On 24 July 2020, I was walking to St Stephen’s Green for a Tinder date. To set the scene – Taylor Swift had just dropped folklore and it was about to lash rain. Before leaving the apartment, I had rattled off a few tweets summing up my feelings about Conversations with Friends and Normal People. I had recently read Conversations and was in the process of reading Normal People. I had never seen the TV series. I still have not. Unbeknownst to me, I had caught the Rooney zeitgeist at exactly the right time.
As I waited outside the gates of the park, I noted that a few people I knew who didn’t normally retweet much had retweeted me, with great enthusiasm. Then their friends joined in. By the time I was sitting down on the grass with my date, the thread had well and truly popped off on Irish Twitter.
Before we get into this, I’d like to just thank you for coming to read my first blog post, and invite you to subscribe below if you would like my new posts to go straight to your email.
Here is my famous Twitter thread:
13:17, 24 July 2020
Sally Rooney novel generator: Skinnily, I sadly and hotly forgot to eat for 7 days and I only realized when I fell over in front of trinity college and everyone was worried about me. Then a horrible man fed me something and we had sex. It felt good, and bad.
14:15, 24 July 2020
I stared at Emma. She was talking very loudly and I could tell Joseph was attracted to her while also despising her. I visualized throwing wine at her but instead I poked my hipbone into his side and raised my eyebrows. He fingered me in silent agreement.
14:17, 24 July 2020
“in case you hadn’t noticed, Joseph, I’m flawed. I’m not like Emma with her humour and her obnoxious breasts. Sometimes I think the only think I’m good at is cumming vaginally. And writing.”
14:22, 24 July 2020
I don’t know why I go to parties anymore. Everyone just talks about refugees and human rights while playing soft jazz. I feel at nineteen we’re all too old for that. I stood there awkwardly in my very flattering black negligee that I’d paired with a beret from Urban Outfitters.
10:04: 25 July 2020
Where’s Bronagh tonight? I couldn’t keep the edge out of my voice. Politically, I love other women but in practice it’s hard. She’s home for the weekend in Meath, he laughed humourlessly. I wish I could go home for the weekend but it’s harder when you’re from the west, I sighed.
10:08, 25 July 2020
The doctor slammed my chart down. Tough luck, lady, he smirked, your womb is no bueno. Wait I can’t parody this cos it’s way too close to the truth of women’s healthcare and I really like how she represented that.
A few initial thoughts:
I’m pleased to see that it’s still funny, five years later.
I’m particularly proud of “He fingered me in silent agreement”.
I enjoy how you can see my date was probably at 14:30/15:00 and that I then took the thread back up the following morning to crank out a couple more jokes. Remarkable restraint, as all I wanted to do that day was continue making sweet love to Twitter.
Now to the deeper musings.
“Skinnily, I sadly and hotly…”
Most of the main female characters in Sally Rooney’s works are thin, and it is made explicitly clear that they are. Now, Rooney is not at all the worst offender for compulsory skinniness in main characters – it tends to be the norm. Predictably, heroes in fiction tend to fit into societal beauty standards.
But I can’t help thinking that Rooney is deploying a writing trick where, if you want your character to be fucked up in a sexy way, make them someone who frequently forgets to eat, who simply doesn’t even have time to remember their own health.
Seldom do you have a heroine who overeats due to stress, or who doesn’t have time to plan to eat in a more healthy way, unless the novel is explicitly about the main character being overweight. Even then, quite often these are Bridget Jones-type heroines, kooky and messy and cute, but always striving for thinness (spare a prayer for teenage me, reading the weights that Bridget would note at the start of her diary entries as being heavy when they remain unattainable for most women).
No Bridgets in the Rooneyverse – you’re sad and thin and that’s that. Bigger people must not exist or must not feel things to the same intensity as the Rooney women do, or they would be too depressed to overeat.
Writing this, I was worried that I am being too hard on the Rooneyverse, and that maybe some of this is hypersensitivity on my part, but this Vogue article from 2024 convinces me that this criticism is not just projection of my own body image insecurities. (Also – apparently in Beautiful World, Where Are You someone rubs “the fin of someone’s hipbone”? Jesus Christ, I would’ve dismissed that as overdoing it if I’d come up with that). These sad, fragile women with extremely limited caloric intakes make the reader feel as though being depressed will make them slender, make them catnip for very sexy men who will, every so often, make them eat but in a horny, controlling, BDSM way. The following day, it’s back to the usual diet of a glass of water and a paragraph describing one’s own clavicles.
“in case you hadn’t noticed, Joseph, I’m flawed. I’m not like Emma with her humour and her obnoxious breasts. Sometimes I think the only think I’m good at is cumming vaginally. And writing.”
The “Emma at the party” section of the thread deals with a few things. The hipbone of it all, which I have already discussed, but also the collision of supposed awkwardness with the absolute narrative certainty that is always present that the main character is hot, don’t worry. Rooney heroines are never comfortable in themselves but are always sexy. Sexier than the men’s actual partners, and smarter and meaner too.
However, you can read the meanness as important character flaws for these characters, rather than an endorsement of their mindset by the author. I find criticising characters for their explicitly bad traits to be an example of media illiteracy in action. “Patrick Bateman is such a misogynist!!!” Yes, babe, that is the point!
Am I doing this? Am I depriving Sally Rooney of her god-given right to write horrible people? Why does the characters’ meanness annoy me so viscerally?
I think this is a “me” problem. I’ve always disliked when women in novels seem to hate cheerful, sociable women. Women like the Emma from the thread. These women are funny and loud and large, and, to whatever extent that I project this, heroines in fiction are always waifish and only funny in their silent inner monologue. They would never be so vain, so excessive, as to make loud jokes or be fun at a party.
I see myself as the opposite of a Rooney heroine. I used to visualise myself in social situations as if I were one of those barwenches in pirate films, bawdy and ruddy, or an innkeeper’s cheery wife in Victorian London. I’m always imagining some Rooney-esque woman skinnily and hotly hating me. In a way, me and heroines like Marianne and Frances are natural enemies, but that doesn’t make the writing bad.
But take another book where a slim main character spends most of the book skinnily and hotly hating people. I adored Boy Parts by Eliza Clark, and the antihero Irina is very mean and extremely toxic (spoilers ahead, and trigger warning for some topics that touch on eating disorders). Boy Parts takes pains to note how Irina fits and even exceeds female beauty standards, but it reveals that Irina has undergone cosmetic surgery, exercises constantly, wore a waist-trainer for years and lives on undressed Tesco bagged salad and wine.
The book takes pains to show how very small Irina’s life and her aesthetic joys have become in pursuit of this standard. She begins to feel a kind of obsessive anxiety when doing anything she enjoys, linking it mentally with the loss of control she associates with eating substantial food.
(end of TW) Boy Parts is a rare example of a book that mentions how unhealthy the pursuit of beauty standards is while not making it the entire point of the character, or making it a book explicitly about body image. Her dislike and distrust of others is also slowly revealed to be much more about her than about them.
Maybe I’d enjoy Sally Rooney books more if they were horror stories?
I think, whether it’s worthy of criticism or not, what I find when I read about Frances or Marianne is that they seem to think that they are the only sentient and meaningful people in the room, and I don’t know if the narrative pays this off in any effective way. To me, they’re Chekov’s asshole, except at the end they don’t go off, they just anticlimactically roll onto the next thing life has in store for them.
Finally, I’m a bit embarrassed at the “cumming vaginally” part. I basically lifted the joke from the song “I’m So Good at Yoga” from Rachel Bloom’s incredible tv show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. What I wanted to represent was my annoyance at how very easy sexual satisfaction was for these otherwise very complicated characters (though I’m trying to remember if Frances experiences a lot of pain during or after sex? So maybe that’s not entirely fair). It used to irritate me when I read Fifty Shades of Grey as well, how Annabel/Christiana/Bella (??? I will now Google her name…) ANASTASIA STEELE would have an earth-shattering orgasm if Christian so much as raised an eyebrow at her nipples.
I don’t know why I go to parties anymore. Everyone just talks about refugees and human rights while playing soft jazz. I feel at nineteen we’re all too old for that.
I’m not sure to what extent Rooney is gently ribbing her characters when they go on pretentious political screeds in the middle of a café or house party. I suspect she is poking a bit of fun at how students do go on like this, but she does also put some actually insightful political stuff in there as well. I don’t think my satire quite works as the main character here would probably be in the middle of the refugee/human rights discussion rather than scorning it, but I did just want to make fun of that tendency in her novels.
Also, and this may be because I’m not nineteen, but the youth of the characters sometimes didn’t ring true to me. True, I didn’t study at Trinity, so maybe I didn’t witness this level of pretention. The only Trinity nerds (I use this term with affection) I knew were studying music, and they used to entertain themselves by humming a note in unison after banging a tuning fork they’d whipped out of seemingly nowhere. Is that the music equivalent of what Rooney’s students do? Actually, it might be.
“Tough luck lady, your womb is no bueno”
I really enjoyed writing a doctor saying this and imagining how these novels would be if people said things like “tough luck” and “no bueno”. He’s kind of a ’90s dude from American Pie or something.
Sometimes the callousness of Frances’ medical interventions felt overblown, but when I remember my own experiences with period pain in my teenage years, I think she was right. I used to writhe in pain, feeling as if my internal organs were being ground up like in Sweeney Todd, being actually certain that something must be horribly wrong. Pain is supposed to be a sign that you are taking damage (OK gamer), but when I spoke to GPs about this, there was no interest in scheduling a scan, or checking out my organs. They simply diagnosed me with dysmenorrhea. This is a disorder which means you have bad period pain.
At the time, it felt like I went to a doctor with a hole in my head only to be diagnosed with hole-in-the-head-itis and charged €60 for the pleasure. Thank god for the pill, which calmed it all down. I remember having an ultrasound in my mid-twenties for something else, and being so relieved to finally get confirmation that I actually had a reproductive system in there, since my agonising teenage periods had made me feel as though it must have been converted into some kind of chamber of horrors.
I think Rooney solidly represents how painful and farcical it can be, trying to have your ob/gyn needs taken seriously.
So, yes, the thread was funny. But why am I still talking about this?
One of the reasons I wanted to write this is because I will delete my X account soon. I hate the idea that funny stuff like this is still hanging in suspended animation while 20% actual weirdos and 80% bots say the most heinous shit imaginable to one another, all while Elon “le epic win, you win the Internet today sir, have my updoot” Musk feeds it all indiscriminately to his pointless AI “Mechahitler”.
I want to delete my X account, but I’m embarrassingly very proud of this thread and the Twitter fame that it afforded me. I remember in the weeks following, my friend sent me a tweet that almost word-for-word copied my opening tweet,. I posted a reply: “Very funny – it was also funny when I first said it on 24 July”. The person deleted their plagiarism. But it hit me that my most famous piece of writing is in a very precarious position on the Internet, and it is not attached to my name.
Do I want it attached to my name?
In one cowardly sense, no. I am infinitely more comfortable with the idea that strangers on Twitter hear me talking about vaginal orgasm than people in my real life. Of course, my parents have read the thread, as have my family and friends, and thankfully we all ignore the parts that are on a TMI level.
In another sense, I am very proud of this, even though it was not actually that huge a thing. Currently, post-mass-Xodus from the platform, its first tweet has 15.45K likes, 1.27K RTs and 93 comments. It has 1 million impressions, 197K engagements and 162K detail expands. I don’t really know how big that is in the grand scheme of things, but I was never asked to sell vibrators in the comments below as other viral Twitter users were, so it can’t have been that impactful. But to this day, people like it. Since yesterday, two people have liked the first tweet. In all likelihood, they are OF bots or future mass killers, as is the main userbase of X, but that’s something.
In the days following the viral moment, I removed Twitter from my shortcuts because it made it feel like my heart had crawled up into my throat when I would see the piles of notifications. There was a small bit of not-quite-backlash, of people thinking it was begrudgery and negativity to criticise Rooney’s work. I could never deny a level of begrudgery, as I am Irish. Luckily, I think the silliness of the parody kept the majority of people from thinking I was being totally horrible.
I will also say that Rooney deserves the praise and success that she has received. Even though some parts compelled my eyes to roll, I kept turning those pages addictively. I also felt like Conversations with Friends had a real skill in not lingering too long on any particular scene. It trips along nicely, and you get a real sense of place. I also love the first part of Normal People where Connell and Marianne are teenagers, which mirrored a similar situation that had happened to someone close to me. I think Rooney’s way of showing how Connell hurt Marianne, not through malice but through fear and social expectations of masculinity, was really impactful.
Fundamentally, a good writer is someone who keeps you reading, and Sally Rooney does that with apparent ease. Whatever problems I might have with her writing, she is not overrated and is very deserving of her success.
Oh and want to know how the Tinder date went?
Well, would you call a wonderful marriage and four beautiful children a success?
I’m joking, we didn’t procreate, marry, or hang out again, but the date was nice.
It lashed rain but we stayed under an umbrella in the park, sipping cans until our bladders demanded shelter. We went to his place, it was nice enough, and I apologetically had to keep checking my phone in disbelief as the thread continued to blow up.
Neither of us felt a great connection to the other, but it was a very nice date, especially as it was the first time since the pandemic that I’d met someone new.
And as for this blog…
The purpose of this blog post is to save my tweets somewhere that is not X. The point is to have some evidence of having owned this viral moment. It’s a bit self-indulgent but maybe I need to lean into my inner Rooney heroine. At least they (and Rooney) actually have the discipline to get things written and published.
The purpose of this blog generally is to write. I have missed getting my words out there like I used to with Twitter. Unlike Twitter, this blog will force me to develop said words to something more than a pithy blurting of a thought.
I’m going to write about media, mostly, and how I feel about it. I keep having ideas for podcasts, then not doing anything with them. I suspect a blog will suffice for now.
Goodbye, Twitter, you were great and awful.
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