“Reading this novel,” Sally Rooney wrote in her introduction to Natalia Ginzburg’s All Our Yesterdays, “we get to know its characters as if they were our own friends, or even ourselves. Many of them are trying hard in various ways to figure out what is right and resist what is wrong … These are not people born with special moral qualities,” she goes on, “people who find it easy to be brave and honorable. We know them: we know quite well that they are just as irritable and selfish and lazy as we are.”
I share Rooney’s love of Ginzburg, and it was this shared love that led me to Rooney’s novels, which I had erroneously believed were for zoomers, not boomers like me. In reading her, I soon found that what Rooney observes about Ginzburg, one of the 20th century’s greatest writers, might easily be said of Rooney’s own work, even if their contexts—Ginzburg’s wartime and postwar Italy; Rooney’s post-capitalist, post-feminist Ireland—seem eons apart.
