Did Sally Rooney ever really want to be an author? The fact that her UK publisher, Faber, has stopped selling her books, in response to the Irish novelist’s support for the proscribed terrorist organization Palestine Action, seems to have come as a relief. From her earliest interviews, she has given the appearance of someone who stumbled into her trade by mistake, and somewhat regrets being there. “The writing is the bit that I do this for,” she told Esquire in 2019, “and at the end I submit to it being published.”
The lore of Rooney holds that success came to her, rather than her ever having to chase it. When she was just 24 years old, she published a personal essay in a small literary magazine about how she became “the number one competitive debater on the continent of Europe” before turning away from the discipline in revulsion at the “pretend celebrity” it afforded her. That essay caught the attention of an agent, who asked if Rooney had any fiction she could show to editors. Rooney replied with the manuscript of Conversations with Friends: Seven publishers offered, Faber won, and the novel became a generation-defining bestseller when it was published in 2017. Although in typical Rooney style, she would later suggest that the essay was embarrassingly revealing and she was sorry she had written it.
Since then, every professional triumph that Rooney has enjoyed seems to have happened to her against her will: the prizes, the adulation, the thumping sales, all of them cause her more shame than pleasure. As a committed Marxist, commerce made her squeamish. “I can say: ‘If you can’t afford it, steal my book,’ but my position in the structure, as someone who makes money from intellectual property, makes my saying it quite hollow,” she told the New Statesman in 2018. And so, she apparently tried her hardest to make as little money as possible. “I don’t have any interest in marketing my books,” she said to The Times of London in 2024, and though she was self-aware enough to acknowledge that giving an interview could itself be considered part of the publicity cycle, she concluded that she simply felt “obliged” to talk about her novels rather than having any active desire to sell them.
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Her publisher, though, has been extremely interested in selling her. Rooney launches are accompanied by a tide of branded merchandise and “experientials.” The 2021 publication of Beautiful World, Where Are You was marked by a pop-up shop with calligraphy and candle-making classes. Goodie bags included cotton totes and (for the influencer elite such as Lena Dunham) bucket hats. For Intermezzo in 2024, Rooney’s U.S. publisher, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, put on over 140 events across the country: Swag included pencils, pin badges, bandanas for both pets and humans, and a much-coveted Baggu bag.