Influenced is an interview series featuring authors talking about the works that influenced them.

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Thick Skin, where authors talk about negative reviews, from both critics and readers

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Episode XVII: "The enforced happy ending can't always successfully disguise"

Published 8/1/17
In this installment, Sally Rooney talks about Belle & Sebastian, earnest irony, traditional romantic setups, ambiguity & more.

Today I'm with the Sally Rooney, whose debut CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS recently came out from Faber & Faber, and Hogarth here in the US. The book is as unclassifiable as the relationships that fill it, it's a Bildungsroman or maybe an anti-Bildungsroman, a formal dramatic tragedy or perhaps just a subversion of the form. I think of when the protagonist Frances loses her virginity to a married man she's to have an affair with, and says "The inside of my body was hot like oil." At the end of the book, on a call with him, unsure of how to think or act, she says "the screen felt hot and a little oily." Whether this is to say she'll never escape her desire, or that she now knows how to better handle it, or if it means nothing at all—it's not clear in a wonderful way, and indicative of the rest of the book; the characters' flaws, especially Frances', are so realistic and nuanced they seem to have never been a conscious decision of the author.

A more accurate description of Frances' coming-to might be that she abandons living in poetry to living in prose (something mirrored by the character's writing medium of choice). Similarly, at some point in the novel, maybe about two-thirds of the way, it's as if the background music has been turned off. For this interview, you've chosen to talk about Belle and Sebastian's second album, If You're Feeling Sinister. I associate that band with coming to college and being introduced to all sorts of music and understanding that what I previously listened to sucked. So: How are you? When did you first hear the album?

I'm good, thanks! I knew you would ask when I first heard the album, and the answer is: I don't know. I actually don't know if I was still in school at the time or if I was in college or what. That's often the way with me and works of art that I love—they seem to creep into my life by stealth. Or it seems like they've always been there. 

Well where and when were you when you imagine the youngest time you can think of listening to it?

I definitely was listening to Belle & Sebastian when I was in school. I vividly remember listening to the song "If She Wants Me" from Dear Catastrophe Waitress when I was in an airport outside Paris at the age of sixteen or seventeen. I even remember the green skirt I was wearing that day! But as for listening to If You're Feeling Sinister the whole way through? Probably in college at some point. 

Though this is probably trite to say, it now feels weird to me that I ever didn't know these songs. 

What was your experience listening to this album, and music in general in your college days? Was it more of a social or personal experience?

It was more personal, at least at first. I made friends in college, but my experiences of music (and books and film) were mostly fairly private. It was an intense time for me, because like most students I was still in my teens and I'd just moved away from home for the first time, and I was suddenly finding all these cultural things that I connected with. Later those things would become a more social part of my life, which is probably equally important if not more so. 

It had been a while since I listened to them last, and yesterday when I did I was struck by the discord of how earnestly sad or at least heartfelt the music is (and the lyrics too) and then the occasional ironic distance of the lyrics, and the names of songs. It's like there's a switch they flip, and they are either posing ironically or not at all, and this I think connects to your own writing. When do you think in your life your (very strong) sense of irony emerged? Do you think it has anything to do with you finding their music influential?

I think my sense of irony is actually pretty earnest, in the sense that I find most things extremely funny. I mean, I don't laugh at human suffering, but everything short of suffering is funny to me. Over-seriousness amuses me, and high emotional melodrama really amuses me, especially my own. In that sense the irony isn't really a pose, although of course it has that effect too. I don't know whether that's the influence of Belle & Sebastian, or whether it's what drew me to their music to begin with—their lyrics are actually very humorous, while also spooky and sad. I guess influence always works in that circular way. 

I did often find myself stopping when characters laughed in the novel—maybe it's a cultural divide, or a social disparity, of how often people I know audibly laugh. It seemed like, despite how much the characters went through, they were always happy at the very bottom of their souls. I'm sure many people would disagree, perhaps you as well, but I find that same optimism buried in Belle & Sebastian too. Are you one to listen to music that fits your current mood or your aspirational mood? What mood is most likely to bring you to listen to them?

That's interesting to hear! I think the characters probably laugh too much in a technical literary sense, but when I'm among a group of friends I feel like I laugh the entire time without stopping, and it was hard to represent that sort of "group mood" without endlessly reiterating the word "laughter". Maybe I'm an unbelievably raucous person. But does laughter represent happiness, either in the book or in life? I don't know. I think it's possible to find things funny out of a sense of utter powerlessness or absurdity. But I also think laughing at someone's jokes is a way of signaling that you see the world the same way they do, that the strangeness of the world strikes you in the same way, and in that sense it can be a very intimate thing. I think Frances says at one point she is easily seduced by people who laugh at her jokes. 

I agree that an honest laugh makes someone more kindred that any stated sentiment can, makes the world out as some insane place and one you also belong in. It's funny you talk about intimacy, because that is the thing that is suffused throughout the whole book, and I hadn't really thought about it once, probably because it's so prevalent. I think achieving true intimacy (the easy sort) in literary form is something terribly hard to do, and many writers, even great ones, fail to convey as much. I also think it comes from consuming art that shows you how easy a thing intimacy can be, like Belle & Sebastian. Do you think they've actively influenced you in this way?

Yes, I think so. I sometimes listen back to Belle & Sebastian songs and think "oh, that's where I got that idea". Their songs often have vaguely implied plots that revolve around ambiguous relationship dynamics, and I'm kind of working in that general area too. I also think it's basically acceptable to steal a plot from a song? Am I right about that, do you think? I have a short story called "Mr Salary", and I originally just stole the plot from the song "Sukie in the Graveyard". The plot changed so much throughout the drafting process that it's no longer recognisable, but the protagonist is still called Sukie. 

There's no such thing as cross-medium plagiarism I think. Anyhow there's recently been an influx of terrible films based on works of art. I can't believe I didn't see the connection of ambiguous relationships. It makes me wonder whether you, by a similar token, are repulsed by works of art that play off traditional romantic setups, or help bolster them further?

That's true. I was surprised by the extent to which the plot of the film "Baby Driver" is drawn directly from the lyrics of the song "Baby Driver"—itself fairly slight on the plot front. But the characters in Belle & Sebastian songs are, it seems to me, always trying to negotiate their tangled intimate relationships. What's going on in "Seeing Other People"? Are the characters schoolchildren or what? There's some sort of weird manipulation going on between them, I think, but somehow the song is funny too.

As for traditional romantic setups, that depends what you mean by traditional. Some people would say that a young inexperienced woman having an affair with a good-looking married man is a pretty traditional setup for a book.

Ha. It is, isn't it? I guess what's unique to Frances and Nick is their power structure—who has what and who needs it, who uses their power to get what they want, who is more honest with themselves. In short, it's complicated, like Belle & Sebastian songs—and, of course, real life. I'm talking about wide release movies with happy endings. Are you capable of extracting joy from them?

Often there are a lot of interesting moments for me in those big, mainstream films. Even works of art that go out of their way to propagandise for the status quo are often not able to achieve it completely. They end up accidentally producing these moments of uncertainty or ambivalence, where the characters' feelings and desires aren't containable by the intended shape of the narrative, and the enforced happy ending can't always successfully disguise that. That's a very interesting thing, I think! At least for me.

I don't want to put you under pressure but do you have an example of that?

Haha! I should have one, shouldn't I? I guess the classic generic example is queer subtext—when narratives set up a relationship between two same-sex characters that takes on a momentum and intensity the viewers can sense, and that no compulsory heterosexual ending can quite erase. Lots of contemporary superhero films have these moments of unruly sexuality I think, which are then sublimated through punitive violence and exaggerated gender conformity.

Yes, that is so interesting and so true. I think what a movie is always trying to consciously convince the audience of, but what is always false (and literature skirts this a bit better, just by the medium itself), is desire. Once sprung it doesn't easily go away, which probably explains the lion's share of human romantic problems, and also why, as you say, in movies, "characters' feelings and desires aren't containable by the intended shape of the narrative." But music has it so much easier, doesn't it? Because the lyrics might be fiction by the sentiment is never (in good music, anyways). You can feel free to evade this question or pass on it completely, but there were so many parts of the novel where the desire felt too real not to be (and there was such a realistic arc too), that I felt this must be a true story wrapped in fake names, places, events, and anything else. Did you feel in any way like you writing a song you knew the melody too, just needed to properly fictionalize it?

I do sometimes think music has it easier in this regard, yes. Because in a pop song, there's usually just the dynamic between the singer and the object, crystallised at one particular moment, and hanging suspended there in the melody. If there is any narrative, it's only like a movement of light to catch and illuminate certain complexities. In a song there's no need for change or development; no one feels like the song has failed if the uncertainties are unresolved by the ending. And at times all I really wanted to do in the book was to crystallise the relationships as accurately as I could, between Frances and Nick, between Bobbi and Frances, and so on. But to do that in the form of a novel, I needed all the scaffolding of plot and setting and everything to make it work for the reader. Otherwise it would fail artistically. And indeed some people do feel Frances doesn't learn enough during the book. 

Yes, I don't think she learns, per se, but just in the way no one learns. (This is why it felt like a classic tragedy, I think, but gradually felt like it was diverting from that path.) I do want to ask about the ending—meaning “spoiler waring” for those reading—and your decision to have Frances tell Nick to pick her up again. It almost felt like using the chorus to outro the song. I think if you had any worry of Frances not changing, this wouldn't have been the ending. But it was. Was it originally written this way? Did you have any thoughts about having it end differently?

No, it was not originally written that way! It ended in a number of different ways through different drafts. It was only when I wrote the closing lines of what is now the final scene that I knew I had finished writing the novel. Personally I do think Frances learns a lot, she just doesn't learn what people want her to. The classic adultery narrative is of course to have the woman die horribly at the end, usually by suicide. So anything less than that was probably going to leave certain readers feeling Frances had gotten off lightly. But I think she starts the book not wanting to let anyone past her defences at all, and she ends up a very different person. Maybe for some people she's actually become a worse person. But that's still character development, of a kind.

We're nearly out of time, and so I'll let you go after one more. There is a (minor) obsession, more so as the book progresses, of morality (Frances' ruminations about whether she is a "not nice" person). This is something that literature is concerned with but songs much less often; any clear crystallization of a properly complex situation will render morality useless. In this way I think CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS is more of a song than a novel. Yes, Frances changes, but it feels more like a shedding than anything else, and at the end we feel like we're finally getting this person as she's meant to be. Was this a process of writing the story, you think, and finding her yourself? Or did you know the character you'd end up with when you started?

The question of morality is one I could spend a lot of time on! I agree that ethical concerns become trickier and trickier the more complex a situation is revealed to be, but I don't think they're ever rendered wholly useless. The use of power requires an ethical response, even if specific forms of power can be very hard to locate sometimes. Frances is pretty concerned about being a good person, but her political ideals are far more thoroughly developed than her personal ones, maybe because she's never had to navigate complicated adult relationships before. She doesn't necessarily have the ethical vocabulary to handle them, and she tries to map them onto familiar political categories, with varying levels of success. In the course of the book I think she comes to understand herself in a less individualistic and more relational way. But my answer here is inevitably shaped by the fact that I actually like Frances, which many readers don't! I root for her happiness. Maybe that makes me a person of dubious morals, or maybe I just root for happiness indiscriminately.

This has been wonderful Sally, thanks so much for your time and words.

Thank you!