Name: Conversations with Friends
ISBN: 9780451499059

Sally Rooney

Originally published: London: Faber & Faber Limited, 2017.

A Novel

Conversations with Friends

Elke Maasbommel

nica

rach

Ashley 

hayley

Franzi

I hated that everything I did was so ugly, but also that I lacked the courage to confront how ugly it was. 

Lauren

I liked to sit in the library to write essays, allowing my sense of time and personal identity to dissolve as the light dimmed outside the windows.

neya

The idea of forgetting anything about you is kind of horrifying to me.

Srijita Sarkar 

Was I kind to others? It was hard to nail down an answer. I worried that if I did turn out to have a personality, it would be one of the unkind ones. Did I only worry about this question because as a woman I felt required to put the needs of others before my own? Was ‘kindness’ just another term for submission in the face of conflict?

Arantxa Puyana

Gisselle Vazquez

Alina

Vojtech

WINNER OF THE SUNDAY TIMES / PFD YOUNG WRITER OF THE YEAR SHORTLISTED FOR THE DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE 2018 SHORTLISTED FOR THE KERRY GROUP IRISH NOVEL OF THE YEAR 2018 SHORTLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE 2018 LONGLISTED FOR THE DESMOND ELLIOTT PRIZE 2018 A SUNDAY TIMES, OBSERVER AND TELEGRAPH BOOK OF THE YEAR Frances is twenty-one years old, cool-headed and darkly observant. A college student in Dublin and aspiring writer, she works at a literary agency by day. At night, she performs spoken word with her best friend Bobbi, who used to be her girlfriend. When they are profiled by Melissa, a well-known journalist, they enter an exotic orbit of beautiful houses, raucous dinner parties and holidays in Provence. Initially unimpressed, Frances finds herself embroiled in a risky ménage a quatre when she begins an affair with Nick, Melissa's actor husband. Desperate to reconcile herself to the desires and vulnerabilities of her body, Frances's intellectual certainties begin to yield to something new - a painful and disorienting way of living from moment to moment. But as Frances tries to keep control, her relationships increasingly unspool: with Nick, with her difficult and unhappy father, and finally even with Bobbi. Written with rare precision and probing intelligence, Conversations with Friends is exquisitely alive to the pleasures and inhibitions of youth.

Yulez

Sally Rooney and the way she makes me feel uncomfortably perceived is both alarming and wonderful. 

sally rooney’s writing leaves you with a feeling of how it read instead of a plot by plot trajectory, and you gotta sit with that feeling.

i remembered what it is to be 21 and reckless again. there’s a distinct pleasure in getting inside a 21-year-old’s grim, naive, fragile, yet beautifully articulate literature student’s head. frances’ rigid anti-bourgeois lens of life is intriguing, more so as i watched her paradoxically being swept away by a rich thirty-something couple and ultimately falling for one of them. rooney has captured the stubborn texturing of youth through frances and bobbi’s dialogue, albeit with a performative weight, which makes it seem all the more real.

i couldn’t help myself be in awe of frances’ inner monologue, her elaborate thoughts and vocabulary, and the obvious dissonance between her interiority and her physical reality and how removed off of it she was. she is eager to intellectualize their brewed coffee as a symptom of pretension despite secretly loving the taste, using her politics as a defensive shield until nick abruptly calls her bluff—telling her not to act like she has taste just because she's a college student.

that same youthful, defensive non-urgency carries over into how she handles her own body, surviving on chocolate cake and treating a literal chronic pain crisis as though ignoring it entirely could make it disappear. she doesn’t do life, but life happens to her.

Manaswini

sally rooney’s writing leaves you with a feeling of how it read instead of a plot by plot trajectory, and you gotta sit with that feeling.

i remembered what it is to be 21 and reckless again. there’s a distinct pleasure in getting inside a 21-year-old’s grim, naive, fragile, yet beautifully articulate literature student’s head. frances’ rigid anti-bourgeois lens of life is intriguing, more so as i watched her paradoxically being swept away by a rich thirty-something couple and ultimately falling for one of them. rooney has captured the stubborn texturing of youth through frances and bobbi’s dialogue, albeit with a performative weight, which makes it seem all the more real.

i couldn’t help myself be in awe of frances’ inner monologue, her elaborate thoughts and vocabulary, and the obvious dissonance between her interiority and her physical reality and how removed off of it she was. she is eager to intellectualize their brewed coffee as a symptom of pretension despite secretly loving the taste, using her politics as a defensive shield until nick abruptly calls her bluff—telling her not to act like she has taste just because she's a college student.

that same youthful, defensive non-urgency carries over into how she handles her own body, surviving on chocolate cake and treating a literal chronic pain crisis as though ignoring it entirely could make it disappear. she doesn’t do life, but life happens to her.

I will never understand why all these people are in Valerie’s house

Reread for the first person narration. Did not remember the retrospective narrator, which does change how I view this story, but I still just can’t stand it. Thought I would finish but at around 67% on my kindle I was like ok I’m good

Margo Koss

I will never understand why all these people are in Valerie’s house

Reread for the first person narration. Did not remember the retrospective narrator, which does change how I view this story, but I still just can’t stand it. Thought I would finish but at around 67% on my kindle I was like ok I’m good

100% Sally Rooney’s worst work. definitely grew into her writing with time because this first person one pov wasn’t working for me. It made her unlikable characters even more annoying. Like now I’m pissed off esp with the most non-commital ending ever. Every body is annoying. All of them are like trying to be the smartest in the room. None of them like each other. lowk needed frances to be a bit more miserable for a while. Eat that cake and call every contact in your phone actually.The moral of the story: dont date inside your friend group. idk. it was okay. I see the groundwork for her other novels in it. But this needed more resolution. Like we need another 50 pages atleast to solve how many loose ends are still there. Like i get open endings but like you need some resolution with an open ending or not i feel like i wasted my time.

melanie

The entire second half I just wanted Frances to sit down and call her doctor 

Emily Lucie

absolutely disliked the book. it suffers from absolutely dreadful and predictable plot to painful prolonged commentaries disguised as parts of the story. even though i might agree with the author on a lot of issues since i am in a similar political demographic. i do not want to read a book that has multiple page dialogues that address a political issue the characters or the author do not really have any business talking about

Vincent Osvald

Good read kept me on my toes talking to a guy named Nick right now so it made me think about him more don’t really understand the name of the book but I did enjoy the conversation topics between the friends

Angeleeka

typical sally rooney, the characters felt painfully real. i related to frances very much. 

this is a story about learning to let oneself be known and the struggle to believe in one’s worthiness of love. it’s a quiet yet powerful narrative that lingers long after the last page.

saaral

typical sally rooney, the characters felt painfully real. i related to frances very much. 

this is a story about learning to let oneself be known and the struggle to believe in one’s worthiness of love. it’s a quiet yet powerful narrative that lingers long after the last page.

Kaarthik sekar 

My least favorite of the Sally Rooney books I’ve read, but still quite good. Some things that France and Bobbi do, I see reflected in myself and the women in my life, but that said, it makes the novel very low stakes. Just young adults doing things with no true consequences.

Brynn Sklar

Frances is a lot stronger than me because Nick would have sent me into the psych ward 

Essence

3.75

Frances is a lot stronger than me because Nick would have sent me into the psych ward 

Rec from Ella. Sally Rooney does an excellent job of writing characters I Despise yet deeply resonate with. I don’t want to passively let the world go by and only react in anger. But also fuck Nick oh my god if the devil can’t reach you he sends a man like that. 

this was my first Roony book, and in the process of reading i think i might have gotten a minor crush on her. not in a romantic way, but in a profound admiration kind of way. her writing has a quality to it, that i can best define as emphathy. the kind of emphathy that makes you pick up and feel every little touch of emotion in the room. this made the story feel alive and raw, which i loved. i also really liked that she used this story to highlight the issue of the lack of research funding for women’s health, by powerfully showcasing the consequences it has in the daily life of a woman suffering from endometriosis. with this said - then why not 5 stars? while i spent the first third of the book thinking “god this is brilliant”, something about Francis’ relationship with Nick felt predictable and in the end unresolved. but the writing has got me hooked, and I am already considering which of her books i should read next.

Cecilie Spangsberg

the way sally rooney portrays the complexity of human’s feelings will always be exceptional

moonstone

Katharine kollman

Disappointing. Good writing, but the story and the main character is stupid

Iben engeseth

felicity hu

An engaging portrait of richly imagined characters that highlights people’s flaws, insecurities and the messiness of relationships.

Laura Dobie

Karmen 

Frances is twenty-one years old, cool-headed and observant. A student in Dublin and an aspiring writer, at night she performs spoken word with her best friend Bobbi, who used to be her girlfriend. When they are interviewed and then befriended by Melissa, a well-known journalist who is married to Nick, an actor, they enter a world of beautiful houses, raucous dinner parties and holidays in Provence, beginning a complex ménage-à-quatre. But when Frances and Nick get unexpectedly closer, the sharply witty and emotion-averse Frances is forced to honestly confront her own vulnerabilities for the first time.

Maureen

"You underestimate your own power so you don't have to blame yourself for treating other people badly."


***

3.5 stars. Once again, I am in awe of how Rooney writes. Everything just *flows* seamlessly. Frances is deeply flawed—but so is everyone else. Rooney did a great job with this book because the character's voice felt so authentic! It was a pleasure to read throughout. 

I was ready to give this 4 stars but I just can't accept the ending. It's messed up—but hey, that's real life for you

“[A] cult-hit . . . [a] sharply realistic comedy of adultery and friendship.”—Entertainment Weekly WINNER OF THE SUNDAY TIMES (UK) YOUNG WRITER OF THE YEAR AWARD • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY VOGUE AND SLATE AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY BUZZFEED AND ELLE Frances is a coolheaded and darkly observant young woman, vaguely pursuing a career in writing while studying in Dublin. Her best friend is the beautiful and endlessly self-possessed Bobbi. At a local poetry performance one night, they meet a well-known photographer, and as the girls are then gradually drawn into her world, Frances is reluctantly impressed by the older woman’s sophisticated home and handsome husband, Nick. But however amusing Frances and Nick’s flirtation seems at first, it begins to give way to a strange—and then painful—intimacy. Written with gemlike precision and marked by a sly sense of humor, Conversations with Friends is wonderfully alive to the pleasures and dangers of youth, and the messy edges of female friendship SHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD “Sharp, funny, thought-provoking . . . a really great portrait of two young women as they’re figuring out how to be adults.”—Celeste Ng, “Late Night with Seth Meyers Podcast” “The dialogue is superb, as are the insights about communicating in the age of electronic devices. Rooney has a magical ability to write scenes of such verisimilitude that even when little happens they’re suspenseful.”—Curtis Sittenfeld, The Week “Rooney has the gift of imbuing everyday life with a sense of high stakes . . . a novel of delicious frictions.”—New York “A writer of rare confidence, with a lucid, exacting style . . . One wonderful aspect of Rooney’s consistently wonderful novel is the fierce clarity with which she examines the self-delusion that so often festers alongside presumed self-knowledge. . . . But Rooney’s natural power is as a psychological portraitist. She is acute and sophisticated about the workings of innocence; the protagonist of this novel about growing up has no idea just how much of it she has left to do.”—Alexandra Schwartz, The New Yorker “This book. This book. I read it in one day. I hear I’m not alone.”—Sarah Jessica Parker (Instagram)

Katerina

I truly refuse to believe that this was Rooney’s debut novel. How could someone have such complex insight on human beings at such a young age? 

I enjoyed “Conversations with Friends” so much, perhaps just as much as I’ve enjoyed all of her other work (or maybe a bit more than the rest?). 

It was incredibly interesting to explore the theme of conversations and how Frances, the protagonist, was coping with her life both with the meaningful conversations in her life and without.

You could literally feel her suffering when she was all alone, unable to share her most deepest fears even though she didn’t want to admit it. Perhaps the only time I felt sadness in this book was when the pages were left without any conversation. They felt void, and empty, and sad. How much meaning can a conversation really hold? (“What is a friend? What is a conversation?”)

And I am always amazed by Rooney, but perhaps here more than before, by the way she hides the thing that holds the most meaning in her books in between the paragraphs. No quotes, no nothing. The conversations are always hidden in plain sight. 

… I also feel like I gotta mention the main character because of the impact she had on me. I loved the inner path that Frances had to walk, her growth in so many ways but also her inability to grow. I dived so deep into her world view. Perhaps Frances, out of all of Rooney’s characters, had the most intriguing thoughts to me. I was mesmerized by her way of thinking, not always agreeing but always trying to understand her. Her flaws, as fucked up as they are, were so interesting to analyze. She is so different from me to the core and yet somehow the few similarities that I found between us both troubled me to no end and gave me some sort of an epiphany. 

The quote that I will remember long after I’ve closed this books is this one: 

“I worried that if I did turn out to have a personality, it would be one of the unkind ones. Did I only worry about this question because as a woman I felt required to put the needs of others before my own? Was ‘kindness’ just another term for submission in the face of conflict?”

So much to think about. I love that Rooney always leaves me like this. 

(This was supposed to be one sentence but… when have I ever? I guess I had a lot to say about it.)

Mira <3

idk maybe i'll like it more when it's a tv show. kinda wanna rad normal people kind don't wanna

I have an issue with Sally Rooney’s writing because to me she romanticizes unhealthy and manipulative relationships, romantic and platonic. It does make me think though, about the self-worth we all perceive ourselves to have and how we allow others to alter or control that perception. I do appreciate that I learned several new words from this, acrimonious, bourgeoisie, etc.

Liz Hunsaker

the story was good but the way of storytelling is not for me

Conversations with Friends A Novel

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