Observations, theories, and quips about the world fly between the friends like so many shuttlecocks in a conversation that never ends, because conversations, in our world of screens, don’t have to. As its title promises, Rooney’s book glitters with talk, much of it between Frances, the novel’s narrator, and Bobbi, her best friend, two Trinity students supremely gifted in the collegiate sport of competitive banter. Rooney turns out to be as intelligent and agile a novelist as she apparently was a debater, and for many of the same reasons. There are prizes for fiction, it’s true, but writing it is a private performance: you judge yourself first on your own stage, by your own rules. Rooney is now twenty-six and, after earning a master’s in American literature and publishing a few short stories, has just come out with her first novel, “ Conversations with Friends” (Hogarth). “Maybe I stopped debating to see if I could still think of things to say when there weren’t any prizes,” she wrote. Yet she was also disturbed by her talent for advocating morally dubious positions, like capitalism’s benefits for the poor, or “things oppressed people should do about their oppression.” She quit after winning the championship. What Rooney loved about debating was entering a state of “flow,” that magical mental hum when disparate facts and ideas effortlessly assembled themselves in her mind and poured from her mouth as argument. 1 debater on the Continent, but she wrote about her feats the way a recovering alcoholic might look back on a time of sotted carousing, at once proud of her exploits and appalled by the person she had been while having them. A couple of years earlier, as a student at Trinity College, Dublin, Rooney had risen through the ranks of the European circuit to become the No. In 2015, The Dublin Review ran a goodbye-to-all-that essay by Sally Rooney, a young Irish writer, about her brief career as a university debater. Photograph by Ruby Wallis for The New Yorker Frances's apology to Bobbi goes down differently.Rooney, twenty-six, is a writer of rare confidence, with a lucid, exacting style. ![]() In the TV show, we only see this very briefly. In the books, as Frances's health worsens and she feels like she's losing Bobbi and Nick, she starts to harm herself. In the show, the fallout between the friends doesn't happen until after Nick's birthday party at the end of episode eleven. In the book, concurrent to Frances receiving her diagnosis of endometriosis and finding out Nick and Melissa are sleeping together again, Bobbi is also extremely angry with Frances over the short story and has moved out-heightening all of Frances's emotions. Bobbi finding out about Frances's short story happens at a different part of the story. The two do have a confrontational-esque phone call in the books, after Frances discovers Melissa has sent Bobbi her story and Melissa says to Frances, "Why did you fuck my husband?" That does happen in the show in the final episode-though the conversation goes down differently, and Melissa tells Frances that Nick is struggling. "I'm not really sure why I'm here or what you want me to say to that," Frances tells Melissa. In that conversation, Melissa says much of what is written in the email. In episode ten, the email Melissa sends simply reads: "Can we talk?" Frances goes to meet Melissa at her home, and the two have an awkward conversation over tea. One of the pivotal moments in Conversations with Friends (the novel) is a long email Melissa sends Frances after she learns of the affair. Yet, Nick later tucks her into bed after they have the conversation about him telling Melissa. In the TV show, Bobbi wraps the towel around her, and the two of them share a loving moment. He wrapped the cloth around me and I got out of the bath." ![]() I watched him standing there, not blinking, his expression calm and fathomless like an ocean. ![]() I tried to imagine how I must have looked: dripping wet, flushed with steam heat, my hair leaking rivulets of water down my shoulders. I didn't look away from him and feel embarrassed. In the book, Frances observes, "When I stood up out of the water he looked at me in a way that was not at all vulgar, the kind of look you can give someone's body when you've seen it many times and it has a particular relationship to you. Nick doesn't arrive until she's in her pajamas in bed. While Frances fainting and Bobbi helping her get home and get in the bath largely follows the novel, episode nine deviates when Bobbi is the one who helps her, tenderly, get out of the bath and get into bed. ![]() Nick is there as Frances recovers from her illness.
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