Set in Dublin during financial crisis in 2008, Conversations with Friends is written by Irish author Sally Rooney, who also wrote Normal People.

Everyone’s always going through something, aren’t they?

Conversations with Friends is a meandering story focussed largely around Francis and her relationships with the people around her. Francis is a mass of contradictions. Intelligent, ironic, fragile, nervous and terrified of showing her vulnerability to others.

I realised my life would be full of mundane physical suffering, and that there was nothing special about it. Suffering wouldn’t make me special, and pretending not to suffer wouldn’t make me special. Talking about it, or even writing about it, would not transform the suffering into something useful.

Bobbi is a pragmatic lesbian who goes to university with Francis. She and Francis were lovers for two years and remain friends, performing spoken work poetry together. 

The acclaim also felt like part of the performance itself, the best part, and the most pure expression of what I was trying to do, which was to make myself into this kind of person: someone worthy of praise, worthy of love.

After one performance Francis and Bobbi meet Melissa, a photographer and essayist a decade older. She wants to profile them for a magazine and they go to her house where they meet her husband, Nick an actor. Francis begins an elicit and toxic affair with Nick in which their need to feel wanted by each other seems to become necessary in order to feel anything about themselves. 

I was like an empty cup, which Nick has emptied out, and now I had to look at what has spilled out of me: all my delusional beliefs about my own value and pretensions to being a kind of person I wasn’t. When I was full of these things I couldn’t see them. Now that I was nothing, only an empty glass, I could see everything about myself.

The novel tracks the next seven months and the relationships between these four individuals, though largely it is Francis’s relationships with Bobbi and Nick that take centre stage. 

He was the first person I had met since Bobbi who made me enjoy conversation, in the same irrational and sensuous way I enjoyed coffee or loud music.’

Conversations with Friends is a very human book about poor choices, identity formation, sexuality, desire, and power dynamics.