to think that Sally Rooney and her mates must be really bloody boring company? NO SPOILERS PLEASE

[PorkySisyphus]

Am currently 10 eps into Coversations With Friends.

How are all of her characters so interminably navel-gazey, muttery and downright boring? Her lead females especially. Jesus, this new one is the drippiest drip that ever dripped.

And the love interest? Eurgh. All the charisma of a lumpy bowl of yesterday's porridge. He also looks like Zach from Gilmore Girls if he were a try hard actor (emphasis on the or) which is tickling me every time he comes on screen.

I'm Irish. I'm not young and have zero experience of Dublin uni life. If these shows are reflective of it then I'm pretty glad about that.

QUB circa 1999 was much better craic with actual parties and fun and people not living in phone-glued-to-hand, frumpy jumper clad perma-misery over their own shitty relationship choices.

Its all so bloody draining and avoidable.

I know I can just not watch but I'm sick and need distraction.

Also it's my birthday but I can't eat. Please send virtual cake.

Yeah. So DREARY.

I read the book and it was dreary.
I've just started watching the series and think it should be renamed Awkward Conversations.

I agree, I’ve read all the reviews of CWF in the papers this weekend and it sounds shite.

found NP the book SO boring. The TV version was better but that was probably due to lockdown.

The book was soooo boring, just don't understand this sally Rooney hysteria

I agree. It's a very accurate depiction of a certain part of Trinity - definitely not all.

Haven't started watching CWF yet; loved both books in the sense of her writing - I thought it was amazing. Hated the characters! Which made the reading experience more interesting, for me.

I loved Normal People the TV series but the characters were much more relatable & attractive than in the book.

Lenny Abrahamsom is utterly gifted & part of my enjoyment of watching the series is his talent & craft.

And YY re the point that Rooney is not anti-Semitic & it is unforgivable to bandy that term around casually.

Me neither. I’ve another to read but not sure I can be bothered if it’s more bleakness and angst amongst students. 🥱

I’m relieved to hear everyone else feels the same way about SR, I thought I was missing some subtlety that made all that tedious waffle about unpleasant people incredibly insightful. I suppose I should give her credit for boring and irritating me enough that I really wanted to tell her I was bored and irritated.

I’m relieved to hear everyone else feels the same way about SR

Not everyone! As with life in general.

There's definitely something emperor's new clothes about Conversations with Friends, so I'm glad of this thread and that it's not just me.

TV Bobbie talked of Frances' silence being interpreted as mysterious. I thought she was just extremely socially awkward with nothing much to say. The dialogue! Harsh? Such bland, bored characters, too.

I have just been to lunch with a friend. I asked if she had seen NP or CWF. She asked me what were they about. Having listened to my summaries on both she didn't seem keen. I said I'd like her to watch to see if she agreed so she's tentatively going to watch the first episode of NP.

Yeah I thought this about NP too!

She's massively overhyped. Don't get me wrong, she's a good writer. But that's all – a good writer, nothing special. Fifty years from now she'll be forgotten.

I suspect another reason she's so hyped is that she's Irish. The British left, which dominates the BBC, publishing and the arts, has got a real thing about Ireland – a weird post-colonial guilt. Because of that, anything Irish tends to get over-praised and over-promoted. No way would she be so popular if she was an Oxford-educated English girl with a posh accent. On the contrary, The Guardian would be tearing her to shreds.

I finished the series this morning.

I'm not sure whether I enjoyed it or not tbh......... they were all so dreary and so full of angst.

And I don't know if they were all horribly mis-cast or if it was deliberate.

I quite liked Normal People but I honestly bcant believe how boring CWF was. I've only seen the TV shows, can only hope that the book was better.

I thought I was missing some subtlety that made all that tedious waffle about unpleasant people incredibly insightful

Me too.

I suspect another reason she's so hyped is that she's Irish. The British left, which dominates the BBC, publishing and the arts, has got a real thing about Ireland – a weird post-colonial guilt. Because of that, anything Irish tends to get over-praised and over-promoted.

Bollocks!

There are many fine artists - writers, filmmakers, actors and so on - in Ireland. We possibly over-hype it ourselves, and certainly don't support the arts as much as we should (viz: many Irish-created films/programmes getting commissioned by UK TV)

But it's not 'because she's Irish'. It's because she has a fresh innovative style & spoke about an aspect of Irish life & society that hadn't at that point been well-described.

Not everyone likes her - that's fine too.

I think the reason that 'Normal People' became such a huge hit was lockdown.

People were bored and lonely and had nothing to do, so it became a talking point. Same thing that made Joe Exotic into an international superstar. If either series had been released at any other time, they'd have attracted much less attention.

Agree that 'Normal People' was pretty average. I also found the characters dull, whiny and incredibly self absorbed. Many times I asked myself why I should care about them and their boring love lives, but with there being nothing else to do, I persevered with it. Is that what the yung uns are like these days?

I agree that the popularity TV adaptation of NP was helped enormously by the lockdown.

I haven't seen the TV series of CWF but I didn't like Conversations with Friends or Normal People. I didn't finish watching NP. Neither of them had interesting characters, except perhaps the mother in Normal People. Maybe some day Sally Rooney will write a whole book from that character's perspective. If you want to read amazing literature by an Irish novelist, you should read Anne Enright, if you want to read great literature about ordinary every day people and their lives, you should read Anne Tyler. I won't be reading any more Sally Rooney for a while.

I quite enjoyed Normal People but maybe that was all the sex and Paul Mescal’s willy. I just get the impression that all Sally Rooney books are (VERY) thinly veiled autobiographies. I mean, come on, how about coming up with some characters who haven’t had the exact same life as you? I also really didn’t like the token fat friend in Normal People - who of course is the one who does the cooking while tiny skinny Marianne wafts around, skinnily

If you want to read amazing literature by an Irish novelist, you should read Anne Enright,

I'm mixed about Anne Enright. I like her non-fiction / essays. Less so her literature. I find her characters unbelievable.

Emilie Pine is my recommendation - her memoir is amazing and very raw; she has a novel out now which I can recommend (Ruth & Pen)

Also, wasn't Marianne meant to be quite plain in the book? As in, all the kids were in disbelief that school hunk Connell would be with someone so unworthy? But of course they have to cast a very pretty actress. I guess it's an example of that joke in The Simpsons about being 'TV ugly, not ugly ugly'.

Yes, the descriptions of Marianne in the book were definitely not someone that looked like Daisy Edgar-Jones, who was actually stunning.
They changed a few things from the book for no apparent reason.

I tried listening to an audio version of CWF a few times but gave up. I’ve watched a few episodes but so boring. I liked NP but what befuddled me about it was that the male lead was studying English but could barely string a sentence together.
Give me Thursday nights at QUB anytime if this is what life at Trinity is like.