“Up till now, the books that I’ve written have been about people kind of like me,” reflected Rooney upon the massive popularity of her first two novels. Following that was the predictable backlash, especially around Rooney’s self-proclaimed Marxist politics (which she frequently cites in interviews) and the lack of Marxist praxis in her mostly orthodox romance novels. The 30-year-old Irish writer has published two novels before this - her 2017 debut, Conversations With Friends, quickly followed by Normal People - each to a tide of adulation. It’s a scene that one could easily read through the lens of Rooney’s reputation. “You probably wrote it yourself.” But Alice rejects this collapse between her internet persona and her personal life. “Anyone can have one of those,” he says to Alice. In front of Alice, they list the details of her Wikipedia page, from “Literary work” to “Adaptations” to “Personal life.” Felix, growing visibly uncomfortable, deflects by downplaying the fact that Alice has a Wikipedia page at all. Early on in Sally Rooney’s novel Beautiful World, Where Are You, a young man named Felix introduces the semi-famous writer he’s semi-seeing to a room full of his friends: “This is Alice … She’s a novelist.” His friends do what anyone confronted by a supposedly well-known person would do: They Google her.
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