Her formidable intellect prompts her to adopt an ironic position towards everything – including herself. Photograph: Richard Saker/The Observerįrances is an unusually contradictory creation, so clever and yet so blind.

When she finally blurts out that she loves Nick, he tells her she’s “being unbelievably dramatic”. “It’s not an emotive topic for me.” The self-harm she perpetrates on her thin young body reveals otherwise. “I just don’t have feelings concerning whether you fuck your wife or not,” she lies to Nick. Frances is crippled by the pressure to perpetually “act unfazed”, to “affect an ironic tone” in situations that demand serious emotional engagement. Rather, the women have repressed themselves: they are too guarded to articulate their vulnerabilities. The apparatus of church and state haven’t repressed these people. Similarly, that great stalwart of Irish writing, the alcoholic father, is present, but he is a spent force, having been dispatched from the family home years ago the greatest trouble he causes is when he stops paying Frances her monthly allowance. In Conversations With Friends, Frances’s mother describes it as “a real shame” when the girls break up. In earlier Irish fiction, the narrative would have focused on the social tensions surrounding a gay relationship – and a female one at that. Her characters work in the arts and denounce the evils of capitalism while living off inherited wealth. Rooney sets her story in the post-crash era, among a Dublin elite.

Conversations with friends author