I am entranced by the story of Normal People, and the acting of Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal. I love their world, which feels immensely relatable despite my not being Irish or having been in their exact circumstances.
I loved watching the series, and reading the novel—and I recently found myself revisiting both. There was something I needed to find in the pages, discover in their world.
Fiction and Storytelling
Of course, I love Rooney’s prose and storytelling, as a fellow author of stories. Normal People has been a major and recurring touchpoint of inspiration for my own fiction writing practice in the last years. I attempted to emulate her style in my 2023 novel, It Wasn’t.
It may seem like a minor thing, but for some reason, the way she does punctuation with speech acts—namely not having any quotations—feels liberating to me as a writer.
I remember taking an extracurricular class on writing fiction as a Freshman at St. John’s, and asking the teacher how punctuation worked with speech acts. For some reason it was confusing to me. I knew there were rules, but I didn’t know what there were—I wanted to learn them, but felt hampered by my ignorance, and the expectation that I would follow them.
I still remember that the teacher seemed surprised by my question, and brushed it off as unimportant, and that I’d learn them later. She was right, but I still don’t like how she responded to my earnest question.
I don’t know if I could verbally describe the rules and conventions around punctuating speech acts in fiction, but I could emulate them now. Still, I vastly prefer Rooney’s style, which simply doesn’t have them.
I would love to ask her about that style, and why she chose it. What inspired her to do it that way. What she likes about it. I would love to ask her so many questions!
Her style, and my emulation of it, reminds me of the rediscovery of lower case as a possible writing option. There’s a freedom that comes with lower case, the relief of the self-imposed expectation to take oneself seriously, the absence of the need to pretend that one is more intelligent or important than one actually is. U are simply saying what U think, as U think it.
There is no teacher grading one’s writing, there is no academic achievement to complete or accomplish—there is only writing, for its own sake, to think by oneself and to share with others.
Interestingly, Rooney chose the third person present for her narration style, e.g. “Marianne answers the door when Connell rings the bell.” I’m not quite sure what effect that has, but it certainly has one. There is so much contained in the choice of a narrative voice—which person it is, which time or tense it is, what degree of omniscience or scope of perspective is present. It constrains or limits what kinds of things can be said, or seen, or observed—and gives a flavor or color to the prose of the novel itself.
Cinematic Normalcy
I admire the way that the novel was transposed into the film setting, on television. This is a great accomplishment for a writer, in my opinion—not only to have the rights to a creative adaptation into film purchased, and acted on, but executed so effectively. Doubtless, Rooney’s own participation in the adaptation was critical to the success. I am delighted for her, and can only hope that something similar might happen for my own fiction at some point. It’s far easier to write a novel, in that it only depends on one’s own time, energy, skill, imagination—there are no major budgets needed, no Hollywood studios or direction or any of the many, many complectities that go into such a production—but one can’t help but wonder what one’s own stories and worlds would look like on screen.
Of course, the prospect of such a thing is tender—one would wish to see it done well—but it’s easy to imagine Rooney being not only satisfied but delighted by the quality with which Normal People was adapted, and the enormously warm reception it’s had by the world at large.
Certainly, an enormous part of the success of the adaptation was due to the casting. It’s hard to imagine the series with actors other than Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar-Jones. They are nearly perfect for the role, to the point that one thinks they were born for it, made for it. They have such chemistry, not only with each other, but with the camera, with the audience.
But another part must have been the major players not on screen—including, but not limited to, the authorial team of Rooney, Alice Birch, and Mark O’Rowe, and the direction by Lenny Abrahamson and Hettie Macdonald.
Whoever chose that team, however that particular cast of unseen participants emerged—the magic lies therein.
The Heart of Normal People
I revisit Normal People, in part, I think, to grieve. To remember what has transpired in my own life, my own heart—and from there, to make sense of what happened, to feel through it, to come to a kind of peace with it.
Normal People has helped me to grieve my most beloved relationship, to treasure what I loved there—the intimacy of connection, the feeling of inevitability, and the weight of the pain and grief in it breaking, rupturing, ending.
It has also helped me to grieve other relationships, more recent ones, more painful ones—the ones filled with strife, conflict, and misunderstanding. To make a little sense of what transpired, the feeling of it, the shape of the confusions and impasses.
I think it validates the sense that a relationship is an entire world, that the story of love gone right or wrong is deeply meaningful, that there is a whole essence or being to what is shared or lost; a meaning and purpose to what’s experienced and learned.
Marianne and Connell are incredibly compelling, vivid characters—believable, and entrancing, on print and on screen.
Here are some thoughts I’ve had about their characters:
Marianne’s family is high-class, wealthy. Her father died when she was young. Both her parents were lawyers. Her mother, Denise, and her brother, Alan, are still alive. Alan is physically and emotionally abusive, and her mother is emotionally abusive, and absent. She seems submissive to her son, especially in the show, and characterizes herself as powerless to do anything about him. She gives Marianne the silent treatment after she doesn’t come for Christmas, and when Alan bloodies her nose and Connell says he will kill Alan if he hurts Marianne again or tells her anything bad—a conversation Denise overhears. Presumably, she somehow feels the victim in this entire debacle.
Connell’s family is low-class, and considered seedy or unvirtuous. He has a large extended family, many of whom are criminals and hoodlums. He is considered the exception, although his mother, Lorraine, was pregnant at 17 and he doesn’t know who the father is. Lorraine is willing to tell him but he doesn’t care, doesn’t want to ask or know.
Marianne and Connell both value intelligence. They each separately describe each other, to others, as the smartest person they’ve ever met.
They value that they come from the same place—Carricklea—but also that they understood each other there, that they found a kind of companionship and mutual understanding.
They both feel like outsiders, alienated from the world at large, at different points in their lives and friendship—Marianne while she is at school with Connell, and Connell when they are studying in Dublin. Their experiences invert: Connell is included in Sligo and then excluded/outsider in Dublin, whereas Marianne is excluded in Sligo and then included in Dublin. Both of their experiences of alienation are traumatizing for them, but they take solace in the fact that they understand each other.
Marianne says “It’s not like this with other people.” They both feel this way about each other. The main difference, I think, is that they genuinely love each other. Marianne doesn’t truly love her other male partners. Certainly, Connell doesn’t love Rachel, or his first girlfriend. He loves Helen, but there’s a way he feels more at home with Marianne, more “normal” and seen and loved with her, than with Helen—something Helen senses, a wedge between them that drives them apart.
Connell and Marianne have two major misunderstandings or conflicts during the course of the novel—first, when Connell invites Rachel to the Debs rather than Marianne, in school; and later, at university, when Connell is fired from his job, is unable to afford his housing, and has difficulty communicating his situation, needs, and desires to Marianne.
I think these ruptures happen for meaningfully different reasons. The earlier, high school conflict happens because their implicit, unspoken, boundaries, needs, preferences, and agreements were violated. What was unconscious became conscious in an abrupt, painful way. Marianne hadn’t advocated for her needs, and Connell had not truly faced his fears.
In college, their difference in communication styles, and thinking, comes to a head. What is obvious to Connell is not to Marianne. What is obvious to Marianne is not to Connell. Their words hold unspoken assumptions, their reception carries unintended implications.
As much as they love and respect and care for one another, as close as they are, they have difficulty truly understanding each other—there are limits to their mutual theory of mind.
What was once unspoken becomes talk-about-able only later, in a different era of their friendship, in a different chapter of their lives—when they can discuss class issues frankly, as well as Marianne’s family history.
So much of the brilliance of Normal People, to my mind, is about perspective. We see Connell’s perspective, and Marianne’s perspective, in both forms of the story. We see that what is obvious here, is not obvious there. What is normal to me is weird to U. What is abnormal to us, is commonplace and straightforward to others.
Arguably, in my mind, a third major rupture or conflict is shown in the novel. When Connell is invited to go to NYC for an MFA program, they disagree about whether Connell should go. Marianne, after being slightly upset he’d not done anything, implies that she thinks Connell should go to NYC, or at least strongly consider it. He rebuffs her, and they agree to stop talking about it.
But in the background, they both continue to think about it, and Connell comes around to Marianne’s perspective. As painful as it is, they agree to separate, so that Connell can go to NYC and follow his gifts, and Marianne can stay in Dublin to pursue her own.
They love and support each other in becoming who they are, who they can be—not holding each other back, but investing in their genuine, unrestricted flourishing.
This series of events, in my mind, shows that they’ve learned to communicate. It shows how much they’ve grown in themselves, and learned in relationship, such that what might otherwise have been an extremely painful conflict—one that ruined their lives or their relationship—became a mutual choice, an accomplishment they arrive at together.
In her recent paper Navigating an Allistic World: Authentic Autistic Representation in Sally Rooney’s Normal People, Emelie Wedenberg claims that Marianne is an implicit autistic female character, and analyzes the novel accordingly. This is in contrast to the character Christopher in Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, or Sheldon in the television series The Big Bang Theory, both of whom are explicitly autistic male characters.
The paper diagnoses Marianne as autistic, adducing the following set of behaviors as examples from the novel:
- her social naïveté and tendency to be taken advantage of
- her tendency towards masking, and observing others to make sense of their behavior
- her need for routine and sameness
- her proclivity for direct communication, or taking others literally
- her habit of rotating objects in repetitive motions (spoons, coffee-stirrers, hair)—stimming.
- her special interests related to history, “politics, society, social rights and justice”
- the implication of her sensory sensitivity through the passages from her narrative perspective
- her behaviors around eye contact
- her subtle but consistently demonstrated insistence on correctness in texting (full sentences, capitalization)
I also think Marianne likely has something like PTSD or C-PTSD from her upbringing in an abusive family. The paper alludes to this, but only in passing, as a proposed alternate explanation for her behaviors and challenges that it discards. In fact, symptoms of multiple psychological issues can be comorbid, are not mutually exclusive. I think it likely that Marianne has both autism and C-PTSD.
I quite like Wedenberg’s paper. The only thing I don’t find persuasive or complete is their account of Connell. While it’s certainly persuasive to interpret Connell as allistic—which explains quite cleanly why they have so many misunderstandings—I think it’s overly simplistic.
In particular, I am thinking of the “double empathy problem,” a theory proposed in 2012 by Damian Milton, which suggests that autistic and allistic people have social challenges due to differences in communication styles and expectations, such that they both have difficulty empathizing with the other.
One implication of this is that allistic people tend to spend time with and befriend allistic people, and autistic people tend to spend time with and befriend autistic people—that each subgroup spends time with similar people, who they intuitively understand and can empathize with.
In the world of Normal People, Connell and Marianne are drawn to each other, and feel more understood by each other than by anyone else. The double empathy problem would imply to me that Connell and Marianne spend time with each other because they are both autistic, both isolated and alienated from the larger pool of allistic peers, family, friends, and teachers they are exposed to in Sligo and Dublin.
Their difficulty understanding each other comes from them being differently neurodivergent—not simply from Connell being allistic and Marianne being autistic. To my mind, their class differences and different family backgrounds (Connell’s mother Lorraine as single parent, Marianne’s family as emotionally and physically abusive) also explain a fair bit of their misunderstandings.
In addition to some kind of neurodivergence, I believe Connell has a very intense need for a sense of belonging and social acceptance, perhaps (but not necessarily) stemming from the absence of a father figure in his life. His desire to keep his relationship with Marianne a secret stems from the fear that he will be shunned and exiled if they are discovered to be spending time together outside of school or having sex—that he will receive the same poor treatment and bullying that Marianne receives, by virtue of association. That would be absolutely intolerable to him, and explains the motivations of his actions, which hurt Marianne so much. As the novel progresses, his friend Rob serves as a foil for him, who mirrors back to him a more intense version of his own, similar need.
Connell is explicitly shown to have anxiety, panic attacks, and severe depression. These stem in part from his need for social acceptance, but also from his own moral evaluations of himself.
What even is autism?
It is not a binary, as Widenberg seems to portray it, but rather a spectrum. A vast flora and fauna of neurodivergence and peculiarity. Marianne and Connell are less peculiar to each other than to others, or other to them—even if they are themselves still peculiar, mysterious, confusing to each other.
Isn’t that love? To be deeply safe and comforted by someone’s being, such that U always feel safe returning to them—but also, at the same time, eternally abiding in a sense of wonder and mystery at their being, the miracle of their existence, the palpable infinity of what is as-yet-unknown, unrecognized, not yet fully understood or sensed?
In my headcanon, Connell goes to New York for a year or three. They split up, but stay in touch—they keep corresponding, and doing calls. They probably date other people, and learn from that. But then he returns to Dublin, or Marianne decides to move to New York, and they get back together. And live happily ever after—marriage and kids, a house and pets and eventually death. Normal People. Human lives. Reality: life, and death.
Further Resources
- Rooney’s “At the Clinic”
- How Normal People Does Sex So Good