I have a hard time with Sally Rooney adaptations (which is partly why I'm unsure of my community choice - it's more about the author than the series per se). Last year, Normal People fucking floored me. I wasn't myself for weeks after. I resisted Rooney's mainstream popularity for some time, but stumbled upon the show and found I liked it. She has such a visceral way of painting human suffering, and she does so in no uncertain terms and reaching for no grand metaphors, either. It's not so much the 'big' griefs, the scary ones that come (thankfully) a limited number of times in our lives, but rather the little, every day things.
Her stories are basically long essays about how... it gets to be fucking hard sometimes, you know?
About what it means to be tired and feel ashamed, and to sell yourself cheap and get less than you deserve.
From the trailer, Conversations With Friends looked pretty promising and perhaps more upbeat. College students And ex-lovers Bobbi and Frances befriend an older married couple, Melissa and Nick, and pretty soon morph into a bizarre foursome, with Bobbi and Melissa growing close (though not going anywhere, at least in the TV version), and Frances (the narrator) beginning an affair with handsome, charming Nick.
I keep saying I'll stop watching these. I never like how they paint extra-marital affairs in the movies, you know. They always somehow give it a certain glamour that doesn't actually exist. You find yourself, bizarrely, rooting for the "couple". Well, not here. If there is one thing Rooney excels at, it's creating these vivid, deeply disturbing portraits of unhealthy relationships. She does it with Normal People, Beautiful World, Where Are You, and indeed, with Conversations with Friends, her debut (I've yet to read her latest novel).
While the relationship between Nick and Frances is filled with romantic little moments and flirtatious interludes, it never fully crosses the bridge into something you'd root for. Rather, his nauseating back and forth between her and his wife, together with his passivity, make him easily the most abhorrent character.
The story is slow and somewhat hesitant. Yet the ambiance was, to me, extremely engaging. Though the "vibe" manages to hook you so that you want to know what happens next, you'll watch the show for the mood it sets - for how well it paints the feeling of being alone, awkward, of feeling like maybe you've got nothing worth loving. There's a beautiful scene towards the end where Frances asks Bobbi why she broke up with her, and whether or not she is difficult to be in a relationship with.
Perhaps difficult to love.
Don't we all wonder that all the fucking time?
The scene shook me. It takes great bravery to ask and reveal how vulnerable we all secretly are. Because if I'm not worth loving, then it seems a task so immense, I genuinely don't know how to approach it. It's the sort of thing that can very easily bury you.
Most Rooney stories are also a deep and beautiful love song to friendship. We often mistakenly put our friends on the backburner, particularly when entering new relationships, because suddenly this new person seems all-consuming. From an evolutionary perspective, it's sensible - after all, if things go well, this is the person you will form a unit with, your partner in crime, perhaps the parent to your children. It's worth fighting for, for sure.
But for the most part, unfortunately, we shun old friends for the sake of "temporary sexual interests", without truly valuing how deeply these people often know us, and love us, nor how hard it is to be a friend and love someone even when they're doing bloody stupid things, or perhaps aren't being particularly lovable.
"Who knew I could be so nurturing?" [Bobbi asks towards the end, caring for sick Frances, to which Frances replies:]
"I did."
As I grow older, I enjoy more and more these reminders - invest in friendships, both with your actual friends and with potential partners. You need someone who's gonna be in your corner, not just someone who'll lick ice cream off ya.
Much as I love these productions for reminding me that, indeed, "everybody's going through something all the time", ultimately, I don't know if I agree with the conclusion.
"You just make decisions and you hope."
While it's true you can't control events, nor can you have a guarantee that things will end up alright, the idea that all you need to do is "hope" is deceiving (and needlessly simple). Of course, you have no promised "good ending" just 'cause you behave, but neither should you slip down the damned if you do, damned if you don't slope that leads so many down to Hades.
Personally, I don't think it's enough to hope. Because, arguably, that's what all the people we know trapped in unhappy, bitter lives did. They just said que sera, sera. That denies the critical agency we all possess in our own stories, though. Yes, I can hope my story turns out okay, yet if I conduct my life poorly, there's a much greater chance my hope will go unfulfilled.
You must try to pursue the best and highest as much as is possible based on where you are right now and what you have in your arsenal. It might not always work out well, but often, if you don't, you slip back into elective ignorance - the way so many of us do, behaving poorly, often chasing the worst possible outcomes for ourselves, then crying about it and wondering what gives.
Funny, I was just saying a few hours before I would not allow myself to slip back into ignorance. We are continuously making choices. And sometimes, it seems, little texts and stories find their way to us (or back to us) to nudge, remind, ask -- if you know better, if you could be more, then who the fuck gave you the green light to act like this?
