‘The Interview’: Sally Rooney Thinks Career Growth Is Overrated

There are stylistic aspects to “Intermezzo” that make it different from your past books. But it’s not that different. The way I think about it, any character from one of your novels could walk into another of those novels and the reader wouldn’t be like, What is that person doing here? Do you ever wonder if your books are too similar, and about how your writing might change in the future? That’s a really good question. I would have to answer it by saying I don’t care about my career. I think about, How do I make this book the perfect version of what it can be? I never think about it in relation to my other work, and I never think about what people will say about how close or distant it is from my oeuvre. I don’t think of myself as even having an oeuvre. I just think about: I’ve got these characters. I’ve got these scenarios. How do I do justice to them? I don’t feel myself thinking about my growth as an artist, if you will.

You’re not being a little disingenuous? I’m skeptical. It’s fair to be skeptical. There is a huge cultural fixation with novelty and growth. Everything has to grow all the time. Get bigger, sell more and be different — novelty, reinvention. I don’t find that very interesting. When you say one of my characters could walk into another of my novels, perhaps that is true, but they haven’t. There is no Ivan in any of my previous books. He is a new guy, and for me that’s enough. I do understand that people might feel, Oh, she’s repeating herself because it’s another book about people — same age range, same milieu, some of them are in Dublin, some are in the west of Ireland — and they’re traveling back and forth, and they’re having these relationships, and there’s sex and there’s talking, and they have political beliefs or whatever. Yeah, that is all my books, and perhaps it always will be. I don’t know. I’m wary of saying this, because it could sound like I’m trying to compare myself to the great masters of the past and I absolutely am not, but when I look at writers whose work has transformed my life, I look at Austen, Henry James, Dostoyevsky. Those writers produced work that adheres to what you’re describing, where it feels like a figure from one of their books could stroll into any of the other novels that they wrote and be at home. But each of the novels is its own world, and it’s intense and it’s profound and it’s beautiful, and that’s what I’m striving for.

In “Beautiful World, Where Are You,” you were trying things out with not conveying interiority. In “Intermezzo,” the Peter sections have a stream-of-consciousness feel. Do those formal experiments come out of character, or do you think, This is something I would like to try, and here’s an opportunity to do it? It’s the former. They strictly come out of not only character but scenario. With this one, as soon as I conceived of Peter, the older-brother character, I wrote down what is now the first page of the novel almost instantly, and it has hardly changed. It was a fragmented, fluid way of trying to grapple with his interiority, and it started like that and basically went on like that. There was never a point where I consciously thought to myself, I’d love to have a go at writing sentences like that. It was always, how do I get the reader to understand what I’m seeing in my head? Whatever language I have to use to get to the idea, I’ll use it.

Do you feel like you’re just trying to get to the idea when you’re writing sex scenes? Yeah! Often the crucial changes in the dynamic between two people can happen in the context of a sexual interaction. So when there are crucial shifts in how two people relate to each other, those shifts have to happen on the page. It can be a challenge stylistically. It can be a challenge in terms of what I would call petty personal reasons — it’s embarrassing. But to be true to my work, I have to go there.

Your writing about sex is so not corny. Are there writers you’ve learned from? Do you have friends that you show that writing to, like, “Let me know if this sounds corny”? You set me up for failure here, because if I start talking about how I avoid cringe — a lot of people think I don’t.