The Unbearable Intimacy of Being: Silence, Structure, and the Style of Normal People
This essay was originally posted on Substack.
My home in Palermo, Sicily on 35mm film.
In January 2020, I found myself living alone in Sicily, a place I had never been, unsure what I was looking for but certain I had to leave everything behind. My lease in Jersey City was gone. Most of my things had been sold. I'd called it a money-saving escape, but the truth had more to do with the weight I’d been carrying for months. A depressive episode had leveled me, and something in me hoped that if I changed my surroundings, I could outrun myself. I didn’t. But I did read Normal People.
I wasn’t looking for a book to ruin me, but Sally Rooney’s novel did exactly that. There was something uncanny about how much it understood me, or maybe how much it refused to comfort me. The writing felt like the inside of a quiet, unresolved conversation. It didn’t demand anything. It didn’t give easy answers. It simply sat with discomfort and let it stretch across the page.
“You’re not being told how to feel. You’re being given the space to feel it on your own terms, which somehow makes it worse.”
That tension—between what’s felt and what’s said, between what’s shared and what’s withheld—runs through every aspect of Rooney’s craft. Her choices in voice, structure, and language build an emotional landscape that doesn’t resolve or soothe. It unsettles. It lingers. And as a writer, that was the part that pulled me in: the way she manages to say so much by not saying things directly.
One of the first things I noticed was how little Rooney explains. There are no quotation marks around the dialogue. The characters often say things that mean something else entirely. Internal thoughts are presented without dramatic cues or emotional italics. It’s all delivered in a voice that stays just outside of commentary, even though it’s deeply intimate. That distance is doing something. Rooney has said, in an interview with Haley Cullingham, that she’s more interested in the moral space between people than in how someone feels alone. “I’m not so interested in feelings people go through on their own,” she says. “It’s more about what we do to each other, how we fail one another.” That moral interest shows up everywhere—in the dialogue that never quite connects, in the moments where a character chooses silence instead of clarity, and in the narrative’s refusal to name what’s happening.
The effect is emotional dissonance. You’re not being told how to feel. You’re being given the space to feel it on your own terms, which somehow makes it worse (and better). Jonathan Gibbs, in his essay on the novel, calls Rooney’s style “dangerous,” not because of its content, but because its polish can fool the reader into thinking the prose is simple. But that simplicity is a trick. The lack of emotional punctuation means you start doing the work yourself. You lean into the silences. You read into the gaps.
The structure of the novel works this way, too. It doesn’t unfold in a straight line. The chapters shift in time—weeks, months, sometimes years pass between scenes—and you’re never given the in-between. Instead, the narrative drops you into the aftermath, asking you to reconstruct the emotional terrain on your own. This feels less like storytelling and more like memory: disjointed, fragmented, vivid in parts and blurry in others. It captures how relationships actually feel, especially the ones that never quite stabilize. We don’t see Marianne and Connell growing steadily closer or drifting apart in a clean arc. We see them lose each other, find each other again, and misread the moment every time.
“I’m not so interested in feelings people go through on their own. It’s more about what we do to each other, how we fail one another.”
This kind of looping structure mirrors the inner life of people who can’t quite say what they need. And maybe that’s why Normal People hit me so hard when I was reading it alone, in a country where I didn’t speak the language fluently, trying to repair something inside myself that didn’t want to be named. I recognized myself in those elliptical conversations. In the sharp edges of silence. In the longing that never finds a clear direction.
Cintia Reyes C. writes about the emotional realism of Rooney’s characters—how they stumble through intimacy in a way that feels specific to people shaped by trauma, class, and the awkwardness of early adulthood. And she’s right. What makes these characters feel real is not just that they’re flawed, but that they’re unfinished. They don’t always learn the right lesson. They don’t always get better. Sometimes, they repeat the same patterns because they don’t know how to stop.
That emotional repetition is reinforced by Rooney’s use of close third-person narration. We’re inside Connell’s head, or Marianne’s, but never both at the same time. This single-minded perspective allows for misunderstandings to play out with excruciating clarity. The reader sees what’s gone unsaid—and watches helplessly as it derails them again and again. It’s an elegant kind of cruelty, but it’s also what makes the novel feel so intimate. We’re trapped in their consciousness, just as they’re trapped in their own.
Some critics have dismissed Rooney’s prose as flat. And it’s true—she doesn’t rely on lyrical flourishes. But that flatness is part of the form. It creates a neutral tone that allows emotion to surface in contrast, rather than through direct expression. In a world of over-explained fiction, where every feeling is cataloged and dissected, Rooney’s restraint is radical. When something does break through—a confession, a moment of vulnerability—it feels earned. The weight of it lands harder because we weren’t prepared.
Reading this novel during a time when I didn’t know what came next in my own life, I found comfort in its refusal to provide answers. Rooney doesn’t offer catharsis. She offers recognition. A mirror that doesn’t smooth over the cracks. And in that way, Normal People taught me something lasting about voice: that you don’t have to shout to be heard, and that a writer can create emotional depth by staying quiet at exactly the right moment.
The book ends without resolution, without triumph. Just two people, still trying, still uncertain. And that, somehow, felt like the most honest ending I’d ever read. Not a conclusion—just a continuation. A life that keeps unfolding, sentence by sentence, even after the page is closed.
References
Cullingham, Haley. “I’m Not So Interested in Feelings People Go Through on Their Own: An Interview with Sally Rooney.” Hazlitt, 4 Apr. 2019.
Gibbs, Jonathan. “Sally Rooney and the Brilliance of Normal People (and the Danger It Poses to the Novel Form).” Tiny Camels, 23 Sept. 2018.
Reyes C., Cintia. “Sally Rooney, Normal People, and the Complexities behind Teen Romances.” Medium, 5 Sept. 2021.
