WORRIED how you’ll get your fix of university students sadly having sex now that Sally Rooney has pulled her books from sale? Follow this survival guide.
Stock up while you can
Sally Rooney only withdrew her books from sale recently, meaning there’s probably still a few copies of Conversations with Friends waiting for you in Waterstones. Failing that, charity shops have enough of her novels to fill a wheelbarrow. Hoard them immediately because who knows when this drought will end, and it might take her years to write another glum story about a horny tree surgeon or whatever.
Ration your copy of Intermezzo
You remember Intermezzo. It’s Rooney’s fourth novel about chess and grief. For some reason you didn’t tear through it and decided to watch Instagram reels of cute puppies instead. Luckily your laziness has paid off, as you can now eke out its 448 pages. Read it one dreary sentence at a time and you should be good for the next decade.
Read any of the many, many similar books
Sally Rooney is a literary sensation, so publishers have saturated the market with anything bearing a passing resemblance to her work to make a quick buck. A creatively bankrupt business model, perhaps, but it means there are thousands of similar books about depressed middle-class women waiting for you to ‘enjoy’. Your gran’s probably got you one for Christmas already.
Write your own literary fiction
How hard can it be? Just write what you know. With any luck your novel about a sexually frustrated office assistant clamouring for a Sally Rooney novel could win the next Booker Prize. Change the names of awful characters based on your friends to cover your arse, chuck in a scene of horny yearning set in a Gail’s bakery, and you’re golden.
Watch Normal People for the millionth time
Admit it, you’ve never actually read any Sally Rooney. You just liked to look at their colourful covers on the book shelf and feel like part of a cultural conversation. But the BBC adaptation of Normal People, that’s a different story. You watched that repeatedly, and not just because it came out during lockdown and you’d exhausted conventional pornography. Stick it on again for that faux-intellectual hit.
