On Tuesday, Sally Rooney will publish her fourth novel, Intermezzo, with Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Each Rooney novel since her 2017 debut, Conversations with Friends, has caused a frenzy in the literary world. Normal People (2018) put her on the literary and pop-culture maps, selling more than a million copies and spawning the TV series that made stars out of Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal. (“I don’t want to be the center of attention like that ever again,” she told The Guardian in a recent interview.)
Most recently, the discussion over Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021) focused overwhelmingly on promotional merch. There was a tote bag, an umbrella, and a lemon-yellow bucket hat, all of which became status items. The latter drove people particularly crazy. Some coveted it; others mocked it; most posted about it on social media. Rooney’s writing itself got sidelined.
