Sally Rooney and the Problem of "Lady" Authorship

I’m far from the first person to read Sally Rooney’s new novel (not even so new since a month is eternal by Interweb standards), Intermezzo. Hot takes abound. I won’t link to all the pieces so as not to overwhelm you and because Delia Cai has already done a lovely job of this already.

As all the different folks unspooled their Intermezzo theories, as usual with Rooney, attention quickly moved from the book to the author—the book’s feverish reception was the Taylor Swift Eras tour of the literary world. 

But no matter how many times Rooney patiently explains that her characters are not her, nobody wants to hear it. In this New York Times interview, for instance, right after Rooney has just said, “I’m aware that people think that my work is heavily autobiographical, and in fact, it isn’t,” the interviewer comes back with: “‘Intermezzo’ is undergirded by grief—Peter and Ivan have lost their father. I was curious about your experience of grief. Were you writing from personal reflection? And if you weren’t, was it difficult to write into a feeling so deep that you had not experienced?”

What the actual eff?

First of all, Rooney has just told him that she was not writing from personal reflection, but also how many man novelists are asked whether it’s essentially too hard for them to invent characters and create feelings for them that they may not have experienced themselves?

Rooney responds with more patience than we might expect: “That’s a fair question, but I’ve never been conscious, in writing about any emotional experience that any of my characters have had, of drawing on something that I have felt or known in my own life.” But it’s not a fair question. Not when she has just told him otherwise, and when it seems that he finds it impossible to imagine that Rooney has…made stuff up, which is literally what she does for a living.

Because fiction.

The interviewer also poses this question, “I know you try not to pay attention to the discourse around you, but people have said ‘first great millennial novelist’ or ‘Salinger for the Snapchat generation.’ I’m curious if you think about your youth in relation to your work.”

When prompted to go into her response to this question more later in the interview, Rooney concludes:

“I suppose that the role afforded to young women in the culture tends to be very image-focused and less intellectual. The young women who are given the most prominent roles in our mainstream culture tend to be not political figures and not public intellectuals and not critics or commentators. That’s maybe the space that I’m trying to work within, and maybe I’m not legible within that space. I sometimes feel people want to read me as something closer to a kind of celebrity figure, because that’s the way in which we’re used to reading the image of a young woman.”

She certainly doesn’t seem to be legible to this interviewer.

This whole scenario reminds me of when Chris Kraus refers to the Chris Kraus character in I Love Dick as a writer, “hovering onstage between the poet-men, presenters of ideas, and actress-women, presenters of themselves.” So, two things here: one, even in a piece of autofiction such as I Love Dick, it’s important to see that there’s no Chris Kraus but only the Chris Kraus character; two, this quote parses so well Rooney’s conundrum: why does she keep being viewed as presenting herself when she’s trying to present her ideas?

Because she’s a “lady” author.

But, see, Rooney doesn’t want to be the one presented; she wants to be the presenter, the author. She doesn’t want to be shaped by the world’s opinions but rather shape the world.  

Of Beautiful World, Where Are You, Rooney has shared, “I hope I don’t regret saying this, but I think that is why I had to write this book…Because my life had become so dominated for a time by the success of my previous two.” Because of the obsession with Rooney herself, and because the two main characters—the famous writer Alice and the published-a-single-essay Eileen—send emails to each other throughout Beautiful World, Where Are You, I read Alice and Eileen’s back-and-forth as a sort of platonic dialogue between the different sides of an author. It almost seems as though Eileen is the path Alice could have taken if she’d kept her work to herself, pure and practically unpublished.

In other words, if Alice were Eileen, she wouldn’t be lamenting to her: “I never advertised myself as a psychologically robust person, capable of withstanding extensive public inquiries into my personality and upbringing…What is the relationship of the famous author to their famous books anyway?” Alice realizes that all this rigamarole, “serves to arrange literary discourse entirely around the domineering figure of ‘the author’, whose lifestyle and idiosyncrasies must be picked over in lurid detail for no reason.”

Bourdieu calls these tendencies to assume the character is the writer “complacent and naive projections,” insisting instead that readers should “perceive an enterprise of objectification of the self, of autoanalysis.” And in “The Death of the Author,” Barthes bemoans how, “the image of literature to be found in contemporary culture is tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his history, his tastes, his passions.”

Of course, Barthes’s inability to imagine the “author” with a different pronoun is also part of the problem.

Since Eileen was approached by a literary agent after publishing that one essay, in some ways Rooney’s philosophical gambit in Beautiful World is to dramatize two paths an author’s life could take, one which it did take for Alice, and one which it could have taken if she’d deleted her own initial agent email, as Eileen ends up doing. In the Eileen authorial scenario, writing remains protected, the province of private journals Eileen tells Alice about, a daily accounting of the precious little things: “Dry upturned sycamore leaves scuttling like claws along the South Circular Road. The artificial buttered taste of popcorn in the cinema. Pale-yellow sky in the evening, Thomas Street draped in mist…People’s faces, the weather, traffic. The smell of petrol from the garage, the feeling of being rained on.” 

So, Rooney does reflect on authorship directly in Beautiful World, Where Are You, but this novel still shouldn't be read as Rooney’s own diary entries. Fiction (and writing in general, including memoir) involves an art, a creation, a manipulating of invented characters. It still seems hard for many critics to imagine that women can do this; so much femme literary output has been only legible as lurid diary entry, dirty confession, whether it be Sappho, Sylvia Plath, Jane Austen, or Rooney.

As Rooney writes an essay about herself, the novel form was built on the backs of various women, many of whom got buried under the men in the great origin story of fiction. In this Paris Review article on Joyce’s unacknowledged debt to Jane Austen, Rooney traces the often ignored foremothers of the novel (such as  Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley and Eliza Haywood). She points out that they got dismissively relegated to the literary junkyard of  “amatory fiction,” (something Rooney knows a little something about herself) before the form was taken over by men (such as Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson).

Unfortunately it has long been hard for critics to attribute the capacity for invention to women writers. It’s time to change that.