Under a covered terrace in the heat-blasted garden of a seaside Croatian villa, a tense conversation is taking place between a husband and a wife over a lemon the husband forgot to buy at a shop. “Sorry for being a b—h,” says Melissa, and Nick smiles at her, briefly. The conversation is played again, this time with Nick holding her gaze more intently. And again, now with Nick glancing briefly at Frances, his 21-year-old lover, who is hovering behind a sun lounger. And again, with another barely perceptible tweak in emphasis, a hand now lingering a millisecond longer than before.
Sally Rooney fans will already know these characters and almost certainly the scene, which occurs halfway through her debut novel Conversations with Friends, albeit in France rather than Croatia. “Rooney’s novels are about the spaces between people,” says Lenny Abrahamson, who directed six of the 12 episodes of Rooney’s second novel Normal People, which garnered a staggering 62 million streams on iPlayer in 2020 during lockdown, and is back in the chair for seven of the 12 episodes that will make up Conversations with Friends, which tracks the messy emotional and sexual transgressions between two couples. The shoot is six months long, with each discrete moment demanding multiple takes. “It’s about finding the nuance in ways that feel very real.”
So seismic was the impact of Normal People, a sexually explicit, yearningly poetic 12-parter about the relationship between high- school lovers Connell and Marianne across several years, that Conversations with Friends is perhaps the most eagerly awaited TV show of the year. For those who haven’t read the novel, it parses the same emotional territory – the microscopic shifts in atmosphere between two people, the needling torments of anxiety and self-doubt, the endless debates by bookish 20-somethings over how to live and who to be – yet although Rooney wrote it before Normal People, when she was just 24, it’s a more complex and sophisticated book.
It’s told from the point of view of Frances, an intellectually uncompromising literature student at Trinity College Dublin, still umbilically close to her more candid, uninhibited ex-girlfriend Bobbi. Their performance poetry together attracts the attention, then friendship, of Melissa, a wealthy and established writer, who likes to throw fabulous parties in her gorgeous Dublin marital home. Frances (played by Irish newcomer Alison Oliver) strikes up a relationship with Melissa’s actor husband Nick (The Favourite’s Joe Alwyn, known outside cinephile circles for being Taylor Swift’s boyfriend), while Bobbi (American Honey’s Sasha Lane) develops a partially reciprocated crush on Melissa (Jemima Kirke, star of Girls).
Although the series can’t portray events exclusively through Frances’s perspective the way the novel does, she nonetheless dominates – an emotionally hard to reach “brain in a jar” who, in her sometimes lofty resistance to fixed ideas about identity and behaviour, is occasionally monstrous towards those she loves.
