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Rebecca Liu
Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

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There are only girls on the internet

Book Review

August 2022

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2022

I remember the first time I saw it, like a freshly alert hare alarmed by movement in the distant grasslands. It was 2013. Model...

Book Review

September 2020

Pankaj Mishra’s ‘Bland Fanatics’

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

September 2020

The Anglo-American commentariat is full of lofty egos. Pankaj Mishra has developed a reputation as their great deflater. ‘Watch...

Reading Sally Rooney’s second novel Normal People is a compulsive experience After the navy blue Faber & Faber proofs were sent out in early summer, a trickle of people began to post online about having finished it in a single day, often accompanied by tears of recognition and complicated nostalgia for their own early romantic experiences Rooney, the laureate of interpersonal miscommunication, clarifies its agonies in spare prose as the central characters miss each other’s meanings: the painful ambiguity of the ‘cool see you soon’ text; the prickliness of teenage vulnerability (‘Some people are even saying that he tried to add her on Facebook, which he didn’t and would never do’); and the small, specific tenderness of domestic intimacy: ‘He wipes crumbs out from under the toaster and she reads him jokes from Twitter’ The novel follows Connell and Marianne from their brief affair during their schooldays in Sligo – where he, a popular footballer, is too ashamed to be seen with her, the ‘weirdest’ girl in school – to their time at Trinity College Dublin, where Marianne – always wealthy, now beautiful and popular too – has the social upper hand Normal People is a love story in the truest sense, by which I mean a novel intimately concerned with the things two people can do to each other, and how much we each might want to hurt or be hurt   Observation is Rooney’s primary strength as a novelist, and Normal People, like her first novel, Conversations with Friends (2017), has been hailed for its portrayal of life as it is lived now The contemporary political landscape is internalised, digested and refracted out to the reader through the lives of the characters: international conflicts, abortion protests and war breaking out in Gaza and Syria all feature as footnotes to the relationship playing itself out in the text This primary plot is curiously trope-like, a fairytale reversal of fortune that draws on the characters’ socioeconomic circumstances and fits the pair into a narrative of false equivalences Connell is poor and popular, Marianne is rich and a social outcast; they go to

Contributor

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Contributor

August 2019

Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

Jia Tolentino’s ‘Trick Mirror’

Book Review

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2019

Talk about the fates of young professional women today and you will often alight on two themes: the anxieties that come with living in...

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feature

February 2011

Middle East protests give lie to Western orthodoxies

Emanuelle Degli Esposti

feature

February 2011

For thousands of individuals across the Arab world, 2011 has already become the year in which the political and...

fiction

January 2015

One Out of Two

Daniel Sada

TR. Katherine Silver

fiction

January 2015

Now, how to say it? One out of two, or two in one, or what? The Gamal sisters were...

Interview

October 2012

Interview with Sjón

Mary Hannity

Interview

October 2012

In Iceland, they eat puffin. The best-tasting puffin is soaked overnight in milk. ‘Then give the milk to the...

 

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