Few others inspire such fervour. In the early noughties, it might have been Zadie Smith who found herself on a meteoric rise to fame after the publication of White Teeth, which itself was later made into a television series for Channel 4 starring Naomie Harris. Or, perhaps, Elena Ferrante, the internationally renowned Italian author who, to date, has seen every single one of her novels adapted into a film or television series, most famously in the form of HBO’s acclaimed My Brilliant Friend and the Oscar-nominated The Lost Daughter. Yet Smith and Ferrante are not household names the way Rooney is. The television adaptation of her second novel, Normal People, was one of the biggest hits of 2020, and Paul Mescal took home a BAFTA for his performance as anxious teen Connell Waldron. The show arrived a few months into the UK’s first national Lockdown, allowing its audience to live vicariously through its intimate sex scenes in a time when being closer than six feet to a stranger was a crime. This latest adaption, created by the team behind Normal People, promises just as much sex, if not more. 

Conversations with Friends, which drops today on BBC iPlayer, follows twenty-something Frances (Alison Oliver) as she engages in an affair with a sexy, married actor, Nick (Joe Alwyn). Meanwhile, Frances’ ex-girlfriend, who is also her roommate and the other half of a performance poetry duo, Bobbi (Sasha Lane), takes an interest in Melissa (Jemima Kirk), Nick’s intimidating and successful wife. The show has proven to be less of a critical darling than Normal People, with some reviews noting the pace and questioning the motivations of its characters, but the same is true of the book. The spikey and selfish people who inhabit the show are a lot less likeable than Connell and Marianne; their intentions much murkier. The love story at the centre of Conversations is one of infidelity between a misguided, insecure girl and an unhappy, closed-off man. Nick’s marriage looks perfect from the outside but is nearly hollow on closer inspection; his wife has had her own affairs in the past, while the two girls, once lovers, are forced to navigate the choppy waters of a friendship that was once something more. Whereas Normal People presented us with a relationship we might want to emulate, one that is deeply passionate and filled with genuine affection, Conversations asks what happens when you don’t regulate your desire to fit within the conventional ideas around relationships when monogamy doesn’t feel like enough, and love is not just something that can exist between two people but between many. 

Though Conversations with Friends was a big hit back in 2017, this aspect of it went under-explored. Hearing about the novel from friends or seeing people reading it on the tube, it was never immediately clear how queer the novel was. That Frances and Bobbi were an item was mentioned in passing on the blurb, but there wasn’t a significant focus on the implications. My only guess as to why would be that Rooney has, unjustly, been a poster girl for skinny white girls, and her latest novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, was accompanied by an uncomfortable fanfare that included pop-up shops in trendy London boroughs and an infamous bucket hat with the book’s title embroidered on the front. It seems at odds with the way she’s positioned that she is also staunchly anti-capitalist and that her novels and the shows based on her books reflect this. The more fraught exploration of identity at the centre of Conversations and its endorsement of lifestyles other than the monogamous is less palatable than a story of young love. Yet, to my mind, it’s more intriguing. 

The television adaptation, like the novel, highlights the confusion and complication of bisexual desire as Frances admits to Nick that she’s never slept with a man before and that her “entire sexual history is Bobbi”. The upheaval of such a revelation can be destabilising, especially in a world that asks for sexuality to be clear and defined. In 2022, in a world bogged down by accusations of queerbaiting, ambiguous sexuality is consistently questioned, and most narratives about people exploring who they’re attracted to end with a definite choice. Sexuality is commonly presented as a binary, and those who exist in the middle are, as Toni Stanger wrote for Film Daze, asked to “pick a side”. Conversations doesn’t conform to this idea, and when the idea of loving men and women is raised, it is never accusatory. Instead, it falls into the category of rare but welcome media, like Desiree Akhavan’s The Bisexual, that allows for this type of exploration and doesn’t try to reach a verdict on who someone is more attracted to. 

Frances’ feelings for Nick are a substantial part of the novel, as is Bobbi’s reaction to them, and so, at the heart of it, Conversations is a queer book. But it rarely seems this way. In recent months, when I’ve spoken about Rooney, I’ve always pegged Conversations as my favourite of her novels, while others, ostensibly my straight friends, will say Normal People. This isn’t wrong, of course. Normal People is a great book, but it’s always interested me that Rooney’s straightest novel is her most successful. In Beautiful World, we meet Felix, a bisexual warehouse worker who lives for chaos. He’s an equal opportunity flirter who relishes making people uncomfortable. In Conversations, his counterpart might be Bobbi, an overpowering force who likes to be in control and to party. She isn’t interested in anything that conforms after watching her parents’ marriage fall apart, and seeing Frances start a relationship with a straight married man, who Bobbi thinks is uninteresting, feels like conformity. If loving Bobbi had been radical and queer, falling for Nick is the obvious and easier choice. 

This is what feels refreshing about Rooney’s work and its adaptations. For a novelist that is forced into the mainstream and who is so influential on the cultural zeitgeist, the work is still questioning and politically intriguing. For all its mainstream appeal, Normal People has much to say about class and sexual desire. Conversations reconsiders the romantic structures we’re asked to place ourselves within, while Rooney’s third novel is no different. This too will surely be adapted to screen soon (and I’m going to start my campaign for Saoirse Ronan to play Alice as quickly as possible). In a review of Conversations for the BBC, Philippa Snow said it best when she described Rooney’s work as containing “an additional sly undertone of commentary on class” that helps “to shore up the impression of an Austen love affair playing out in a hip millennial milieu.” It’s no surprise, then, that Rooney is significantly influenced by writers like Jane Austen and George Elliot, two female writers from history who’ve seen their work returned to again and again, both as novels and in their various TV and film adaptations. Whether the adaptation of Conversations with Friends is as big a success as Normal People is yet to be seen, but it seems that, just like with Austen’s work, we’ll likely see more Rooney adaptations. 

Also Read: How Film Changed Me: On Queerbaiting

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I have fallen somewhere in-between. At times I’ve been rapt by books, I’ve devoured Station Eleven, Girl, Women, Other, and An American Marriage. On the other hand, I’ve never in my life started so many books that I’ve ultimately put down, various acclaimed novels and memoirs have been thrown back onto the bookshelf because it seems I need something very specific during these hard times. I just wish I knew what that ‘specific’ thing was… 

Being unable to leave the house has also allowed people to explore the books they’ve had on their shelves for years. The ones they always meant to read but, for some reason, haven’t. For me, that book was Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2013 masterpiece about two young Nigerian lovers, who are pulled apart by distance as one travels to America and the other lives, undocumented, in the UK. The book had come to my attention in 2014, just after Lupita Nyong’o won her Oscar for 12 Years A Slave and, in the wake of her win, as is common with newly minted stars, news stories appeared in the trades of what the actress had lined up next. At the time, it was a film adaptation of Achiche’s novel starring Nyong’o as Ifemelu opposite David Oyelowo as Obinze.  

During lockdown, the book was on my radar again because the casting for Nyong’o’s adaptation had just reached me, following the news late last year that it would be a ten-episode mini-series on HBO. The playwright and actress Danai Gurira would pen the scripts, and Oyelowo was no longer attached, but in his place was up-and-comer Zackary Momoh as Obinze. At the same time, Emmy-winner Uzo Aduba had also joined the cast. 

As I read the novel, which contains astute observations on race in America as well as immigration, class, and gender, it seemed so clear to me that this novel would be a good series, not a film. Clocking in at around 400 pages and approximately 151,960 words, there was so much depth and intensity to the book. It had so many moving parts that, to condense it down to a two-hour movie would mean losing so much of what made this complex and sprawling novel so unique. 

I wondered what had changed since 2014, why the film adaptation had become a TV adaptation. Looking at the past seven years, TV has changed, and books have been adapted at a far more rapid rate. There’s been adaptations of Margret Atwood’s depressing dystopian, but all too relevant,  The Handmaid’s Tale and the prison-based memoir by Piper Kerman, Orange Is the New Black. We’ve seen comedies like Shrill, a series based on Lindy West’s first essay collection, and the fantasy tomes of George R.R. Martin became HBO’S biggest hit in recent memory, Game of Thrones. The Italian sensation My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante also came to HBO, a gender-swapped version of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity hit Hulu, and of course, there’s been Reese Witherspoon’s obsession with ‘little’ things, be they big lies or fires everywhere. 

There was a time when books were deemed intellectual, film considered artful, while television turned your brains into mush and gave you square eyes. If a book was a success, then the film rights would be snapped up a production company, and it would turn into something lavish, and Oscar-baity. While that is still somewhat the case, it’s also becoming more commonplace for books to appear on TV. Before now, it seemed that the books adapted for TV were near exclusively period dramas, pulpy teen novels, and crime thrillers but now all types of novels are turning to the small screen rather than film. Literary hits like Candice Carty-Williams’s Queenie, Emma Jane Unsworth’s Adults, Samantha Irby’s Meaty, and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven are some of the many books currently with TV adaptations in the works. 

Then, there is Normal People. The adaptation of Sally Rooney’s acclaimed novel has become one of the most significant cultural events of 2020 and for good reason. The story follows two Irish teenagers, Connell and Marianne, and their intense romance over a few years, from their hometown of Sligo to the campus of Trinity College Dublin. The novel, sparsely written and keenly observed, was translated into twelve perfect episodes, and each felt like it really captured the atmosphere of the book in a way few adaptations do. The casting of Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal was pitch-perfect, their steamy sexual chemistry a beauty to behold. Mescal especially has hit well with viewers, and his embodiment of the stoic and chain wearing Connell Waldron has inspired Instagram accounts dedicated to his jewellery and a collective thirst on twitter that can seemingly never be quenched. 

I guess the question is, what’s next? Books are still becoming films at a more frequent rate than they become TV shows, but it’s becoming clear that the latter is a better format to do the novel justice. Rooney’s debut novel, Conversations with Friends, is being adapted for TV by the same team behind Normal People and other books are likely to get similar treatment due to the shows overwhelming success. 

I love film, I really do, but for every brilliant adaptation like Little Women or The Personal History of David Copperfield, there’s plenty of lacklustre and ill-considered adaptations like How to Build a Girl, the most recent Emma, or, The Goldfinch. It’s understandable, that film and the novel have been so linked throughout history because the film industry was usually the only place that had the kind of cash a good adaptation needs but, that’s just not the case anymore. That narrative ended when Netflix spent $130 million on the first two seasons of The Crown. 

TV also is far more level in terms of access. I remember, as a kid, seeing the ads for The Line of Beauty on BBC; a handsome Dan Steven’s charging around a London backstreet as suggestions of gay sex and romance were offered in small flashes. The three-part drama was adapted from Alan Hollinghurst’s 2004 Man Booker-winning novel (next on my lockdown to-read list), and it still sticks in my mind as one of the earliest glimpses of gay life I saw. Seeing that ad, though admittedly I was unable to watch the show itself, as it was beamed into my home via BBC Two made me aware that gay stuff existed out there in the world and that maybe, one day, I’d be able to see it. The way TV is now, with the majority of it available via the internet, people are far more likely to be able to access it. What I’m trying to say is, books not only get more time when they’re adapted for TV but they also get a wider audience, and that can mean that those you really need it, can see it. 

Of course, we can only hope this trend leads to more readers. If once again, Instagram is a barometer of the current mood, then a lot of people are picking up Sally Rooney while they wait for the days when we’ll be allowed out again. Even some of her short stories have been released via Audible to try and appease those looking for more after finishing the show. It seems like Normal People might have paved the way, and the future looks bright.

Also Read: How Film Changed Me: On Survival Without the Cinema

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