Normal People Study Guide

Sally Rooney was born in 1991 in County Mayo, Ireland, where she grew up with her parents and two siblings. She eventually attended Trinity College in Dublin and was named a scholar in 2011, thus securing what’s considered Ireland’s most prestigious award for undergraduates. She was on the debate team during her time at Trinity and won the European University Debating Championships in 2013—an experience she wrote about in an essay called “Even If You Beat Me,” which captured the attention of her future agent, who later sold her debut novel, Conversations with Friends. After the novel’s publication in 2017, Rooney started writing more about two characters from a short story she published in 2016. These explorations turned into Normal People, which was published in 2018 and adapted into a television series by Hulu and the BBC in 2020. Rooney published her third novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, in 2021. She has been hailed as the foremost “millennial novelist,” though some critics note that the hype surrounding Rooney’s writing tends to prevent people from seeing the actual nuance and complexity of her work. Rooney herself has voiced misgivings about her own fame.

Because Normal People focuses so heavily on the intricacies and nuances of Connell and Marianne’s romantic relationship, it doesn’t necessarily dwell on many historical events. The novel does, however, mention the economic crisis that Ireland experienced in 2008, since Jamie—one of Marianne’s college boyfriends—comes from a family involved in the banking scandals that impacted the economic downturn. Although there were some different factors at play in each country, the financial and social impact of Ireland’s economic crisis was similar to the impact of the recession that took place in the United States during the same period. Both countries, for instance, saw bank bailouts that sparked massive protests. Of course, the specifics of Ireland’s financial crisis don’t necessarily work their way into Normal People, but the general awareness surrounding economic disparity that the crisis created ultimately serves as an appropriate backdrop for Connell’s experience as a working-class student attending university alongside wealthy, privileged students. 

Normal People has some similarities with Rooney’s first novel, Conversations with Friends, at least insofar as both books explore an on-off romantic relationship. For that matter, all three of Rooney’s novels, including Beautiful World, Where Are You, consider what it means to have power, whether that power has to do with some kind of relational dynamic or with fame. Because Rooney became so famous at such a young age, her fame often eclipses her actual work, as reviewers and booksellers tend to use her books as a reference point for almost any kind of contemporary, realist fiction that explores present-day life. In reality, though, Normal People has a lot in common with 19th-century novels of manners, which were books that dissect and explore the conventions of a given society, examining the relationships and everyday lives of people living in certain social environments. In Normal People, Connell even becomes infatuated with Jane Austen’s Emma, a novel of manners (or, perhaps more accurately, a comedy of manners) that focuses on the relationships between people living in a small fictional town in England. In terms of a more contemporary comparison, though, there’s an argument to be made that Normal People shares some similarities with André Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name, since both books feature complex romantic relationships and illustrate just how hard it can be to communicate clearly when experiencing a burning sense of passion.