Conversations With Friends: Sally Rooney

An extensive psychological profile by the writer on her debut book. The book centers around our protagonist Frances--who is the narrator--and her ex/best friend Bobbi; the duo encounters an older, unhappily married heterosexual couple that brings some curious changes to their lives. It goes exactly how it sounds. 

    From the beginning, the book is heavy with the narrator's thoughts and feelings towards everything that goes on in the featured period of her life. She is a poet, whose work and social life are hugely affected by her best friend. The things that stand out in the book are the conversations--how the title would suggest the words exchanged by the characters hold a lot of value, and they end up being either interestingly ambiguous or just never reaching a satisfying conclusion. But that's the defining trait of the story; because it gave me a lot to think about what the characters are influenced by and their way of thinking.

    The other thing that stands out about the book is the characters are fluid in their social lives, and not a lot of their childhoods are mentioned; or basically how their minds became what they are, in the story. Their friendship is the thing you'll have to think about. They have their ups and downs like every love square, but the writer has put the unfiltered thoughts of almost every human through her characters in this story; or alternatively, if real-life humans communicated like these characters did, there probably wouldn't be so many communication gaps among people. It also might cause a lot of people to just plainly avoid humans as much as possible. Idk.

    The book is definitely well-written. It was very easy to read, but it isn't anything profound. What it offers you is a look into the minds of some questionable emotional people; which might make you look into yourself with the straightforward lens you just borrowed from the writer. It made me look that way. In any case, I would've liked this book to reach a different conclusion, because it seemed like our mains were gonna go around in circles for some time after the book ended (and the circles seem so familiar I'm glad I don't have to go through them again). But I'd definitely recommend it to anyone who likes books that'll poke your brain to self-analyze a bit. It was a fairly good read.

I gave it 3.5/5. Check it out!