“Everyone’s always going through something, aren’t they? That’s life, basically. It’s just more and more things to go through,” (Rooney 245).
Frances and her best friend Bobbi study together in Dublin while also performing spoken word poetry around the city. One night they meet Melissa, a well-known photographer, and her husband Nick, an actor. While Bobbi is fascinated by Melissa, Frances and Nick have a surprising connection that leads to a vulnerable intimacy neither of them could predict.
I’m finally on the Sally Rooney band wagon! I’ve been curious about her work for awhile and have heard that many people love her except that she doesn’t use quotation marks when writing dialogue. All of this is true, and I can accept the lack of quotation marks in favour of authorial style, though it does confuse me considering Rooney does use quotation marks when characters are “air quoting” something, if that makes sense. But authors are allowed their quirks!
But enough about quotation marks and Rooney’s lack of using them, onto the review.
I’m still muddling through my feelings over Conversations with Friends. I really enjoyed Frances as a protagonist and loved Rooney’s writing style. There isn’t a lot of description, just Frances explaining what she’s doing, where she’s going, what she’s eating (four slices of toast has never sounded so delectable) and going about her life. It’s a very mundane existence of studying, writing, interning at a literary agency she has no real passion for. It’s life in all it’s ordinary, painful, blissful moments, and I liked how Rooney explored this.
I liked seeing the exploration of relationships between Frances, Bobbi, Melissa, and Nick but I was confused by some of it. The book is labelled as a romance which I didn’t really feel, but in an interview with Rooney included in my copy of the book she said that she was happy people saw the book as a love story which I understand more. Conversations with Friends really is a look at the different ways we love the people in our life and how we can’t fully love or be loved without letting ourselves be known which is terrifying.
Overall I enjoyed the book and am excited to explore Rooney’s other work. There were parts of Frances inner monologue that really spoke to me while others flew over my head, but I’m excited to dive in more to the world of Sally Rooney!
Publication: October 28 2025
Publisher: Crown
Pages: 307 pages (Paperback)
Source: Library
Genre: Fiction, Queer
My Rating: ⛤⛤⛤.5
Summary:
Frances is twenty-one years old, cool-headed, and darkly observant. A college student and aspiring writer, she devotes herself to a life of the mind–and to the beautiful and endlessly self-possessed Bobbi, her best friend and comrade-in-arms. Lovers at school, the two young women now perform spoken-word poetry together in Dublin, where a journalist named Melissa spots their potential. Drawn into Melissa’s orbit, Frances is reluctantly impressed by the older woman’s sophisticated home and tall, handsome husband. Private property, Frances believes, is a cultural evil–and Nick, a bored actor who never quite lived up to his potential, looks like patriarchy made flesh. But however amusing their flirtation seems at first, it gives way to a strange intimacy neither of them expect. As Frances tries to keep her life in check, her relationships increasingly resist her control: with Nick, with her difficult and unhappy father, and finally even with Bobbi. Desperate to reconcile herself to the desires and vulnerabilities of her body, Frances’s intellectual certainties begin to yield to something new: a painful and disorienting way of living from moment to moment.
Sarah O'Connor 