Sambhavi Gautam
Begin your new year with Marianne’s quiet rage by reading or watching Normal People: a study of female self-awareness and emotional labour laid bare. It is a story for women who think, feel, overanalyse, and still learn to choose themselves daily.
Intimacy Without Drama
What makes Normal People feel so close to the heart is that it refuses to dramatise life beyond reality. There are no grand plot twists, no cinematic villains—just conversations that almost happen in real life, silences that say too much, and relationships shaped by class, insecurity, and timing.
Sally Rooney writes about intimacy the way most people experience it. The writing is messy, uneven, and deeply shaped by what we don’t know how to say. The novel’s relevance lies in its honesty about emotional labour: how much effort it takes to be understood, and how easily that effort fails.
Marianne’s Quiet Agency
At the centre of this discomfort is Marianne Sheridan, a character who quietly reshaped how “female agency” is represented in contemporary fiction. Marianne is not aspirational in the glossy sense; instead, she is socially awkward, emotionally self-aware to the point of pain, and often makes choices that outsiders misread as weakness. Yet her agency lies precisely there. Unlike the male protagonist, she is acutely aware of herself and her body, and she feels she knows only that. She feels she does not know the world or life, yet she still makes choices—even when those choices hurt her.
“Marianne had the sense that her real life was happening somewhere very far away, happening without her.”
She names power dynamics—class privilege, emotional dependence, and sexual vulnerability—long before others do. Marianne doesn’t perform empowerment; she interrogates it. For many readers, especially women, she feels unsettling because she mirrors the reality of being intelligent and self-possessed, yet still deeply affected by how others treat you.
Gen Z Recognition
The Gen Z obsession with Normal People, both the novel and its screen adaptation, stems from this portrayal of emotional precision. Online discussions don’t revolve around plot as much as moments that feel painfully real: a look held too long, a text unsent, a relationship mislabelled. Gen Z readers see themselves in the ambiguous relationships without definitions, intimacy without certainty, and the constant negotiation between independence and connection. In an era shaped by therapy language, emotional self-awareness, and digital intimacy, Normal People feels less like fiction and more like a mirror held up to modern relationships.
The Language
Rooney’s language is central to this grip. Her prose is spare but exacting: short sentences, minimal description, and dialogue that carries emotional weight without explanation. She trusts the reader to sit with discomfort rather than resolve it. There’s a deliberate flatness to the narration that mirrors how people often experience life while they’re inside it—without dramatic cues, without clarity, without grandeur. This restraint is what makes the book so absorbing. You don’t read Normal People to escape reality; you read it to understand why reality feels the way it does.
Recognition as Narrative Closure
In the end, Normal People resonates because of what Marianne represents. Being “normal,” in her world, doesn’t mean being uncomplicated; it means living with contradiction. Marianne wants closeness yet fears dependence. She recognises her intelligence and worth, yet still absorbs the ways others diminish her. Reading the novel places you inside her relentless self-awareness, while watching the adaptation makes you feel her silences and withdrawn gestures. The mediums might differ, but the truth remains the same. Through Marianne, the story doesn’t offer solutions—it offers recognition. And for many women, that quiet validation is what makes Normal People linger long after it ends.
In short, Normal People doesn’t lead you out of the maze. It walks you through it, looping back through desire, silence, and self-doubt until you realise the confusion was never the point; recognition was.
