Normal People

Connell and Marianne grow up in the same small town in the west of Ireland, but the similarities end there. In school, Connell is popular and well-liked, while Marianne is a loner. But when the two strike up a conversation – awkward but electrifying – something life-changing begins.

Normal People is a story of mutual fascination, friendship and love. It takes us from that first conversation to the years beyond, in the company of two people who try to stay apart but find they can’t.

Sometimes the hype surrounding a particular book is so intense I find myself at a loss to know what to add to the conversation. That’s one of the reasons I have put off reviewing Sally Rooney’s Normal People.

The other is that it is a particularly polarising novel. There are the Normal People evangelists, waving the book around to anyone who will listen like you. Must. Read. This. Then on the other hand there’s those who disliked it so much they want to hurl the thing out of the window, tear it, burn it and then throw the pieces in the faces of everybody who ever told them it was worth reading.

I fall very much into the first camp.

I love Normal People.

(Yes, I have watched the BBC show. Yes, I loved it. Especially the episode about Marianne’s year in Sweden. It destroyed me.)

Normal People is a quiet, introspective novel about two people, Marianne and Connell, who love each other very much, but are, for reasons ranging from miscommunication to trauma, unable to hold onto each other. At least not in the way they’d like.

I have a theory that the people who don’t like Normal People are that weird subsection of the emotionally healthy who, like, know how to communicate their feelings? And they don’t understand how you could accidentally end a relationship because it didn’t occur to you that the person you’re in love with wouldn’t want to leave you?

(Who even are those people?)

For the rest of us, Normal People is a mirror for feelings of inadequacy (Marianne: why would anyone love me? Connell: What if people are judging me right now?), love (and heartbreak) and the self-destructive habits (Connell: isolating. Marianne: dating men who want to destroy her.) people have to move through in order to reach something like the beginnings of an emotionally healthy life.

It’s about how two people can change each other, and damage each other, and love each other.

The perspective shifts constantly between Marianne and Connell, between situations they’ve shared and the times – always temporary – where their lives have diverged away from each other. Time jumps as well as perspective, as though Rooney is sharing only snapshots of the most crucial points in these two lives. What is so remarkable is how ordinary these crucial moments are – a party at university where Connell and Marianne reconnect after many months, the sudden onset of Connor’s depression, Marianne’s study abroad year in isolation. Probably her most destructive period in the book, even it is punctuated not by melodrama but instead a fucked up sort of endurance test for Marianne to figure out how much hurt she deserves. I don’t think I have read such an empathetic and painful narrative of a person who wants to do harm to themselves before Rooney’s depiction of Marianne.

This snapshot-like structure spoke to me because often the biggest moments aren’t some epic thunderclap of realisation like I’d always thought they would be. Instead, a lot of the time, they’re only recognisable in retrospect, something I think the structure of Normal People really speaks to.

If you like books with plot, you’re probably not going to enjoy Normal People. If you like people to make emotionally healthy decisions that make total sense… yeah, you’re probably not going to like Normal People. But if you’re interested in emotionally messy, complicated people who fuck up constantly – sometimes deliberately – and all the moments of a relationship from the romantic to the truly painful and gnarly, then, yeah, Normal People might be for you.

Truly Devious

Ellingham Academy is a famous private school in Vermont. It was founded by Albert Ellingham, an early twentieth century tycoon, who wanted to make a wonderful place full of riddles, twisting pathways, and gardens. “A place,” he said, “where learning is a game.”

In 1936, shortly after the school opened, Ellingham’s wife and daughter, Iris and Alice, were kidnapped. The only real clue was a mocking riddle listing methods of murder, signed with the frightening pseudonym “Truly, Devious.” It became one of the great crimes of American history. Something like that could never happen again, obviously…

Years later, true crime aficionado Stevie Bell is set to begin her first year at Ellingham Academy, and she has an ambitious plan: She will solve this cold case. That is, she will solve the case when she gets a grip on her demanding new school life and her housemates: the inventor, the novelist, the actor, the artist, and the jokester. But something strange is happening. Truly Devious makes a surprise return, and death revisits Ellingham Academy. The past has crawled out of its grave. Someone has gotten away with murder.

Remotely situated boarding schools for the excellent – be that wizards, vampires or, in this case, geniuses – have always been one of my favourite literary escapes. So when Maureen Johnson, one of my forever faves, presented us with Ellingham Academy – a school with ‘…no application, no list of requirements, no instructions other than “If you would like to be considered for Ellingham Academy, please get in touch.”’ – I was totally in before I even read the first page.

Truly Devious is a murder mystery split into two separate timelines. There’s Stevie Bell, a new arrival at the school, true crime enthusiast and Sherlock Holmes-in-training at present day Ellingham Academy, sticking her nose into history to see what she can sniff out there, interspersed with chapters covering those shocking days of April 1936 when the course of Albert Ellingham’s life was thrown dramatically and tragically off course. The only thing both timelines have in common is that no one yet understands what on earth has gone on.

Stevie has lived all her life feeling like a misfit. From a politically conservative family – her parents even work for a local senator who is the unfortunate embodiment of Make America Great Again-ism – and a high school filled with kids she got on well enough with, but never felt especially connected to, she’s frustrated and desperate for a new chapter of her life to begin.

Yeah, Stevie. We can all relate.

The school is populated by the sort of colourful characters you might expect from an institution for the strange and genius – Janelle, an engineering superstar who was caught mending the toaster at 5 years old; Nate, the teenage author of a best-selling Game of Thrones-type series called The Moon Bright Cycles; Hayes Major, writer and star of The End of it All, a web series about a zombie apocalypse; and, finally, David. Oh, David. Constantly on the edge of expulsion, it’s unclear what David’s talent is besides disruption – of the school, and of Stevie’s general sense of wellbeing – but all I can say is you’re always glad he’s around. It’s Maureen Johnson we’re talking about, so you can’t guarantee a happy ending for the pair, but however it all turns out I am invested.

Like all Maureen’s books – has anyone else read her Shades of London series? I was obsessed – Truly Devious is totally addictive. There is a sense of foreboding over the entire narrative, the weight of the unsolved murders Stevie is at the Academy to investigate, plus that of the murder the summary promises is coming. Who will it be?

I’m not going to give it away.

All I will say I was reaching for the sequel as soon as I could get my hands on it.

Permanent Record

On paper, college drop-out Pablo Rind doesn’t have a whole lot going for him. His graveyard shift at a twenty-four-hour deli in Brooklyn is a struggle. Plus, he’s up to his eyeballs in credit card debt. Never mind the state of his student loans.

Pop juggernaut Leanna Smart has enough social media followers to populate whole continents. The brand is unstoppable. She graduated from child stardom to become an international icon, and her adult life is a queasy blur of private planes, hotel rooms and strangers screaming for her just to notice them.

When Leanna and Pablo meet at 5am at the bodega in the dead of winter, it’s absurd to think that they’d become A Thing. But as they discover who they are, who they want to be and how to defy the expectations of everyone else, Lee and Pab turn to each other. Which, of course, is when things get properly complicated.

Mary H.K. Choi appeared on one of my favourite podcasts, Call Your Girlfriend, a few months back and I fell in love with her within the first five minutes. She’s just really fucking cool. Read/listen to any interview she’s ever given and you’ll quickly see what I mean – this one is a good start, if you’re interested.

Permanent Record offers an authentic take on what it means to be young and lost. Though classified as YA, perhaps what I liked most is that Permanent Record wasn’t about teenagers, but people in their early twenties. It wasn’t about high school, or university even, but that vast space you find yourself in when you’re finally thrown out of all the institutions in whose structures you’ve been immersed your entire life up until that point. Technically you’re an adult – employed full time, no longer living with your parents – but the reality is that you don’t have a clue what you’re doing. There’s this old musical that we used to have on VHS when I was a kid, Singin’ In The Rain. My brother and I’s favourite song in the whole thing was ‘Make ‘Em Laugh’, sung by Cosmo Brown, the clown to Gene Kelly’s leading man. Anyway, while he’s singing this stupid song, for the final flourish he goes to do his signature move – this back flip that involves first running up the wall before springing back off of it and landing on his feet. We see him manage it successfully a couple times, but the final wall turns out to be fake – they’re on a movie set – so he crashes straight through. Basically what I’m getting at is that I think early adulthood is a lot like Cosmo Brown singing ‘Make ‘Em Laugh’.

You’ll fall down a lot, and you probably won’t be the leading man.

That’s pretty much where Pablo is at when an escape hatch arrives in the shape of Leanna Smart. I once heard Dylan Moran say that relationships in your twenties are a continual process of not wanting to turn around and face your bullshit, so instead you find another person to whom you can attach yourself and be all “you look at it”, and that particular dynamic forms the heart of Pablo and Leanna’s relationship. It’s all-consuming and chaotic, it further fucks Pablo’s already pretty fucked up priorities and, more than anything, presents a fast-moving tide he can ride along rather than going about the difficult business of gathering the pieces of his scattered life.

So much of YA is consumed with firsts (for obvious reasons) – first love, first sexual experiences – and oftentimes, at least in contemporary novels they are written in a way that’s very much idealised. And look, I’m not complaining. There is a very important place for uncomplicated love stories (I mean, the first thing I did when lockdown happened was start rewatching Parks & Rec because I needed my Lesliemin fix) and there is something regenerative and hopeful about reading them, but the older I get the more I want to live in complicated spaces, and Permanent Record is the perfect read for this.

It’s also straight up uncomfortable at times. You know when your friends are doing better than you and you don’t exactly celebrate their achievements as you should because you’re so caught up in your own sense of inadequacy? Mary writes that to perfection. What about when you realise that those people in your life you’re totally judgey towards maybe aren’t actually doing it (it = life) wrong? That maybe despite what you’ve always thought they actually aren’t a joke, but had it figured out in a way you can only hope you will one day the entire time? Mary. Fucking. Gets it.

Permanent Record grabbed a hold of my heart with the wild abandon of a murderous Damon Salvatore and I loved it. Bittersweet and packed with uncomfortable truths, it was every bit as cool as Mary H.K. Choi herself. From this book to her extremely helpful podcast Hey, Cool Life, Mary has now cemented her place as one of my favourites, and a voice I am very glad to have during this lockdown.

Read Permanent Record. Seriously. It’ll blow your mind and break your heart a bit – but you can deal with that.

Then maybe watch Singin’ In The Rain because it doesn’t get much more pure than tap dancing, and I feel like we need that right now.