Normal People: being vulnerable

This book follows Marianne and Connell, who went to school together in Sligo, a small town in rural Ireland. We are updated on the trajectories of their lives, skipping a few months at a time, from 2011 through to 2015. Marianne and Connell wind up in university together, Trinity College in Dublin. Their lives were never fixed in a place as things kept moving, as seasons change and people change. Even though they stray towards other people, dancing around social status and opinions of people, politics, and the world, they are always magnetically, uncontrollably, irresistibly drawn back together.

This book is not a feel-good romance, and maybe it’s not a romance at all. There is no central love story, and not nearly an emotionally satisfying ending. The story is full of both void and emotion. Intimacy hangs on the precipice, but that is merely a small outcome and not the lone goal of the story.

Normal People by Sally Rooney is about us when we are young and inexperienced, ever in search of closure, placing ourselves in most vulnerable positions, seeking something that brings us comfort when we don’t quite know what we long for. As we’re drifting through life, we ask ourselves if we even fall under the category of “normal people”, or if we are damaged in some way. We wonder when we peaked in life — high school? college? and whether we are even deserving of love, like a normal person. We are indecisive of who we are, what we want, what we even stand for, and when life slows down and when we look back, we sit in apathy, ambivalence, and dull aching. What decisions are permanent, and what is temporary?

I haven’t seen the TV show, but when I picture Marianne and Connell, I see Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal. The casting director has a special ability, a good eye. Edgar-Jones and Mescal play their characters to a tee. “All Too Well” and “august” by Taylor Swift are songs made for Marianne and Connell.

august

Salt air, and the rust on your door
I never needed anything more
Whispers of “Are you sure?”
“Never have I ever before”

But I can see us lost in the memory
August slipped away into a moment in time
’Cause it was never mine
And I can see us twisted in bedsheets
August sipped away like a bottle of wine
’Cause you were never mine

Your back beneath the sun
Wishin’ I could write my name on it
Will you call when you’re back at school?
I remember thinkin’ I had you

Remember when I pulled up and said, “Get in the car”
And then cancelled my plans just in case you’d call?
Back when I was livin’ for the hope of it all (For the hope of it all)

For the hope of it all
For the hope of it all