone with money was kind of a git. For instance, Jamie, Jamie is case in point. This is Marianne's horrible, horrible boyfriend. And his dad was involved in creating the financial crisis. He doesn't do anything in life unless he's wearing red trousers. He beats Marianne up during sex and he's, he has a massive tantrum about the size of their champagne flutes. And he is controlling. Her friend Peggy, who is of a similar class, kind of thinks that's all fine because, you know, he's from the right set. And so I just kind of thought that it was lacking in kind of subtlety and nuance. It was just so plainly done. And the posh characters basically served to emphasize Connell's kindness and gentleness and maybe that of his mother or whatever.

• 47:45Speaker 02

  But then, having said that, well, after we spoke, I kind of thought about it and I was like, well, I'm very lucky in that I haven't experienced that feeling of feeling like an outsider and in the way that Connell does, where people probably do seem like cliches and archetypes from his experience, which is not mine.

• 48:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  That's a fair point, that we're seeing it through Connell's eyes and maybe he would see it in a slightly, you know, understandably, they all wear plum trousers and they all wear gilets.

• 48:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. And also just to stress, I think these people are awful. I'm not.

• 48:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. Obviously, class, a huge thing about class is power.

• 48:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  And power dynamics are a really big part of this book, aren't they? And it's not just about class. You already mentioned Connell has a kind of power over Marianne, which is basically a sexual power.

• 48:28Speaker 02

  It's sexual, exactly. It's, it's, yeah, it's about desire.

• 48:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, and desire is a big, is a huge thing for Sally Rooney in her books. So Marianne desires Connell, partly because he has social cachet when they're at school. It's not just that he's sexy, it's that he's popular, he's an exciting person to be going out with. She finds it transformative.

• 48:48Speaker 02

  And you see that when he says, I love you, and then obviously later, he's not sure why he said it or whatever. Where she says, well, this is the beginning of a new life for me.

• 48:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, exactly. And then it turns on its head when they're at Trinity. She has the social capital and he feels the outsider left out and whatnot. And so his desire for her is partly coloured by that, isn't it? And desire for Sally Rooney is so important because it comes back to this theme of interconnectedness, that none of us is independent, that none of us is an atomised individual. I mean, she said many times in interviews, she's not interested in writing about people on their own. She wants to write about people in relation to others, their emotions, their sadness, their happiness, their lust, their love, whatever. They are inevitably entwined with other people. And actually, just before we started recording, I was flicking through the book and I realised that we hadn't talked at all about the epigraph, which is from Daniel Deronda by George Eliot.

• 49:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 49:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  And it's as follows, "It is one of the secrets in that change of mental poise, which has been fitly named conversion, that to many among us, neither heaven nor earth has any revelation until some personality touches theirs with a peculiar influence, subduing them into receptiveness." And that's basically the theme of the book, that you are changed not by abstract ideas or anything like that, but by your relationship with other people, and that nothing almost has any meaning. Except as it's experienced through your relationship to others. But the Connell Marianne relationship is so important because it's their mutual desire that changes them and exposes them to new possibilities and makes them realise that

• 50:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  they can be different people and that the world contains more in it, more kind of emotional possibilities than they had previously imagined, don't you think?

• 50:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of about how you are a pinball in life, moving from one bump to one bump with people and how that changes you. Not necessarily transforms you, I think that's kind of an ideal that she plays with in the book, but certainly how, yeah, your life is basically, you were moving from one kind of relationship, from one encounter to another.

• 50:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 50:55Speaker 02

  But also for Marianne, sex and intimacy, it's all about like the loss of self. So she wants to be utterly, utterly in someone else's power because she doesn't have a very strong sense of self. And she kind of leans into that. But equally, that between her and Connell, their desire for each other is not a bad thing. It brings much into their lives. And, you know, particularly the kind of chilly, isolated Marianne, it kind of suggests that rather than independence being the ultimate goal, that it's all right for women to need. And I think that's why the sex scenes in the book, they're always telling you something about what phase Connell and Marianne are at in their lives, but also what phase they're at in their relationships.

• 51:40Speaker 02

  You know, the sex is illustrative and it also explains why they find each other so compelling, why their connection is so, you know, strange and profound. But then, despite this incredible kind of avenue of communication between them, one of the massive themes in the book, which you mentioned towards the beginning, is miscommunication. Despite this incredible connection and knowing each other as they do, trusting each other as they do, their relationship is constantly fragmenting, thanks to a series of kind of misfire born of their own private issues and insecurities. And so they can't communicate properly with each other and they break apart again. It's really, it's actually a tragic element of the

• 52:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  But as you were saying to me before, it's very old fashioned in a way.

• 52:23Speaker 02

  It is, it's very classical.

• 52:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  So much of Jane Austen or George Eliot or something, and your favourite author, Anthony Trollope. So many of the of the plots are influenced by letters gone astray or misunderstood or communications that are misunderstood in some way.

• 52:38Speaker 02

  The misfire results in the happy ending a lot of the time, getting over the confusion or miscommunication.

• 52:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  And so I mentioned in the first half, there's one scene in particular that perfectly encapsulates this. So it's when they're at Trinity College and Connell, because of his poverty, is basically, he's run out of rent money. He's going to have to move out and he wants to tell her about it. He's sort of throwing himself a little bit on her mercy. And he basically says, well, you know, I'm in a real mess. I'm going to have to go home for the summer. And he, I think, is looking for her to almost put an arm around him and say, oh, don't worry, you know, whatever, whatever. But she takes it completely the wrong way. That he's deserting her and going off home for the summer because he's got cooler people to be with or something.

• 53:23Speaker 02

  I think she's right to see it that way. I totally am. I get why Marianne, like, he never gives any indication of his true intention because he's, you know, he's too embarrassed.

• 53:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  But of course, he's embarrassed. Exactly. He doesn't want to admit it. And there's this line, "He couldn't understand how this had happened, how he'd let the discussion slip away like this. It was too late to say he wanted to stay with her, that was clear. But when it had become too late, it seemed to have happened immediately." He obviously hopes that she's not going to see other people. And he says very sort of simply, "I guess you'll want to see other people." And she says, "Sure," in a voice that struck him as truly cold. And then afterwards, he cries because she's going to see other people and all of this. But he doesn't realise.

• 54:01Speaker 02

  That she's devastated.

• 54:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  That they're at total cross purposes throughout. And that does capture the way that you speak when you're young and you're frightened to betray your emotions and you are frightened of rejection and of exposing your vulnerability and all that kind of thing.

• 54:15Speaker 02

  I think the other slight implication is that because, you know, often between, you know, young men and young women, you know, sex is always kind of popping in the air between them. How much can they ever really understand each other with, you know, sex, which needs a vulnerability, which needs a pride and stuff like that in the picture? You know, there's always going to be an uncrossable barrier. But then this leads to. I think kind of the question at the heart of the novel, because I'd been told so much about this book by kind of friends that loved it and found it a very moving love story, I kept thinking as I was reading it, is this a love story? And in a sense, I think, no, in a sense, I think it's almost the anti-love story.

• 54:56Speaker 02

  It's about how two people can change each other's lives for sure, in a lasting way. But it suggests that love isn't enough to guarantee happiness or longevity in reality. So for instance, there's these references to classical romances like Emma in the book. And I think that kind of serves to frame this message because in Emma, for instance, romance is kind of about social positioning, the stability of marriage and easily resolved misunderstandings resulting in kind of a clearly defined, harmonious ending. Marriage is the ultimate goal and that's what you are overcoming the jeopardy to get towards. And once achieved, the story is kind of done and dusted. But here, you know, for Marianne and Connell, like marriage is just, it's never even in the picture. It's never even part of the end game or endpoint. And they continue to drift in and out of each other's lives without resolve, without

• 55:41Speaker 02

  any kind of clear definition of what they are. That is so millennial dating. Like, no one ever really knows what they are because of dating apps, because there's so many other options on the table.

• 55:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 55:51Speaker 02

  And there's no emotional resolution, you know, both remain damaged. So the conclusion is kind of, love doesn't heal everything, love doesn't fix everything, and uncertainty will always prevail.

• 56:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  And they don't even really become a lasting, stable couple, do they?

• 56:07Speaker 02

  They never refer to each other as boyfriend and girlfriend. No.

• 56:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, there's never a point where they are, oh, we're going to have Marianne and Connell round for dinner. Do you know what I mean?

• 56:15Speaker 02

  No. You really betrayed like your age there.

• 56:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, come on.

• 56:19Speaker 02

  Shall we have like the Sheridans over for dinner? Fuck's sake.

• 56:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  Tabby, you have dinner parties. I know you have dinner parties.

• 56:28Speaker 02

  I actually don't have dinner parties. I've had one.

• 56:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, you've had a dinner party.

• 56:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  You've had people round for dinner. Were they a couple?

• 56:35Speaker 02

  No.

• 56:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  You're saying that, and I think they probably were. I think you're lying.

• 56:38Speaker 02

  I don't know how we got here. Come on.

• 56:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  So you don't think it's a love story, deep down? Or you don't think it's, hold on, you don't think it's romantic? Lots of people clearly do.

• 56:47Speaker 02

  No, no, I don't think it's a typical love story. But it is, you know, rapturously romantic. I mean, you can't say that it's not. I mean, for one thing. Okay, so I'm going to reveal what happens at the end of this book. Connell gets onto a writing course in New York. The indication is that he's going to go and Marianne will stay, but they're both enriched each other's lives. Marianne says at one point that he's brought goodness into her life and she'll have that forever. So it's a really hopeful ending. It's not saying that, you know, love is pointless because it doesn't really change anything. Not at all. It's deeply romantic, you know, in part just because of the connection Connell and Marianne share for one another.

• 57:26Speaker 02

  Their endlessly tender conversations and the way that they understand each other, even amongst these kind of infuriating missteps. And also their sexual connection is incredible.

• 57:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, we're told it's incredible, but we're not, we don't really see it.

• 57:38Speaker 02

  No, of course not.

• 57:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  Would you agree with that?

• 57:39Speaker 02

  They both think that it is, though. I mean, I think obviously the TV series is much more blunt about this. But I think the implication is that they share an unusually deep connection. And also the fact that it's a will they, won't they? That is the most romantic formula in the book.

• 57:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 57:55Speaker 02

  And there's also this thing that it plays with the idea of soulmates, even in amongst the realism of it all. And frankly, I mean, that is one of the most romantic concepts out there. And it's something that everyone kind of deep down, I think, is sort of fascinated by.

• 58:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  But Tappy, do you know what? Yesterday, as you know, I was listening back to our first episode that we did about Wuthering Heights.

• 58:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  And in that, you poured scorn a little bit on the idea of the soulmate when you were talking about Cathy and Heathcliff. So don't you think that in this, the power of the book needs to derive from us believing that this is an unbelievably special?

• 58:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  Connection between these two people that they are soulmates. You were mean about his girlfriend, who I think is called Helen. And you said, oh, she's a bit dull and she's, you know, all of this.

• 58:41Speaker 02

  She's very unsympathetic when his best friend dies.

• 58:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  I think she's fine. I think she's all right.

• 58:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, she's fine. But that's the thing. That's what Sally Rooney is saying. These two people are not fine. They are exceptional. They're exceptionally clever. They're exceptionally traumatized. They bring something uniquely vulnerable, tender and also physically charged into each other's lives. That's why it is a very romantic book, capital R romance. And that's why, in a sense, their relationship, despite it being set firmly rooted in the real world and against the backdrop of text messages and, you know, what are we and anxiety and that kind of thing. It is an idealized relationship. You know, they share an inexplicable connection, despite the fact that they come from different backgrounds, they have different friends. It's about this kind of intellectual intangible connection.

• 59:27Speaker 02

  And the idea of that, the idea that it plays into of soulmates is an idealized projection of love.

• 59:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  You have to sort of buy into that a little bit, and I'm going to give myself away now and betray my hand. And this is where all the Sally Rooney great fans will give up on the podcast. Because I don't, deep down, find them very likeable characters. You know, I believe in them. I think they're very well observed. You made the point when we were chatting about this before, before we recorded. They don't have any fun. They're not funny.

• 59:57Speaker 02

  They never make each other laugh, which I think is a crucial component of relationships and love.

• 1:00:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  Of course, I think a key component of any really successful relationship, there has to be a shared sense of humour. I mean, you have to be able to laugh and enjoy yourselves. They never really enjoy themselves. You get a sense that it's always raining and they're always running out of money and they're always very miserable.

• 1:00:19Speaker 02

  Oh, you can't say the running out of money thing. That's just real life.

• 1:00:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  I mean, I have just said it.

• 1:00:24Speaker 02

  All right.

• 1:00:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  There is times where you are just having a laugh and you're having a really nice time. And especially in a couple with somebody you're meant to be getting on really well with. You know, the sex, for example, everyone says, well, the sex is tremendous. They have sex, then they talk about Gaza for a bit. Then they have sex and they talk about Marxism. I mean, to me, that doesn't sound like a brilliant recipe for a sundae.

• 1:00:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, but you're like a middle-aged Englishman. I mean, that's kind of the ideal of, you know. There's that film The Dreamers about young people and sex and love and stuff.

• 1:00:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 1:00:52Speaker 02

  It's like, it's all about talking about Marxism in between sex, basically.

• 1:00:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:55Speaker 02

  But also, I mean, yeah, I do, I do agree. Like, you know, you said, for instance, you never see them going over to dinner at people's houses. I mean, God, why would they be invited? They're so miserable. But.

• 1:01:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  Let's have those two, like, long faces round.

• 1:01:11Speaker 02

  That being said, this book is all about the silences in between what we are allowed to see. So we don't know what goes on offstage. And also, I do like the kind of rounding it up message at the end of it all, which is really hopeful. It's that love can't heal you, it can't fix you, whatever it is, but it is freely available to anyone out there. And the wonderful thing is that Marianne, by the end of the book, kind of comes to believe that. And I think that's, that's a lovely thing. But then still, I mean, we're talking about the sex, the romance of it all. This leads me on to the question, like, why was it such a cultural phenomenon? It's said often these days that people don't read as they used to. Books like this kind of belie that trend.

• 1:01:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  The readership is young. Sally Rooney has definitely got a gift for capturing how a lot of young readers think about their lives and about how they think about their relationships. So without, again, we're not, the rest is therapy. But when you read it, do you think, oh, this absolutely captures my experience of, you know, being young, relationships, all that kind of stuff? The coming of age element of it, for example.

• 1:02:10Speaker 02

  Yes, I think it definitely captured parts of that. The miscommunication element because of pride and fear. The fact that you feel like when you're young, that there should be some kind of rulebook that you're following. But actually, you're never quite sure that you're doing it right. Like, there's this wonderful bit where it says, oh, Marianne has this sense that her real life was happening somewhere very far away, happening without her, and she didn't know if she would ever find out where it was and become part of it. She had that feeling in school often, but it wasn't accompanied by any specific images of what the real life might look like or feel like. You know, that feeling that. Technically, you know, you're following all the steps and everything, but you're just an observer watching the world, you know, turn around you.

• 1:02:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  Everybody has that feeling, don't they? That you're missing out, the real part is happening somewhere else, that you're not doing it right, that you've misjudged your course because of fear and anxiety and you've chosen the wrong path, all of that. That's part of being human.

• 1:03:01Speaker 02

  Connell wishing that he had an imprint for how to conduct his personal life. When you're having your early relationships, it so feels like that. It so feels like, you know, when you first get irritated by someone, you're like, oh my God, that is so bizarre. I've seen that happen in movies, but I didn't know like it actually felt like that. Or am I doing this wrong? You know, that kind of thing. So it's that, it's the kind of the relatability of this coming of age story in the early 2000s for, I suppose, people my age or younger. It's an idealized romance, but seemingly kind of set in the real world, which means that people can maybe indulge in the, in it a little bit more, kind of the will they, won't they for modern audiences perhaps? And then of course, the TV show rocked it to new heights.

• 1:03:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  But the TV show is interesting because the TV show can show you things that the book can't. And you work less hard, obviously, on a TV show because you don't have to use your imagination. And the TV show was famously very explicit. I mean, the sex which we're imagining really in the book, we see in the TV show and of course, the TV show, I think came out during Covid. So basically people were trapped at home watching, you know, two very good looking people pretending to have sex and people were delighted by it. And it was a phenomenon in a way that the book wasn't, I would say. I mean, even more so than the book with a, with a different kind of audience. Anyway, so we are going to mark this in a way that Sally Rooney would undoubtedly despise and see as the marketization of literature. We're going to mark this out of 10 as we always do. And the scale this time, Tabby, is?

• 1:04:25Speaker 02

  Long lingering love-lorn looks out of 10.

• 1:04:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  Long lingering love-lorn looks.

• 1:04:29Speaker 02

  Points for alliteration.

• 1:04:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  Very good. Lots of points to you there. So I have been dithering about my mark because on the one hand, I don't imagine Sally Rooney was, when she was picturing the reader, I don't think she was picturing me. However, I think there are lots of good things. I like the architecture of the book. I think it's written with great care and construction. There is actually some beautiful writing. So people who think it's just Spartan. Here's a passage, Dublin is extraordinarily beautiful to her in wet weather. The way grey stone darkens to black and rain moves over the grass and whispers on slick roof tiles, raincoats glistening in the undersea colour of street lamps, rain silver as loose change in the glare of traffic. Deep down, I would have liked a little bit more of that. I know it's not really her thing. Crucially, I don't really like the characters.

• 1:05:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  And I think if you don't like the characters, I mean, there's no reason why you should, of course, but if you don't, then the affair between them feels less cosmically significant. And so for that reason, perhaps partially, I'm going to give it a six.

• 1:05:29Speaker 02

  Okay, fair enough. I agree with you about the writing. I mean, I think that was beautiful and I actually quite like the slightly introspective, spare style that nevertheless kind of cuts to the quick of feelings. I like the way that it felt like you had kind of this privileged insight into the minds of two young people. I recognised much of it from having been that age myself. I thought the pacing was done beautifully and the fact that it's a book where not much actually happens, very readable. You, you turn the pages willingly and you know, I love how nuanced the two main characters are, they're not cliches at all. But I am like you in that I wasn't massively invested in their relationship. I wasn't that bothered by whether or not they ended up together.

• 1:06:13Speaker 02

  I wish that they'd had the odd laugh, maybe, or just cracked a smile from time to time. That's so reductive, I know, so forgive me. And I also just occasionally found, whilst pitying her and really admiring parts of her, I found Marianne quite annoying from, from time to time and that, you know, the pair of them for a book so deeply realistic, there's a lot that's kind of idealised about it, you know, they're both very bright, they're both good looking, they both get scholarships, all of that.

• 1:06:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:41Speaker 02

  So I am going to give it a 6.5. You know, I love my point fives.

• 1:06:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  You like the point fives. I don't think this.

• 1:06:47Speaker 02

  I do.

• 1:06:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  I think the very few marks that you've given that aren't a fraction.

• 1:06:50Speaker 02

  Hey, it's my podcast, I can do what I like.

• 1:06:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  Wow, golly, I can't believe she's gone there and said that. I bet she has. So.

• 1:06:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  Coming up after this, we have another of your suggestions, actually.

• 1:07:00Speaker 02

  Sorry.

• 1:07:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's a very, basically if you. Haven't started reading it, start reading it now because it's East of Eden. It's quite long. I have to say it's incredibly readable.

• 1:07:10Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:07:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's East of Eden by John Steinbeck, California, great epic. There's a lot of very peculiar goings on in that book.

• 1:07:16Speaker 02

  Lots of small sparkling white teeth.

• 1:07:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  Lots to discuss. Then a massive change of pace and tone when we do Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles. And then the greatest change in pace and tone in podcasting history. As we finally, Tabby gets her dream and we venture into the murky waters of romantacy.

• 1:07:38Speaker 02

  Don't pretend that wasn't your idea, Dominic. Come on.

• 1:07:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  With Sarah J. Massey's book. How would I even have heard of it, Tabby? So Sarah J. Massey's book, A Court of Thorns and Roses. And then after that, just to give you a preview of what's coming up after that, Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White. Tony Morrison's book, Beloved. Friend of the show, Virginia Woolf's book, Mrs. Dalloway. And finally, another book actually that I haven't read, that I'm really looking forward to getting stuck into. Another Tabby Syrett suggestion.

• 1:08:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  The Hunger Games. So we've got it all happening and both of our listeners have got all that to look forward to, which is great. Tabby, thank you very much for that and bye bye everybody.

• 1:08:22Speaker 02

  Bye.

• 1:09:03Speaker 01

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, theHouseMajorityPac.com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.