The adaptation of Sally Rooney’s first novel can’t quite bring tricky source material – repressed characters, digital communication – to life
Conversations with Friends is a harder sell. The book and series follow a thorny quadrangle of sex and friendship between two best friends/ex-lovers and an older married couple – none of whom, in classic Rooney fashion, seem party to their own motivations. It’s a murkier tangle than Normal People, made even more inaccessible by the characters’ psychological opaqueness and general aversion to speaking.
As in the book, the show takes the perspective of Frances, played by Irish newcomer Oliver, a 21-year-old university student who performs spoken word with Bobbi , drawing the eye of thirtysomething Melissa , an essayist and sophisticate. In the book, Frances and Melissa’s husband Nick , both uncomfortable in social situations, flirt over email before plunging into an affair. On-screen, it happens within two episodes with little said between them beyond trailed-off sentences.
That being said, I found the show’s unhurried depiction of messaging – a chat history available to the audience, watching the characters use autocorrect, type and erase – to be one of its most evocative elements, in part because it’s still rare to see the weight of digital communication on our lives accurately reflected on screen.