Like Rooney’s previous books - 2017’s Conversations with Friends and 2019’s Normal People - Beautiful World, Where Are You might be reductively summarized as being about the interesting love lives of a set of intellectually discontented young Marxist Dubliners. “When I put it like that, I think: that’s it? And so what? But the fact is, although it’s nothing, it makes me miserable, and I don’t want to live this kind of life.”Īlice’s discontent with her life and her work is one of the chief animating forces of the novel. “I can’t believe I have to tolerate these things - having articles written about me, and seeing my photograph on the internet, and reading comments about myself,” says Alice, the celebrity novelist who is one of the four central characters of Beautiful World, Where Are You. And she’s done it all, apparently, without much caring for the experience. Since her first book came out in 2017, Rooney has gone from much-admired young writer to Instagram status symbol to metaphor for everything that is ailing white middle-class millennials. Early galleys of Beautiful World, Where Are You sold for hundreds of dollars online, and even the promotional tote bag her publisher put together can fetch about $80 on the resale market. There are other literary novelists who have bestselling books and hit TV show adaptations of their work, but only Sally Rooney has a hypebeast bucket hat and a pop-up shop. Sally Rooney has become that rarest of creatures among literary novelists: a brand name. Early on in Sally Rooney’s fraught and lovely new novel Beautiful World, Where Are You, it becomes clear that one of the big problems Rooney is struggling with on the page is herself.

Eileen beautiful world where are you