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ellemaddy 's review for:

Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney
3.0

Conversation with friends is often hilarious, unbelievably real, and unpleasant to read.
Everyone in this book are horrible. Frances, Bobbi, Nick, Melissa, literally every single one of their friends, they're all toxic. BUT I feel like their terribleness have nuances which makes them feel realistic in a way. People DO shitty things in real life too after all, and sometimes they just do be needin' therapy.
There's no way to justify the things that the characters did in this book, they were extremely mean to one another and they were never honest which created all of these unnecessary drama and problems which is so true to life! Because hashtag feelings and being open and vulnerable to people is a scary thing to do. So even though I found it unpleasant to read sometimes and the things that the characters did left a bad taste in my mouth, I can still appreciate Sally Rooney's writing and how she managed to make these characters feel so three dimensional with their own set of unique and complex personalities.
However, due to how realistic the characters and the situations felt, this book has got me emotionally exhausted. It's tiring to be inside Frances' stream of consciousness all the time, because the things that she's thinking about? She's just like me for real. I just was so depleted by the end of this book, it's like my social energy was drained after meeting a bunch of really emotionally exhaustive people.

There were some quotes I'm just gonna throw down here because they were hashtag relatable and sort of funny:


You underestimate your own power so you don't have to blame yourself for treating other people badly. You tell yourself stories about it. Oh well, Bobbi's rich, Nick's a man, I can't hurt these people. If anything they're out to hurt me and I'm defending myself.

Sometimes when I was doing something dull, like walking home from work or hanging up laundry, I liked to imagine that I looked like Bobbi. She had better posture than I did, and a memorable beautiful face. The pretense was so real to me that when I accidentally caught sight of my reflection and saw my own appearance, I felt a strange, depersonalizing shock.

I sat starting at my laptop screen until it went black. Things matter to me more than they do to normal people, I thought. I need to relax and let things go. I should experiment with drugs. These thoughts were not unusual for me.

-as if I also was an important person with lots of admirers like he was, as if there was nothing inferior about me. But the acclaim also felt like part of the performance itself, the best part, and the most pure expression of what I was trying to do, which was to make myself into this kind of person: someone worthy of praise, worthy of love.

I'm bettering myself, I thought. I'm going to become so smart that no one will understand me.

I thought bitterly: he has all the power and I have none. This wasn't exactly true, but that night it was clear to me for the first time how badly I'd underestimated my vulnerability. I'd lied to everyone, to Melissa, even to Bobbi, just so I could be with Nick. I had left myself no one to confide in, no one who would feel any sympathy for what I'd done. And after all that, he was in love with someone else. I screwed my eyes shut and pressed my head down hard into the pillow. I thought of the night before, when he told me that he wanted me, how it felt then. Just admit it, I thought. He doesn't love you. That's what hurts.

Was I kind to others? It was hard to nail down an answer. I worried that if I did turn out to have a personality, it would be one of the unkind ones. Did I only worry about this question because as a women I felt required to put the needs of others before my own? Was 'kindness' just another term for submission in the face of conflict? These were the kind of things I wrote about in my diary as a teenager: as a feminist I have the right not to love anyone.

Now I was afraid that Nick was right: I isolated myself from criticism so I could behave badly without losing my sense of righteousness.

Sometimes I find myself thinking: if I’m so awful, why doesn’t he leave me? And I know what kind of person has those thoughts about their own spouse. The kind of person who later murders their spouse, probably. I wouldn’t murder Nick but it’s important for you to know that if I tried, he would absolutely go with it. Even if he figured out that I was planning his murder he wouldn’t bring it up in case it upset me. I’ve become so used to seeing him as pathetic & even contemptible that I forgot anybody else could love him. Other women have always lost interest once they got to know him. But not you. You love him, don’t you?

Who even gets married? said Bobbi. It’s sinister. Who wants state apparatuses sustaining their relationship?
I don’t know. What is ours sustained by?
That’s it! That’s exactly what I mean. Nothing. Do I call myself your girlfriend? No. Calling myself your girlfriend would be imposing some prefabricated cultural dynamic on us that’s outside our control. You know?