In Sally Rooney’s first novel, Conversations with Friends, the protagonist narrates an episode familiar to most people under thirty-five: “I continued to read through my log of conversations with Bobbi, entering search terms which seemed willfully calculated to annoy me.” The character is staring at an instant messenger transcript full of disjointed messages, sentences broken up, interspersed over several lines of unpolished text. Older reviewers have noted the interweaving of digital communication in Rooney’s fiction as characteristic of the novelist’s chronicling of millennial lives.

Every decade, older figures balk at the inscrutable peculiarity of the younger generation, but the attitude towards millennials in particular seems to have driven the media into a frenzy. Millennials are allegedly responsible for every ill under the sun, they refuse to participate in normal activities such as buying houses and having children, and spend far too much money on avocados and not enough on diamonds, as though they exist outside of an imploding and unsustainable economic system.

Rooney’s second novel, Normal People, was recently published in the United States, and sold incredibly well in Britain and Ireland upon publication in 2018, especially among younger people.