Edited by: Lavanya Goswami
NORMAL PEOPLE
From: Person 1
Subject: Are we Normal People?
Date: Sun, Dec 5 2021, 02:34
To: Person 2
Dear P2,
If I could, I’d want to be suspended in this novel, until the end of time. What is it about Sally Rooney’s writing? I’m only halfway through Normal People, and I’ve already ordered Conversations with Friends. Maybe I’m obsessed because I’m scribbling marginal notes for you, because you’ll read what I wrote. See what I saw. Think what I thought? It’s the deepest level of intimacy, isn’t it? Like, you will have access to my private thoughts. I’d like to think that in the painfully short 266 pages of Normal People, you will inhabit the world, for a moment that will mark you, as I inhabit it. Borrow my gaze, as it were, for just a moment. As my notes carry the marks of my life, I wonder if the novel carries any of Sally’s. Since I’ve wandered far down the rabbit hole, I also wonder if literature is itself a means of transporting lives, of sharing them.
Should I be sorry that the last four emails I wrote you have all revolved around Normal People? As I confessed, I’m obsessed. Speaking of which, I’d also like to register my protest against the negative connotations of obsessions. It’s only the ultimate form of surrender. Basically Marianne and Connell. I can’t fathom why a world that functions on the binary of the subjugator and the subjugated turns up its nose at obsessions.
From the bottomless pit of the rabbit hole,
P1
From: Person 2
Subject: Not Normally
Date: Sun, Dec 5 2021, 05:47
To: Person 1
Dear P1,
I think you make a fair point about obsessions. But re: Marianne and Connell, I don’t think Marianne makes a conscious choice to surrender herself so completely to Connell. It just happens. I sound like Marcus Aurelius, but life just seems to happen to them, to all the characters that populate Normal People. I think it’s that passivity in Sally’s writing that enthralls you. It sobers you to the lack of control you have over your own life, normalizes the abnormal since whatever you do, it’s not a conscious choice.
In the span of one paragraph, P1, you’ve made me into a stoic and a determinist.
Person 2
From: Person 1
Subject: Don’t Pull a Connell on Me
Date: Wed, Dec 8 2021, 11:58
To: Person 2
You think I’m weird? Abnormal?
Also, do not for a second delude your stoic, deterministic self into thinking that it’s escaped my attention that you ignored the first rather confessional part of my email.
P1
From: Person 2
Subject: Don’t Be Such a Sadie
Date: Wed, Dec 8 2021, 13:25
To: Person 1
You know I love you.
Person 2