Conversations with friends

Wow, Sally Rooney. Just wow.

I considered leaving this post at that, but then you really would be none the wiser, so I let my thoughts settle for a moment. So I read Conversations with Friends, Sally Rooney's first novel. This was one of those novels that I came to live with, of which I read a chapter each day, no more no less, to keep it in my mind but not to rush through it. And then today I finished it in one go.
I loved Normal People, but I love this novel even more. I can see elements from Normal People in this novel, characteristics, events, plot devices. It almost feels as if the two protagonists from Normal People, Connell and Marianne, together make up the protagonist of this novel, Frances. Partly because Frances is so much more complex than they are, and partly because she has so many sides to her personality that they hardly fit in one person. But in a good way.
So, what's it about? Well, the title mentions conversations with friends, and Frances has a lot of conversations with her one friend, Bobbi, but we never really get to read those conversations. They're about politics or feminism or capitalism or something like that, but those are described in one sentence; then we talked a lot about [insert something]. The conversations they do have are not really about something concrete, but they are very realistic. This is how people actually talk.
Frances and Bobbi have been friends since secondary school, which is also when they were lovers. Bobbi broke up with Frances, but they remained friends and now perform spoken word together. Through this, they meet Melissa and her husband Nick and they become friends.  Frances and Bobbi are still students in their early twenties, whereas Nick and Melissa are early and mid thirties. Melissa is a wealthy writer, Nick is a somewhat failed actor. They make an unlikely combination with the communist students, but it works. After a while, Frances and Nick start an affair. It is unclear whether Bobbi and Melissa also have an affair; the novel is written in the first person and Frances looks up to Bobbi too much to ask her directly about that kind of thing, but it is implied that they do.
We soon discover that Frances comes from a difficult home situation, which has taught her to keep her emotions under control. The conversations that the title alludes to felt to me more like the conversations she has in her head with herself, about behaving and thinking and feeling the way she should, the way people will like here. Things start to spiral out of control when Frances and Nick both are unable to confess that they actually feel more for each other than they are supposed to.
I won't give away too much, but the last couple of pages I almost held my breath. In Normal People the ending spoiled it for me, but here it is perfect. It contains the same doubt, the swinging between emotions and outcomes, which is portrayed so realistically throughout the whole novel These are characters I felt I really knew, and I rooted for them all the way through.
There's lots more to the novel, again the class and gender boundaries, the dialogue is written without quotation marks, but it's all extra. The core of this novel is a beautiful, gripping story about a very interesting set of characters.