Sally Rooney: How an Irish Millennial Became the World’s Favorite Export of Existential Dread
Sally Rooney Has Conquered the Planet—Now Let’s Ask Why
DUBLIN—While the rest of us were doom-scrolling through pandemic dashboards and commodity prices, a 32-year-old former debate champion from Castlebar quietly became the most exported piece of Irish soft power since Guinness. Sally Rooney’s three slender novels have been translated into 46 languages, including Catalan, Korean and—fittingly for a writer who treats money with the suspicion of a medieval monk—Czech. Her books now serve as a kind of diplomatic currency: German ministers gift them at state luncheons, Mexican bookTokers weep into their ring lights, and Seoul metro ads assure commuters that Normal People can make the 7:18 a.m. ride feel “existentially worthwhile.” If James Joyce once boasted that Dublin would be reconstructed brick-for-brick through fiction, Rooney has managed to reconstruct global intimacy Wi-Fi signal by Wi-Fi signal.
The numbers are almost vulgar. Normal People shifted 1.4 million English-language copies in the first month of release; the BBC-Hulu adaptation was streamed in 104 territories, making Connell’s chain the most paused neckwear since Dr. No’s tuxedo. Beautiful World, Where Are You topped charts from São Paulo to Helsinki despite a title that sounds like a rejected postcard from an exhausted gap-year student. Foreign rights sell at auction faster than you can say “late-stage capitalism,” and Rooney’s refusal to allow Israeli translation deals has itself become geopolitical commentary—proof that even her abstentions travel farther than most nations’ cultural policies.
Critics, meanwhile, treat her like a social-media eclipse: stare directly and you risk retina damage from either adoration or derision. The New Yorker calls her “the first great Marxist novelist of the algorithmic age”; the Sunday Times complains she “writes like an intern ghosting a brand.” In Delhi, columnists debate whether her characters’ refusal to own property is aspirational or simply laughable; in Buenos Aires, grad seminars dissect the semi-colon as a neoliberal coping mechanism. The irony, of course, is that a writer famously skeptical of hype has become a one-woman transnational content farm—her face adorning tote bags in Brooklyn, her dialogue turned into TikTok audio for Lebanese teenagers to mime break-ups they haven’t had time to experience yet.
What explains the planetary group chat? First, Rooney’s terrain—post-2008 economic anxiety, precarious labor, the emotional spreadsheet of open relationships—translates effortlessly across borders. A Barcelona bartender and a Vancouver coder both recognize the humiliation of unpaid internships; everyone knows what it feels like to send a text that reads “okay sounds good” while privately auditioning suicide. Second, her prose is flat enough to skate over on Google Translate without too many grammatical face-plants. The sentences may scan like a psychiatric intake form, but that very blankness invites projection: Milanese readers imagine bitter espressos; Swedes insert six weeks of paid parental leave.
Still, the phenomenon carries the faint whiff of cultural arbitrage. Western Europe lionizes her as a class warrior; Eastern Europeans note she writes about poverty with the detached fascination of someone who’s never had to smuggle toilet paper. In Southeast Asian markets, the novels arrive shrink-wrapped alongside banana-scented hand sanitizer—luxury commodities in a single plastic sheath. And everywhere, the same paradox: books that indict commercialization are themselves best-sellers, their anti-aesthetic cover design reverse-engineered to look exquisite on 4K screens. Even Rooney’s famed email exchanges—those long, self-lacerating paragraphs—now function as stealth influencer copy, driving hardback sales the way Kylie Jenner pushes lip kits.
Perhaps that is the final, bleak joke. A writer who keeps asking whether love can survive neoliberalism has answered the question by becoming neoliberalism’s most reliable content pipeline. Her characters fret over ethical consumption; her publisher’s parent company books record profits. We click “add to cart” anyway, because the ache feels authentic even when the shopping cart is counterfeit. Somewhere in Lagos or Ljubljana, another reader finishes the last page, exhales, and wonders why communion always arrives pre-wrapped. Don’t worry, the algorithm whispers: there’s a limited-edition hardback of the next one, shipped carbon-neutral to salve your conscience. Rooney warned us that intimacy is commodified; she just neglected to mention she’d be the one ringing up the sale.
