Inside the Sally Rooney Fan Base

On Wednesday, a crowd of mostly young women, many carrying bookstore tote bags, filled a venue on the bank of the River Thames. They — we — were there to hear the Irish novelist Sally Rooney discuss “Intermezzo,” her latest novel.

Rooney is a literary star, and each new release is a highly anticipated and heavily marketed cultural event. Fans attend midnight release parties. The lucky few who get advance copies wield them as status symbols on social media. “I did post the book,” a 26-year-old Rooney fan told me. “Everyone knows I’m obsessed with her.”

Rooney’s writing embodies a kind of cool that feels of the moment. Her style is unforced, spare and incisive — the literary equivalent of Gen Z’s habit of omitting capital letters from text messages, or the doe-eyed, bored poses of influencers on Instagram. “If writing is almost too effusive, too emotional, it becomes a bit cliché,” another fan told me. “I think her writing feels really fresh because it’s pared back.”

The simplicity of Rooney’s language is part of its power. Her most emotionally resonant sentences have word counts in the single digits, and they arise in mundane situations. “Normal People,” Rooney’s second novel, is about two young people, Connell and Marianne, who are negotiating their relationship, with its various power imbalances, while feeling out their place in the world. I think about this scene a lot:

“She smiled, rubbed at her nose. He unzipped his black puffer jacket and put it over her shoulders. They were standing very close. She would have lain on the ground and let him walk over her body if he wanted, he knew that.”

Many of the Rooney fans I spoke with at the book talk on Wednesday — all in their late 20s — praised the emotional truth of her writing. “I couldn’t believe that somebody had written something that I related to so much,” a fan said of “Normal People.” Rooney’s books deal in the fraught business of interpersonal relationships — the difficulty of vulnerability, miscommunication, understanding one’s own power over another.

Her characters often consider their political and social context, what it means to be young and to be in love right now, at a time when connection can be difficult and things appear to be falling apart. In Rooney’s third novel, “Beautiful World, Where Are You,” the character Alice writes to her best friend, Eileen:

“I think of the twentieth century as one long question, and in the end we got the answer wrong. Aren’t we unfortunate babies to be born when the world ended?”

At the event, I found myself thinking about Taylor Swift and the Eras Tour, which I attended a couple of weeks ago. There are, of course, considerable differences between Rooney and Swift. Yet their fan bases are demographically similar — there is certainly overlap — and they share a desire to see themselves in their idol’s work. I thought, then, about how few avenues Rooney’s fans, as opposed to Swift’s, had to connect to her. A key part of Swift’s appeal is her willingness to narrate her life as it happens. She courts her fans’ investment not only in her work but in herself. Swift is an active participant in her celebrity.