conversations with friends

voice of a generation

>>9805237
I read the first few pages and it was just as bad as I thought it'd be. Uninspired generic writing that any MFA grad could have written. I have no idea why anyone would want to read this, but I'm obviously not the target audience. I need to go purge myself with some good writing now.

ugh, literally me

>>9805237
Post an excerpt

>>9805305
first chapter here: https://www.the-pool.com/arts-culture/bedtime-bookclub/2017/21/sally-rooney-conversations-with-friends

>>9805305
Bobbi and I had first met in secondary school. Back then Bobbi was very opinionated, and frequently spent time in detention for a behavioural offence our school called ‘disrupting teaching and learning’. When we were sixteen she got her nose pierced and took up smoking. Nobody liked her. She got temporarily suspended once for writing ‘fuck the patriarchy’ on the wall beside a plaster cast of the crucifixion. There was no feeling of solidarity around this incident. Bobbi was considered a show-off. Even I had to admit that teaching and learning went a lot more smoothly during the week she was gone.

When we were seventeen we had to attend a fundraising dance in the school assembly hall, with a partially broken disco ball casting lights on the ceiling and the barred-up windows. Bobbi wore a flimsy summer dress and looked like she hadn’t brushed her hair. She was radiantly attractive, which meant everyone had to work hard not to pay her any attention. I told her I liked her dress. She gave me some of the vodka she was drinking from a Coke bottle and asked if the rest of the school was locked up. We checked the door up to the back staircase and found it was open. All the lights were off and no one else was up there. We could hear the music buzzing through the floorboards, like a ringtone belonging to someone else. Bobbi gave me some more of her vodka and asked me if I liked girls. It was very easy to act unfazed around her. I just said: sure.

I wasn’t betraying anyone’s loyalties by being Bobbi’s girlfriend. I didn’t have close friends and at lunchtime I read textbooks alone in the school library. I liked the other girls, I let them copy my homework, but I was lonely and felt unworthy of real friendship. I made lists of the things I had to improve about myself. After Bobbi and I started seeing each other, everything changed. No one asked for my home- work anymore. At lunchtime we walked along the car park holding hands and people looked away from us maliciously. It was fun, the first real fun I’d ever had.

After school we used to lie in her room listening to music and talking about why we liked each other. These were long and intense conversations, and felt so momentous to me that I secretly transcribed parts of them from memory in the evenings. When Bobbi talked about me it felt like seeing myself in a mirror for the first time. I also looked in actual mirrors more often. I started taking a close interest in my face and body, which I’d never done before. I asked Bobbi questions like: do I have long legs? Or short?

At our school graduation ceremony we performed a spoken word piece together. Some of the parents cried, but our classmates just looked out the assembly-room windows or talked quietly amongst themselves. Several months later, after more than a year together, Bobbi and I broke up.

>>9805317
>She got temporarily suspended once for writing ‘fuck the patriarchy’ on the wall beside a plaster cast of the crucifixion

whatever the female equivalent of fedora is, this is it

>>9805317

amazingly this is one of the more tolerable passages

File: 1479624383838.gif (1022KB, 500x281px) Image search: [Google]

1022KB, 500x281px

In this case, I would rather the author showed me these facts rather than giving me a drawn history lesson in the book.
Usually sprinkling history or the background of the character throughout the story is the best policy. showing the qualities > telling the reader about the qualities

t. master author and writer.

>>9805317
That is genuinely apalling

>>9805237
Currently reading this, for some reason I've read a string of contemporary female friendship novels lately.

Prose is light and tight but no one seems terribly fleshed out.

>>9805317
Ahahahhaha is this published literature? Well I guess having no talent never goes out of style. Ahahahahahaha

File: jej.jpg (3KB, 125x79px) Image search: [Google]

3KB, 125x79px

>>9805317

>At our school graduation ceremony we performed a spoken word piece together.

Funniest part.