Comment | Sally Rooney’s new book is so anticipated that people were queuing up at night for it – What is the cause of the “cult”?

Tuesday the night before, many bookstores in New York were in the same mood as the last one in 2007 Harry Potter – when the book was published. The New York Times describesas the crowd counted down the seconds until the end of the day. Some were coming directly by Charli XCX from the gig.

Irish writer Sally Rooney33, a new novel Interlude appeared on Tuesday worldwide. It is perhaps the most anticipated book event of the fall.

Rooney has often been called the first great millennial author and even a literary unicorn, so rare is he: a celebrity author who writes fiction, whose works, especially other millennials, describe on social media and queue up in stores. We talk about the cult of Sally Rooney and how reading her books has become a status symbol.

Rooney is loved by the general reading public and critics alike, and of course there are those who love to hate him. What makes him so special?

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The novelty has even been called Rooney’s best, refined and yet confident weeper.

Rooney succeeds in two difficult tasks in his books at the same time: they can be read as touching descriptions of love and friendship, or they can be analyzed for literary references and social meanings.

The works are elegant and intelligent reading novels. They talk about politics, aesthetics and literature and reflect on life in the crisis-filled modern world. At the same time, they are romantic works that tell about people in financial difficulties, housing problems and emotional storms. They have skillfully depicted sex, witty conversations, and humor.

Due to the intertwining of human relations and sociality, Rooney has been compared to, for example to Jane Austen.

Of course, Rooney’s age is also relevant: he is considered the voice of his generation.

Autofiction in the promised time, Rooney categorically denies that he writes on any level about his own life or his own experiences. It feels refreshing.

“I have never consciously drawn from something that I myself have experienced or felt when I have written about the emotional experience of any of my characters,” he says in a recent The New York Times in the interview.

Instead, Rooney says in the same interview that when he came up with another main character for his new book, he wrote the first page of the book almost from that sitting, and it didn’t really change during the process.

Although he emphasizes that writing is work, it is as if he is channeling his realistic characters from some other reality. It makes writing feel fascinating.

As a person, Rooney doesn’t particularly want to be featured (I’m so uninteresting, he says), but he also takes a stand. He has defended Gaza and abortion rights in Ireland. He has talked about how he wants to bring the themes of class and capital distribution into his books. It speaks to many modern readers.

Rooney’s from the first one Conversations between friends -book I also remembered the extraordinary and harsh description of a woman’s endometriosis pains during menstruation. Such experiences of women have rarely been brought up.

Right however, literary merit alone did not make Sally Rooney a superstar.

Actually blew up the pot Normal people TV series made from the book. It was shown during the pandemic, when people were hungry for something to watch. Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar-Jones did amazing roles, and sex and consent have probably never been portrayed like that before finely. After this, Rooney’s first child was also made into a TV series.

Rooney’s third novel Beautiful world where you are root out the superficiality of the literary world and the curses of success. It has not been described, and perhaps that is also why the book has been overshadowed by its predecessors.

The newest, fourth book has already received exceptionally high praise around the world. In the intermezzo the focus is on male characters for the first time for Rooney: two brothers who mourn their dead father and who both have a big age difference in their relationship.

The novelty has even been called Rooney’s best, refined and yet confident weeper. I can’t wait to read it.

If there’s not just a cult in the ratings, Rooney really seems to be a unicorn.