I surely should read more of this.

"Rooney’s heroines are, without fail, always the smartest people in the room. They are also pretentious, priggish, self-absorbed and superior, condescending and driven by insecurity. They put me in mind, occasionally, of people I remember from university, those students who hung around outside the union on election day, shouting, 'Apathy led to the rise of Hitler!' at politically disengaged students as they passed. 

Their cleverness is mocking and, to casual readers, one imagines, vaguely threatening: typical responses to young, smart women that have been deflected on to Rooney herself. She was 27 when Normal People was published and her experience of being in the spotlight is worked into the new novel through Alice who, after writing two successful novels, has fled to a remote house in rural Ireland. 'When I submitted the first book, I just wanted to make enough money to finish the next one,' writes Alice in an email to Eileen. 'I never advertised myself as a psychologically robust person, capable of withstanding extensive public inquiries into my personality and upbringing.' Literary fame, Alice writes, has been so thoroughly unpleasant and unnerving that, in her opinion, 'people who intentionally become famous – I mean people who, after a little taste of fame, want more and more of it – are, and I honestly believe this, deeply psychologically ill.' 

"If you don’t want to read novels about writers, or women, or Irish people, don’t read my novels. I won’t mind." 

Rooney is at pains to point out she’s not Alice. 'I have no appetite for writing about myself and things that have actually happened to me,' she says, instead casting her experiences as a 'mental library' she may draw from when creating her fiction. This seems a complicated way of preserving her privacy, but in any case, as it turns out, Alice’s horror of the publicity process is one Rooney wholeheartedly shares. I mention that I recalled her saying it would be graceless to complain about fame, and she’ll have none of it. 'I don’t remember saying that. And actually, I don’t think that at all.' Quite the opposite, in fact. 'As far as I can make out, the way that celebrity works in our present cultural moment is that particular people enter very rapidly, with little or no preparation, into public life, becoming objects of widespread public discourse, debate and critique.' It’s irrelevant whether or not fame was part of their plan. 'They just randomly happen to be skilled or gifted in some particular way, and it’s in the interests of profit-driven industries to exploit those gifts and to turn the gifted person into a kind of commodity.'”  

~ Emma Brockes

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/aug/28/sally-rooney-hell-of-fame-normal-people