Hip bones—bones of all kinds—project sharply from the pages of Sally Rooney novels. There is Conversations With Friends’s disaffected poet, Frances, who looks in the mirror and notes how her “bones still jutted out unattractively on either side of my pelvis” and Normal People’s brilliant, misunderstood Marianne, wearing a dress “cut low at the front, showing her pale collarbones like two white hyphens.” And then there is the morally upright Simon rubbing the “hard fin of [Eileen’s] hipbone” in Beautiful World, Where Are You?
Then there is Rooney’s latest novel, Intermezzo, out today. Intermezzo makes reference to side characters as having “small and portly” forms and “plump, pretty” faces. But the real action, as ever, is trained squarely on thin characters. This time it’s a man who’s young and thin and shivering! But while Intermezzo broadens Rooney’s conception of what a body can look like, thinness ultimately factors into the narrative scaffolding as much as in the three novels that preceded it.
Just what is Rooney communicating with her recurring descriptions of a certain kind of body? Rooney’s female protagonists mope wanly, swoon with hunger, and tremble during sex, while the men respond almost fetishistically to their slight forms and perceived weakness. Normal People’s Connell marvels at how Marianne’s body “feels so small…and so open” during sex, and Beautiful World’s bisexual cad Felix admits to his lover Alice: “Whenever a girl asks me to open a jam jar, I kind of fall in love with her.”
The thinness isn’t explicitly glamorized, but it’s ubiquitous enough to feel like a prerequisite for sensuality. Rooney—whose precise economy with words is duly commended—lavishes attention on “the firm upturned bowl of [Frances’s] stomach,” Marianne’s “narrow and delicate” body, and Eileen’s “slim white arms like reeds, like branches.” (Meanwhile, an incidental Conversations With Friends female character’s thighs are described as being “pocked like the texture of whipped cream.”) Intermezzo’s 20-something student and occasional sex-worker character, Naomi—a hardier, somewhat less ethereal protagonist, whose boyfriend deems her “a carnivore”—tucks into a “family-size bag of Doritos.” But even while she’s eating, the “smooth obtrusion” of her prominent ankle bone is noted.
Most writers tend toward some degree of stylistic repetition, but these characters are not just thin—they are often starving. Frances drinks black coffee and makes a habit of working through lunch, while Marianne survives all day on “a tangerine and a piece of unbuttered toast.” Over the course of Conversations With Friends, Frances admits to having “a troubled relationship with my body” that evokes immediate empathy. But is it possible, in Rooney’s world, for a fat—or even non-painfully-thin—protagonist to suffer in ways that aren’t externalized through increasing smallness? Does a woman’s pain still matter if her appetite doesn’t diminish and her bones don’t show?
There is, of course, no mandate that Rooney populate the landscape of her fiction with fat bodies as some kind of feint toward inclusion, even if those bodies do happen to comprise almost half the US population. But consider a reversal: If another writer, even one of Rooney’s stature, populated her novels with a similar number of fat characters, that stylistic choice would be interrogated in a way that Rooney’s is not. Rooney’s slim characters are able to detach from their bodies in ways that it’s often assumed fat people cannot, by sheer virtue of the fact that our physical forms have always connoted a lack of discipline that thin people are spared.
Thin has long been the unexamined default in literary fiction. As novelist and journalist Emma Copley Eisenberg wrote in The New Republic, thinness is “routinely associated with morality and fatness with immorality,” while “characters are often made fat as a shorthand to tell the reader that they are gross, weak, evil, cruel, stupid, unimportant, or mentally ill.” Rooney’s novelistic point of view is not so crudely binary, but that’s partly because it’s impossible to be gross or weak or evil or stupid if you’re not there in the first place.
To find yourself outside the narrow space that Rooney has carved out for her protagonists by virtue of your biography or identity is not unique. In a 2021 essay for Electric Literature titled “I Love Sally Rooney’s Novels, But They Aren’t Written for Me,” Malavika Kannan notes that Rooney’s focus on “white, pointedly thin, elite-educated women with miraculously attractive lovers” leaves her wondering: “Where are the Normal People of Color?” Still, there is something about the emphatic physicality of Rooney’s characters that makes you wonder whether a fat Rooney heroine could ever exist. One hallmark of a Rooney protagonist, after all, is the kind of willful disappearance—into an affair, into BDSM, into friendship, or, indeed, into the hollows of one’s own body—that fat people are rarely afforded. The world might explicitly wish for us to shrink or disappear, and we might wish it for ourselves, but we’re almost always visible.
Novels certainly aren’t required to mirror their readership, and I’m a lot less starved for sympathetic, well-developed representation as a fat reader than I was even just a few years ago. But as I encounter yet another crop of protagonists who dream of a better and more principled world, I find myself wondering where fat people fit into it all—or, more to the point, where we don’t fit.
