Writer Sally Rooney on Transforming Life Into Novels | Louisiana Channel

The acclaimed Irish writer Sally Rooney explains her urge to write novels about the life that she is living: “It didn’t come from any particular fascination with my own life, it was just that that was the only life that I had available to me.”

In this video, Sally Rooney explains that her two first novels, Conversations with Friends and Normal People, drew inspiration from her own experiences at university in Dublin: “I feel like I need to know something really well before I can pick up the kind of observations that interests me as a writer,” she says and elaborates: “To be able to set a story in a place, not so much a geographical location, but in a community, I need to have a really strong sense of how the people in that community behave.”

Sally Rooney explains that she sees the world through what she calls a Marxist framework and that both of her novels explore social structures: “When there are two people alone in a bedroom no one is thinking about class and gender, but the structures are there,” she says. Rooney’s books also discuss social class through her characters: “The people that I write about tend to be precariously situated in the economy. They are usually college educated like I am, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are financially stable and secure.”

“I find it really hard to explain why I’m interested in the things that interest me,” Rooney reflects. In her writing, she tends to throw obstacles at her characters to see how they react and develop:
“I wonder if that’s because the character is a projection of me.” The link between herself and her characters is apparent: “I need to feel that I can make something from my experiences because otherwise, I don’t know what they are. Maybe it’s a way of consoling myself for the meaninglessness of life,” she says and adds: “I feel like I have a duty to [write].”

Sally Rooney (b. 1991) is an Irish writer. Rooney is the author of Conversations with Friends (2017) and Normal People (2018). The latter won the ‘Irish Novel of the Year’ at the Irish Book Awards as well the Costa Book Award, which Rooney is the youngest novelist to be awarded. Rooney is also the winner of the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award 2017. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta and The London Review of Books. Moreover, she is the editor of the Irish literary journal The Stinging Fly.

Sally Rooney was interviewed by Kathrine Tschemerinsky at the Louisiana Literature festival at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark in August 2018. In the video, Sally Rooney is reading an excerpt from her novel Conversations with Friends.

Camera: Jacob Solbakken
Produced and edited by: Roxanne Bagheshirin Lærkesen
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2019
Supported by Den A.P. Møllerske Fond

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CHAPTERS:
00:00 College life
03:43 From adolecent to young adulthood
06:27 Marxism and social structures
12:33 How to write
17:43 Seeing herself in her characters
24:58 When the book is finished

[thelouisianachannel]

*Watch Sally Rooney talk more about writing with Marxism in this video:*

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[ifheavenwashuman]

“I didn’t have any other life I could write about.” Such a beautiful quote.

[xoIvon]

I just finished reading this book and normal people. She’s a very good writer. It almost feels like you’re reading a diary when characters have intimate conversations. It’s really hard to put down her books when she makes really honest characters. Can’t wait for her new book this September. She’s a great author!

[nataliasomsedikova]

This is my most favorite modern author. I fell in love with her first book. I love her introvert-melancholic writing...it suits my personality perfectly....I also enjoy conversations about society, interesting topics etc. in her books.

[chloelauryn]

sally seems to get the same feeling writing a book that i get from journalling. Having somewhere to break down your emotions / experiences and then coming to a conclusion at the end. I love how her mind works, after reading normal people in less than a day, i bought her other two novels. Im so excited for this author, she seems to get me!

[kaninikadey]

I'm so in love with Sally Rooney's writing I can't express in words. I would put my life on the line for this woman

[PinkFreud]

Absolutely love Sally. Confidence, talent, intelligence and humbleness mixed perfectly. She just seems to be someone you'd love to have as a friend. Well, at least I would.
I was magnetically attracted to Normal People. It was immensely relatable and beautifully written.

[clarabonatto]

when she talked about not wanting to make a point out of something readers always get from her books, it made me think about what Roland Barthes said on "death of the author", we tend to look for book's "true meaning" from who wrote them, but maybe it's about giving a place to the readers.. as Barthes said, "the unity of a text is not at its origin, but at its destination"

[Mdias]

She writes about what She knows. Thats the best thing She could ever do.

[miladiyah]

Reading her book for the first time was like opening my eyes and Im so grateful for that experience. She’s spectacular

[noelwoodward]

Normal People was one of the most underrated tv shows of 2020.

[mehroopkaur]

I just loved the way she write normal people …I was so immersed in how the characters perceived life and tried to communicate with each other

[gyappumusoka]

Lovely interview and author. It's so interesting to see what each author/artist thinks and feels about their art, and how different it is from one person to another.

[clairbear]

Love this woman, can't wait for her new book this fall 2021

[socks]

She’s my fav author I love this woman.

[DANJONPEARCE]

loved Conversations with Friends, very engaging thank you, for me, it captures quite nicely the relationship between creative, sensitive people and those possibly less so who are better stronger communicators.

[KingMinosxxvi]

Feeling you have a duty to right is how one justifies the compulsion to write which is necessary to actually complete anything. Duty is how one resolves "humility" with ambition and pride.

[kamalpreetsingh]

Good Thanks for sharing these channel on

[idaeja]

This was exactly, how I hoped, this interview would go.

[patriciaheawood]

I love Conversations with Friends- it captures that time in your 20s when you really don't know what it's all about. When Frances self harms I want to enter the novel and give her a hug. Nick is so nice- but he is dishonest. The ambivalent relationship is harming Frances. She could waste years of her life with this