Love Lessons: Girl World Unfurled

When I opened Sally Rooney's Beautiful World, Where Are You, I wasn't sure what to expect.  Even if I did gain an inkling from the thought-provoking post on Ivy & Ellie.  I was cautiously excited (if that's even a thing) because I'd loved Normal People.  Still, I sensed that this book would be different.  And I was right.  Sort of.

Alice and Eileen have been best friends since college.  Now in their late twenties, both are ladies of letters, Alice as a famous novelist and Eileen as a small-time magazine editor.  They also write letters to each other, long, scholarly-sounding emails lamenting the evils of capitalism and their guilt about caring about their love lives more than global warming and starvation.  Although World has the trifecta of elements commonly featured in women's fiction, i.e., man woes, job woes, and family woes, we're not in chick lit land anymore.  I'm not going to lie; the letters are a little tedious and sometimes hard to take.  Nevertheless, I can't deny that they're special.  They show what a close friendship these women share and are endearing in their honesty.  I wanted to write to Alice and Eileen myself and say, hey, the weight of the world isn't on your shoulders.  And therein, I think, lies Rooney's point: being young is a painful business.

Yet despite their torment, both Alice and Eileen dread growing up.  It takes them a long time to realize that the end of adolescence can be the beginning of everything else, freeing them from the pressure to be perfect.  In other words, the beautiful world has been there all along, but they've been too troubled to see it.   

That's the thing about this book.  Even as Rooney ever so gently satirizes her heroines, there's never a doubt that she feels for them, or that their angst is any less real.  If anything, she wants them to get past the demons that plague them, to accept themselves -- and the world -- as they are.  And as lofty and remote as this book sometimes is, it doesn't get much more poignant than that.  It's why Alice ultimately reverses her position on love, deciding that despite -- or because of -- all the hurt in the world, love isn't trivial, but all there is:

"So of course in the midst of everything, the state of the world being what it is, humanity on the cusp of extinction, here I am writing another email about sex and friendship.  What else is there to live for?" (146)

So Alice is a closet romantic.  Which isn't too far off the mark from chick lit.  

Put that in your vape pen and smoke it, Bechdel Test.