sara

blog of sorts. diary of sorts. largely a place for me to store my own thoughts. reviews will contain spoilers be warned. writing may consist of random thoughts, poems, stories, etc. really just for me and potentially a future portfolio??? dates are of when i wrote it ♥

♪ you get what you give - new radicals

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reading

07.14.2026
i recently read normal people by sally rooney. i was surprised by how deeply i loved it. i've heard about it for years, especially after the show came out, but i never quite got around to it for some reason. i'm glad now i put it off for so long. i don't think i would've fully processed and understood it had i read it when i was younger. i'm only 17, so i imagine it'll bring me new insights as i continue to grow. i believe i chose the perfect time to take in this story. with graduation seemingly right around the corner, i've been feeling excitement, but also a sense of dread. apprehension for what the future will bring and a childish desire to stay where it's safe and comfortable. normal people is perhaps most beautiful to me for how it approaches topics like this, subjects some would deem mundane or boring but which are truly the most realistic parts of the human experience. it shows the intersections of romance, class, coming of age, and mental health struggles. it shows how your life can be changed drastically in often invisible-to-the-eyes ways: by taking a chance, by ignoring an opportunity, by your privilege, by who you meet, by who you're raised by. i've long heard complaints from rooney's choice to not use quotation marks for dialogue, but i find the decision to only enhance the narrative ultimately. i love when writers intentionally break grammatical rules; it feels like a protest, a refusal to fit into a box. it evokes a message of personal style and is to me a mark of true creativity. if anything, it forces you to pay more attention to what you're reading -- although, it isn't hard to follow at all. i think it works for normal people because of the simplicity of the narrative. it's the kind of book that feels so real it's almost plain, right before you're hit with some of the most profound words you've ever heard. so much like life. rooney findd a way to write two characters who are both so easy to connect with and relate to it almost feels unreal. they're both so flawed and so themselves and so human. i feel that connell is such a misunderstood character, though i am aware this is largely of his own doing. i loved seeing how him and marianne practically switched places when they went off to college. it was such a vindicating reminder of how little high school really means in the grand scheme of life. rob's suicide being the catalyst for connell's realization of this very idea makes so much sense. it's so harrowing because it forces connell to confront the reality that he really can never go back to his youth. rob won't be there. school won't be there. it's gone, and he's unhappy where he is at college. in rob's death, connell felt the death of his childhood. the loneliness of this moment is so palpable. i'll admit it's made me terrified for adulthood. i personally live with so much nostalgia, particularly for my old school. it's so fascinating because, like connell, i didn't actually like a large part of the people there, but the idea of never being able to live in those moments among the same people every day again is painful. i hope college life treats me better than connell. then there's marianne... oh, marianne. some of her thoughts felt so familiar it was like rooney ripped them right out of my head. she's such an interesting character because she has such a deep self loathing that only manifests in her relationships. outside of them, she truly appears confident, put together, like someone who doesn't tolerate disrespect. the way she disassociates speaks to how violence and abuse manifest in one's life as they get older. it's like she escapes into this shell of herself, waiting for it to end. it's a feeling i know. something separates her from others that she can't put her finger on. it's not her fault, but she doesn't know it. her only true outlet is connell, and even he humiliates her. when connell says his friends wouldn't be into the stuff him and marianne are, marianne is confused. what they care about is the real world, social issues, suffering, the truth. it's essentially connell saying his friends are ignorant and there's nothing he can do. "it's different for you," he tells marianne. the fact of the matter is, though, that connell chooses to associate with them. this is the conflict of half the people i know. them and connell can hardly be blamed, can they? they're so young, and they just want to get through high school without being alone. i've never been able to do that. i've always been marianne in this situation, listening to people justify their silence in the face of bigotry and cruelty because they're not the ones engaging directly. i couldn't help but think of this whenever the topic of connell's friends came up. that being said, connell and marianne might be in my top ten favorite fictional relationships ever now. they know each other in a way that others simply cannot, and i can only dream of achieving a connection that strong. of course they each have their issues, and lives naturally diverge (very hard pill to swallow), hence why it would never work long term, but being able to sit with someone and talk to them and know they genuinely want to understand you and learn what makes you you and even being able to sit in silence and still feel that mutual bond is so profound. to try time and time again to sever that cord and never be able to is even more beautiful. i just love love so much, and i'm such a believer in true love being love that doesn't remain idle; it's love that changes you both, helps you grow into the best version of yourself. the power of human connection and how we can alter each other by opening our hearts to one another. it's an ongoing topic between connell and marianne, how they've changed each other. connell wouldn't even have went to trinity or pursued what he really loves (English) without marianne. marianne needed someone to show her she was loveable, which is what allows her to exist on her own at the end. the way they nurture each other's passions and intellects is endlessly moving. even now i haven't fully captured the entire beauty of their relationship, but i know i've been changed alongside connell and marianne. i would expect from a book this popular a very surface-level exploration of class dynamics, maybe one throwaway sentence here and there, but i found that rooney is actually very interested in observing the true weight of class in everyday life, as well as politics in general. normal people really does a great job of combining profound character studies with the inherent political and economic aspects of living in the world. it's all so utterly human. easily a new favorite, and i might even check back in with more to say later on.

favorite quotes:
★"It's not like this with other people."
★"Marianne had the sense that her real life was happening somewhere very far away, happening without her, and she didn't know if she would ever find out where it was and become part of it...All she knew was that when it started, she wouldn't need to imagine it anymore."
★"Marianne, he said, I'm not a religious person but I do sometimes think God made you for me."
★"I don't know what's wrong with me, says Marianne. I don't know why I can't be like normal people...I don't know why I can't make people love me. I think there was something wrong with me when I was born."
★"It was culture as class performance, literature fetishised for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterwards feel superior to the uneducated peple whose emotional journeys they liked to read about."
★"Things that happened to her then are buried in the earth of her body. She tries to be a good person. But deep down she knows she is a bad person, corrupted, wrong, and all her efforts to be right, to have the right opinions, to say the right things, these efforts only disguise what is buried inside her, the evil part of herself."
★"...like watching a perfect goal, like the rustling movement of light through leaves, a phrase of music from the window of a passing car. Life offers up these moments of joy despite everything."
★"It's nothing worse than this mostly, it's just this all the time, nothing but this, and long empty weekdays wiping down surfaces and wringing damp sponges into the sink."
★"She's not leading the same kind of life as other people. She acts so worldly at times, making him feel ignorant, but then she can be so naive. He wants to understand how her mind works. If he silently decides not to say something when they're talking, Marianne will ask 'what?' within one or two seconds. This 'what?' question seems to him to contain so much: not just the forensic attentiveness to his silences that allows her to ask in the first place, but a desire for total communication, a sense that anything unsaid is an unwelcome interruption between them. He writes these things down, long run-on sentences with too many dependent clauses, sometimes connected with breathless semicolons, as if he wants to recreate a precise copy of Marianne in print, as if he can preserve her completely for future review."
★"Connell always gets what he wants, and then feels sorry for himself when what he wants doesn't make him happy."
★"He tells her that she's beautiful. She has never heard that before, though she has sometimes privately suspected it of herself, but it feels different to hear it from another person."
★"Marianne wonders what it would be like to belong here, to walk down the street greeting people and smiling. To feel that life was happening here, in this place, and not somewhere else far away...In just a few weeks' time Marianne will live with differnet people, and her life will be different. But she herself will not be different. She'll be the same person, trapped inside her own body."
★"As a child Marianne resisted, but now she simply detaches as if it isn't of any interest to her, which in a way it isn't. Denise considers this a symptom of her daughter's frigid and unlovable personality. She believes Marianne lacks 'warmth,' by which she means the ability to beg for love from people who hate her."
★"It suggests to Connell that the same imagination he uses as a reader is necessary to understand real people also, and to be intimate with them."
★"At times he has the sensation that he and Marianne are like figure-skaters, imrpvosiing their discussions so adeptly and in such perfect synchronisation that it surprises them both."
★"I think I have an unlovable sort of... I have a coldness about me. I'm difficult to like."
★"In a way I like the idea of something so dramatic happening to me. I would like to upset people's expectations. Do you think I'd be a bad mother?"
★"She feels that even she doesn't know what her family are like, that she's never adequate in her attempts to describe them, that she oscillates between exaggerating their behaviour, which makes her feel guilty, or downplaying it, which also makes her feel guilty, but a different guilt, more inwardly directed."
★"Often he wished he could fall asleep inside her body."
★"It feels powerful to him to put an experience down in words, like he's trapping it in a jar and it can never fully leave him."
★"He senses a certain receptivity in her expression, like she's gathering information about his feelings, something they have learned to do to each other over a long time, like speaking a private language."
★"Obviously Connell did find Marianne's opinions interesting, but he could see how her fondness for expressing them at length, to the exclusion of lighter conversation, was not universally charming."
★"When he saw Yvonne last week she told him he was 'making progress'. Mental healthcare professionals are always using this hygienic vocabulary, words wiped clean as whiteboards, free of connotation, sexless."
★"He has sincerely wanted to die, but he has never sincerely wanted Marianne to forget about him. That's the only part of himself he wants to protect, the part that exists inside her."
★"How strange to feel so completely under the control of another person, but also how ordinary."
★"They've done a lot of good for each other. Really, she thinks, really. People can really change one another."

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