Sally Rooney on romance, writing about sex, the Normal People phenomenon and her new novel, Intermezzo
“I feel like the older I get the more freedom I have to write about a greater range of life experiences,” Sally Rooney says when we meet to discuss her new novel Intermezzo, which centres on two love stories with significant age gaps. “Because I’ve lived slightly more, not a whole lot more, but a few more years.”
Those few more years make her 33, no longer the twentysomething voice of millennial angst. Rooney can’t wait to shake off the “Salinger for the Snapchat generation” tag that has followed her since the publication of her first novel Conversations With Friends in 2017 (she didn’t even know at the time what Snapchat was). The success of her second novel, Normal People, not to mention the TV adaptation in 2020, transformed the publicity-shy, self-proclaimed Marxist from County Mayo into the book world’s Taylor Swift. “I really feel like I’m not lying when I say I’m quite keen to leave that all behind,” she says. “I didn’t actually want to be ‘the young novelist’; I just wanted to be good.”
