Above, all there was an engaged, questing subjectivity and an underlying faith in fiction itself, which seemed modernist rather than contemporary. There was even the calamitous female physicality, with Frances’s bloody struggles with endometriosis reminiscent of Lehmann’s portrayal of abortion or Trapido’s of birth and, underneath the relentless irony of the dialogue, Frances’s haunting innocence and yearning, her distinctly pre-feminist sense of a lack of entitlement to love, which is perhaps much more like Lehmann’s Invitation to the Waltz than Girls. There was the scant plot of these earlier classics, the romanticised, aphorising characters, the shamelessly beautiful sentences and exquisite, precisely considered suffering. The resulting doomed romance appeared closer to Rosamond Lehmann’s novel The Weather in the Streets (1936) or Barbara Trapido’s Brother of the More Famous Jack (1982) than to chilly contemporary autofiction or modish surrealism. But the instant messages were used to produce something like Platonic dialogues email functioned, like Victorian letters, to consider the workings of the heart time was marked by the publishing of novels and the passage of the seasons rather than the irruptions of news and Frances was not only diagnosed with endometriosis without ever googling Lena Dunham but very soon abandoned her never specified relationship with Bobbi for an all-absorbing affair with an older married man, Nick.

True, the author was only 26 yes, the story took place in an Ireland where Catholicism no longer mattered, and everyone was a digital native and the narrator, Frances, was a new graduate who started the book in a modishly fluid friendship/relationship with the avowedly lesbian and definitely woke Bobbi. O f all the praise lavished on Sally Rooney’s first novel, Conversations with Friends – that it was glittering, witty, addictive, elegant, heartbreaking – only the insistence that it was especially contemporary, and “could sit with Lena Dunham’s Girls”, as the Sunday Times put it, didn’t seem entirely applicable.

Normal people rooney