Normal People

While I liked the book, I didn't enjoy the central relationship. I was so happy with that ambiguous end. I thought: This is a healthy move, Marianne; you absolutely did the right thing.

Rooney does a good job of highlighting the harm we do to ourselves, and other people when we depend on others for validation and acceptance. So I think it is so interesting that even in the final version of their relationship, Marianne seems so dependent on Connell. There's a particular passage I can't get out of my head:

She was laughing then, and her face was red. She was in his power, he had chosen to redeem her, she was redeemed. It was so unlike him to behave that way in public that he must have been doing it on purpose, to please her. How strange to feel herself so completely under the control of another person, but also how ordinary. No one can be independent of other people completely, so why not give up the attempt, she thought, go running in the other direction, depend on people for everything, allow them to depend on you, why not. She knows he loves her, she doesn't wonder about that anymore.

Rooney critiques a need for social acceptance to such a large degree in this novel, that it seems an odd choice to have Marianne and Connell this dependent on each other. Even in the end, they haven't necessarily found a middle ground. In this particular passage it reads (to me anyway), that Marianne is accepting that she and Connel are co-dependent and that is ok. I think that an over-reliance on social acceptance and an overreliance on one person, are both perversions of what could otherwise be healthy relationships between ourselves and the people around us. So it is an interesting choice Rooney makes to have Marianne ‘accept' her codependent relationship, getting to the end of her book. To me, it reads as an indication that Marianne and Connell have not yet managed to be independent while maintaining healthy relationships. There's an all or nothing quality to their relationship that is present even at the end, which is why I think the book absolutely had to end the way it did.

In the book, we got to see Connell get therapy for his anxiety and depression, but we never got to see Marianne work through her own trauma and abuse. I think this may in part contribute to the state of their relationship. Considering Connell himself had contributed to her feelings of unworthiness, I couldn't believe in the health of their connection. Even in the last chapter. So I was overjoyed when the book ended with their separation. I feel perhaps they could reconnect later when they are healthier more mature versions of themselves and have a better relationship. For now, I was happy that this iteration of their relationship was dying.


The book made me feel many things, it is rare that I inhabit characters as fully as I inhabited Connell and Marianne. In fact, I'm absolutely certain that my strong feelings about this book have made this review an incoherent mess but