For a book that is called Conversations with Friends, the characters sure knew to not have any of the needed ones. Don't take me wrong, I loved the writing and the dialogues. I get why Rooney chose this title, and it surely makes sense. There were conversations with friends. Many, actually. And it was the naturality as well as the realistic aspect that conversations nowadays never truly end that made me eagerly continue to read it. However, in the end, I wasn't sure anymore how realistic they truly are - or if it was Rooney's talent of writing that made them appear so.

This book is being marketed as the book for millenials. For female millenials. A category in which I find myself to be. Rooney is the voice of Generation Y. A generation I belong to. With all the talk and hype around this debut novel, I was expecting it to deliver what everyone said it would: a sense of what it means to be young.

I don't want to say, it didn't. That's not the case. Its core message definitely resonated with me, and kept me thinking. It was more the plot Rooney decided to use for these messages that felt so distanced and unreal that I often wondered, how this voice could say something affecting a full generation? If we can actually speak of a plot...

The story is very character-driven, and reads itself like a stream of events, feelings, conversations, and memories. It is a book that fully lives through the characters' relationships, and it's the relationships that carry the book.

A ménage-à-quatre it is - with former lovers and now best friends Frances and Bobbi, and the ten-ish years older married couple Melissa and Nick. Met at a Spoken-Word-Event where Frances and Bobbi perform texts of the former, Melissa showed interest in the duo. This lead to a rather interesting constellation as the friends arrived for dinner at the journalist's place, where her husband and actor Nick joined them as well. No matter how you looked at these four people, each individual pairing had their interesting and very emotional aspect to it. What started as friendly dinner invitations and ... (yes!) conversations, became very soon a complex and intertwined construct, added with a longing for the other, power, and vulnerability.

It was this specific constellation of these four people, just as their individuel relationships to each other, that I found interesting enough to binge this book. Their thoughts, their actions, and their feelings felt as real as they felt distant. I thought I could understand them, and whenever I couldn't, I came to learn to do so. (I don't necessarily see myself as a person with too high morals, and while I can understand many people's shock of Frances' actions, I also knew that the possibility for such things to happen is higher and more often more innocent than one lets them to believe.)

And as much as their relationships made the story what it was, and made me unable of putting the book down, I just couldn't connect to any of the characters. It wasn't the lack of reality, but more how far away they seemed to be of anything that I knew. It was as if every character stood on a pedestal, attributed with this presence of being special and different that made it hard for me to connect to them, or even like them. While I sense the irony behind this, since Frances (the protagonist and narrator of the novel) gets accused to do just that - think of people she likes as something special -, I couldn't agree that this degree of specialty exists. Who doesn't praise people they love? Or see them as better versions than they actually are? I, for my part, very much like to do so, and understand why Frances does. But this only led to create a bigger distance between the characters and me.

Despite all of this, I still can sense why this novel might have been a dealbreaker. Despite the distance I felt towards the characters and some of their conversations, I still sensed this specfic longing that many of my peers, me included, feel. Despite the fact that I missed an actual plot with a beginning, a climax and ending point, I could still understand why Rooney went for this. Because after all, we all live a life depending on individual decisions and events, where one things leads us to the other, one conversations is more meaningful than the other, and no ending or point of satisfactions is in sight. Even if I couldn't relate to Frances as the narrator of the story (who to some degree had too many tropes as attributions to her personality), I could relate to one thing. It's hard to find out what one wants, to find one's place, and to plan out a future in a present so overwhelming.

This is definitely a book that gives as much as it doesn't. And I guess that's what life does, too.
One can find themselves enjoying the story, and one can find them being bored. One can answer the questions place throughout the book, another might add some couple more.

One thing this book is. A long conversation of its own that leads to ask "what is a conversation?".

And honestly, what is it?

Actual rating: 3,5 stars