Summer reissue: If you want to read a book that makes you feel good about your body, I beg you to look elsewhere.

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Once again Sally Rooney is the subject of discourse after body-positive women’s liberation magazine Vogue published an opinion piece titled “Why Are All The Characters in Sally Rooney Novels So Thin?” This was followed by an article titled “Sally Rooney slammed for ‘glorifying eating disorders’” published by little-known feminist zine The Daily Mail.  

Emma Specter, writing for Vogue, delivers a comprehensive overview of thinness in Rooney’s books, before writing “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”, leading some readers to ask: has everyone once again forgotten Sally Rooney is Irish? 

Let’s say it again for the record. Sally Rooney is Irish. What more does she have to do? Conclude each line of dialogue with “in his lilting Belfast drawl?” Release her books on St Patrick’s Day? 

This is not the first time Rooney has been the victim of Irish erasure. In an earlier article, this time, from Vogue Australia, the author discusses the fashion choices of Rooney’s characters, diagnosing Rooney’s characters’ plain clothing choices as demonstrating “they are beyond fashion”. 

But as Sean O’Neill points out in the aptly named “Sally Rooney is Irish”, non-Irish readers may be missing important cultural context. One tweet on the subject reads: “Props to anyone who tries to be fashionable in ireland i wore a red beret once in waterford and someone called me super mario.” 

I’m not saying there are no fat Irish people or, as one commenter joked, that the thinness of Rooney’s characters can be epigenetically linked to the trauma of the potato famine. Perhaps Specter is simply asking what we’re all thinking: wouldn’t all novels ultimately be better with me in them?

There’s no denying that Rooney’s protagonists share an alarmingly narrow BMI range, which has been widely derided in a popular genre of tweets that can be summarised as “Skinny Rooney walked thinly down the stairs”. 

Is it fair to make fun of Rooney for her endless litany of hip bones? Sure, being mean is free 😈. Do people, as the article suggests, take the pain of thin women more seriously? Yes of course, what are you stupid? Do we, as a society, want Sally Rooney, author of popular novels such as “young woman crippled by intense shame and self-loathing” and “my body is a matrix of suffering” to write her next book from the perspective of a fat character? I suspect the answer is a resounding: god no.

I don’t really believe Specter wants that either. It’s a harmless literary provocation, not a serious call to action. But I think it’s equally wrong to pretend that Rooney’s depiction of thinness is nothing but a glib fashion statement. 

There’s no use pretending Rooney’s books don’t have an aesthetic, but find me an author who doesn’t. Mervyn Peake. Henry James. Just because nobody makes a Dan Brown mood board, doesn’t technically mean you can’t. Rooney’s work is full of jutting clavicles, polished benchtops, and cashmere sweaters. Her prose has an Ikea-like radiance to it. 

Where Mervyn Peake and Sally Rooney diverge is that Peake never had a marketing department with a budget for promotional bucket hats. The design on Rooney’s books and swag, from the freebie greyhound bookmarks for Intermezzo, to the enamel pins of a couple folded into a sardine can, all have a Uniqlo-heroin chic. 

The fact that Rooney herself looks like one of her characters only draws more attention to the subject. But then again, who doesn’t have a stunning Irish friend who looks like a saint in a painting? Stephen King frequently writes about skinny male authors, and nobody is calling him a manic pixie dream girl, even though he is and we love him for it. Anyway, the “young female novelist” angle is a little stale, considering almost everyone currently writing a novel is a woman in her 30s.

This kind of criticism of Rooney’s work feels like it has more to do with who Rooney “represents” as a cultural archetype than the substance of her work. The last few years have seen an explosion of these kinds of “inventing a genre of person to get mad at” articles. Welcome to the Era of the Sally Rooney Girl, Deconstructing the ‘Sally Rooney girl’, Waif Girl and so on. Admittedly it’s fun to occasionally make fun of someone for belonging to an enemy subculture. Everyone can picture what I mean when I say a Motorhead guy or an Antiques Roadshow girlie. But it’s a lazy criticism because it doesn’t engage with the work. 

So let’s try a little light engagement. Rooney’s books are about rendering the beat-by-beat nuances of human relationships in the most authentic way possible, by which I don’t mean she is a realist. The conversations in her books are too psychologically refined to reflect ordinary life. I think this is one of the reasons Rooney has so few successful imitators. Her books shy away from the contemporary habit of overstuffing the turducken of the sentence with self-referential jokes and Charli XCX references as if to insist upon the authenticity of the present. Rather, her books have a quiet restraint to them, that feels more reminiscent of a classic novel. 

Like classic literature, her books are about manners, class and shifting power dynamics. She pays forensic attention to the music of conversation. They are lavish in psychological nuance but her prose is sleek and invisible, like that of a great wise eel. Her books are minutely attuned to sensation. If you want to know how it feels to eat a slice of unbuttered toast in a cashmere sweater, Rooney has got you covered. 

And what of Rooney’s skinny protagonists? Like Austen or Eliot, Rooney’s books tend to take a principled, intelligent but somewhat inflexible person, bring them into contact with others, and force them to bend. 

Rooney’s books are about that process of bending and are therefore ultimately redemptive. But for the vast majority of her novels, her characters wrestle with shame, self-hatred, issues of control and self-abnegation, a struggle which is reflected in their bodies and diet. I can’t remember if there are explicit mentions of eating disorders, but a spectre of deprivation haunts the early pages of her books. These grown women are truly out there eating half a croissant and a bag of dried apple crisps to meet their daily nutritional requirements. 

If this was Virginia Woolf, Marianne might buy herself the strawberry ice cream. But Rooney’s books aren’t a moral fable about raising oneself up by one’s feminist bootstraps. They are about the mysterious and subtle process by which relationships between people can teach us to be at peace in the world, to live among others, and to bear happiness and suffering with something approaching grace. 

Do the books glamourise eating disorders? Maybe. It’s hard to depict thinness without glamourising it, because it’s already so culturally prized. Is there any such thing as a neutral description of thinness? Perhaps an unglamorous depiction would look like someone indulging in repetitive thoughts and behaviours about their weight, which would be harder to romanticise. But ultimately Rooney isn’t writing educational pamphlets on disordered eating. She’s writing novels about relationships. And this sort of hand-wringing is just a distraction from the deeper philosophical question the article raises: should an author ever write more than one book? 

Have we forgotten the point of reading? It’s happily buying the newest novel from your favourite author in the hope and expectation that in many ways, it’s going to be exactly the same as the previous one. All my favourite authors have had enormously successful careers writing exactly the same book over and over again. Agatha Christie wrote the same book 66 times. Wodehouse wrote the same book over 90 times. So far, Rooney has only written four novels, but she has a long career ahead of her. 

Asking Sally Rooney not to write about a thin and damaged person who must find a way to relate to others in order to survive in the world is like asking Patricia Highsmith not to write about an attractive grifter with an eye for luxury and a magnetic core of emptiness at the pit of their soul. 

Specter makes the point that if any other writer with the same platform wrote exclusively about fat characters, that decision would be ruthlessly interrogated, whereas Rooney’s thin characters get away scot-free. But the awkward truth is, the thinness of Rooney’s characters doesn’t go uninterrogated, and is in fact the basis of a thriving ecosystem of think-pieces (guilty). What does strike me as true is that nobody would bother to leverage a criticism like “why does Ian McEwan only write thin characters” at Ian McEwan. Why is nobody talking about the Man in the Iron Mask’s problematic BMI? There’s got to be some middle ground between critiquing the depiction of women’s bodies in fiction and treating a female author’s work like a Ministry of Health vaccination campaign. 

Sally Rooney’s characters are thin, but their skinny lives, while movingly rendered, are nothing to aspire to, and Rooney never intended them to be.  If you want to read a book that makes you feel good about your body, I beg you to look elsewhere. 

First published October 4, 2024.