Which is sad, isn't it? Because she's the new hot thing and I know I would've adored reading her when I was younger. Now, despite my best efforts, I cannot connect with the angst and endless self-reflection and unrequited crushes and even the period pain. All of that, for me at least, is so long ago. Another lifetime.
Maybe that's precisely the problem. Maybe reading Sally Rooney is so uncomfortable for me because I don't want to remember a time when my feelings were always just below the surface. A time when I felt the frisson of attraction when I walked past a crush or the agony of a it's not you it's me note slipped under my dorm room door. A time when I was certain that it would never happen for me. A time before those intense bursts of emotion were dulled by conference calls and commutes.
A time when I still felt like the real me.
Although who is the real me? Is it the five year old who clung to her daddy's hand? The tween who was banished from the sixth grade clique? The nerd who won the Economics Award? The idiot who wasted too many years pining for someone who didn't love her enough? The organizer of conference calls? The not always good friend or mother or wife?
I'm lucky that I've lived through several iterations of me -- I know not everyone makes it to double nickels. And I'm grateful that I've reached the stage in my life when, unlike a Sally Rooney heroine, things aren't so damn painful -- at least not everyday. My psyche is no longer tender and the pricks of disappointment and disillusionment don't hurt so much anymore. One benefit of middle age.
But maybe it would do me no harm to remember, at least sometimes, the earlier versions of me. After all, what's the point of living through all that angst if you bury it beneath layers of suburban busyness? The twenty-something me was fierce and confident and fun and shouldn't be erased from the narrative of my life because she was a wee bit melodramatic and unnecessarily angsty and made more than her fair share of mistakes.
When my father died earlier this year, we created a photo collage of all the stages of his life and the mosaic of his life was beautiful. My father was as much the skinny boy on the beach and the handsome young cop as he was the doting grandfather. If I can appreciate each stage of my father's life, should I not cast a similarly forgiving eye on my own?
Maybe, once I accept and forgive my younger self, I'll be able to appreciate Sally's young and earnest heroines.