There is a new Sally Rooney novel out. As with Beautiful World, Where Are You‘s rollout in 2021, Intermezzo comes on a wave of recycled discourse about the author: her spare writing style, her Marxism and how it is or isn’t present in her work, what her success Means For the Novel, what she has to do with “literary hot girls” (or “literary it girls”), and I guess somewhat related to that last one, how all of her characters are thin. I think the reason this is all so repetitive is because it never sticks. Whatever Rooney’s dominance in her field means, she keeps writing and people keep enjoying her books. She is, by all accounts, a very private person and aside from the occasional profile where she wears lovely sweaters, she doesn’t feed us much to keep any kind of it girl persona burning. She mostly saves her influence for dropping bangers of rare moral clarity. She seems to be pretty skinny under those sweaters I guess.
The people who criticize her novels for being populated with exclusively thin characters are correct in that…uh, they are. Conversations with Friend‘s Frances routinely describes herself as very thin, almost underdeveloped. She forgets to eat and/or runs out of money for food. Whether her restriction is accidental, circumstantial, or intentional is left murky. Normal People‘s Marianne, while it is never explicitly named, has some kind of eating disorder. Beautiful World‘s four protagonists are all slim and basically attractive, Eileen in particular. I just got Intermezzo in the mail, but I hear it has the same pattern going on. Maybe Rooney herself has had disordered eating at some point. She’ll probably never say so, and that’s fine! In Frances I recognized my own experience in college – during part of which I was very anorexic – of forgoing food and feeling my mind race, like I could tackle or study anything for hours. I used to intellectualize my hunger as the desire to only contain one “pure experience” inside me at a time, as if the words I read while starving were truer forms of themselves. In Marianne I recognize being an outsider (both by choice and not), struggling to separate love from violence, and the compulsion to seek things that mirror my own self-hatred. If these characterizations are also shades of Rooney’s own life, is it wrong to put them in her books? The argument is that she seems to exclusively write about thin characters. To that I suppose I can say, you’re right, but it seems weird to single her out when there are many, many other authors doing the same thing and doing it in more explicitly fatphobic ways.
A common criticism is that eating disorders, financial difficulties, etc. aside Rooney equates thinness with beauty. I’m not sure that’s actually true. Frances makes a crack about being thin enough to look interesting, which strikes me as more of a self-deprecating observation about equating thinness with beauty, not endorsing it. Frances does not seem to find herself or her body beautiful. Marianne’s “ugliness” is hard to pin down. She’s too spiky and weird to be acknowledged as attractive at her rural high school and blossoms in college, so there might be a little bit of “young woman’s literature protagonist described as ugly actually hottest girl in the room” going on, but again, she never finds herself attractive. Her physical frailty is not why Connell, the person who loves her, finds her beautiful. Rooney’s characters struggle with restrictions and constrictions that lead to their feeling disembodied. Their thinness is often a signifier of a lack of joy and their beauty is recognized and drawn out by connecting with others.
I am actually less interested in disordered eating in Rooney’s world than I am in how eating – or not eating – reflects the emphasis in all of her novels on interpersonal connection and love being a redemptive and generative force. The skinny girls of these books differ from my own experience in one major way, and that is that they are not preoccupied by food. They forget to eat, they are utilitarian about it when they must, or their loneliness and suppressed lives seem to extend to all of their habits. When her characters are lost in their heads, alone, or struggling, they undereat or resign themselves to depressing, flavorless meals. When food does appear in abundance, it’s at the rare family meal, or more often, a dinner party with friends. When the four friends of Beautiful World are finally in the same physical space towards the end of the novel, they put care and joy into making a special dinner. This makes it into the TV adaptations of Rooney’s work, too. In Normal People, Daisy Edgar Jones’s Marianne enjoys eating in situations where she is welcomed and unburdened: having ice cream with Connell in Italy, having a birthday cake with the friends who turned out to be worth keeping, or eating holiday dinner at Connell’s mom’s house. In the adaptation of Conversations with Friends, the dinner thrown by the vivacious Melissa on the Croatian holiday Frances joins seems like something out of an Alison Roman cookbook: whole crispy fish surrounded by lemons, food that looks thrown together but homey and abundant.
This is just a sort of messy thing that’s been rattling around in my brain for years. I think the way food and restriction function in Rooney’s novels is meant to say that eating, like many of life’s necessities, is made better or perhaps even only a joyful action when it is shared. When her characters let themselves cook or eat with lightness and even relish, they are opening themselves to friendship or romance. The fair rebuttal to all this is that the bodies of the characters and their relationship with food aren’t the same thing. A character who isn’t thin could have the same experience of only really enjoying food when it’s made with hospitality or love. Sure. But is it really such a big deal?
feelings.technology 