Hip bones—all kinds of bones—are clearly visible in Sally Rooney’s fiction. Frances, the disaffected poet of “Conversations with Friends,” looks in the mirror and sees that her “bones on either side of the pelvis still protrude and are unattractive,” while the talented but misunderstood Marianne in “Ordinary People” wears “a front cut low, revealing her pale collarbones like two white hyphens,” and the morally upright Simon in “Beautiful World” is rubbing the “hard feathers of [Irene’s] hip bones.”
Rooney’s latest novel, Intermezzo, is published today. Intermezzo mentions that the supporting character’s body is “short, plump” and the face “full, beautiful.” But the real action, as usual, is directed directly at the thin characters. This time, it was a young, thin, quivering man! Although Intermezzo broadens Rooney’s understanding of the body, as in the previous three novels, thinness is ultimately a factor in the narrative framework.
Rooney repeatedly describes a particular body, what message is he sending? Rooney’s heroines scream, starve and tremble during sex, while the male protagonists react almost erotically to their fragile bodies and feelings of weakness. Normal People’s Connell marvels at how Marianne’s body feels “so small…and so open” during sex, and Beautiful World’s androgynous donkey Felix admits to his love Alice: “Whenever a girl asks me to open a jam jar, I fall in love with her.”
Thinness is not explicitly glorified, but it is so ubiquitous that it seems like a prerequisite for sexuality. Rooney is justly praised for the precision and simplicity of her diction, which focuses on “[Francis’s] hard, upturned stomach,” Marianne’s “narrow and delicate” body, and Eileen’s “reed-like, arms as thin and white as tree branches.” (Meanwhile, a casual female character in “Conversations with Friends” has her thighs described as “bulging like whipped cream.”) Nao, the twenty-year-old student and occasional sex worker in “Intermezzo,” Naomi — a robust, slightly less ethereal protagonist whose lover considers her a “carnivore” — “stuffs family-sized bags of Doritos.” But even when she was eating, the “sleek bulge” of her prominent ankle bones was evident.
Most writers tend toward some degree of stylistic repetition, but these characters are not only thin, but often hungry. Frances drinks black coffee and makes a habit of working through lunch, while Marianne subsists on “an orange and a piece of unbuttered toast” for the day. During “Conversations with Friends,” Frances admits to having a “problematic relationship with my body,” which immediately evokes sympathy. But in Rooney’s world, is it possible for an obese – or even painfully thin – protagonist to suffer without reliving the pain of being small? If a woman’s appetite is not lost and her bones are not exposed, does her pain matter?
Of course, there’s no mandate that Rooney fill her novels with fat bodies as some sort of sham of inclusivity, even though those bodies make up nearly half of the US population. But consider a reversal: If another writer, even one of Rooney’s stature, filled their novels with the same number of fat characters, that stylistic choice would be questioned in a way that Rooney’s has not. Rooney’s slender characters are able to separate themselves from their bodies in a way that fat people are often deemed incapable of, because our physical size has always meant a lack of discipline to which thin people are immune.
“Bo” has long been an uncensored default word in literary fiction. As novelist and journalist Emma Copley Eisenberg wrote in The New Republic, thinness “is often associated with morality, fatness with immorality,” and “characters are often fat, which, in essence, tells the reader that they are vulgar, weak, evil, unkind, stupid, unimportant, or mentally ill.” The point of Rooney’s novel isn’t so much strictly binary, but that’s partly because you can’t be gross, weak, evil, or stupid if you aren’t in the first place.
Finding yourself outside the narrow space Rooney creates for her protagonists, depending on your biography or identity, is not unique. In a 2021 article in Electric Lit titled “I love Sally Rooney’s novels, but they’re not written for me,” Malavika Kannan said Rooney tended to focus on thin, elite-educated women with “white, obvious” magical lovers. She wonders: “Where are the normal people of color?” Still, the intense physicality of Rooney’s characters makes you wonder if Rooney has any heroines at all. After all, one of the hallmarks of Rooney’s protagonists is the deliberate disappearance — into affairs, into BDSM, into friendships, even into the nothingness of their own bodies — which fat people can hardly afford. The world clearly wants us to shrink or disappear, and we ourselves may want the same, but we are almost always visible.
Novels certainly don’t have to reflect their readership, and as a fat reader I no longer crave empathetic, mature representation as much as I did even a few years ago. But when I met another protagonist who dreamed of a better, more principled world, I wondered where fat people fit in, or more importantly, where we don’t fit in.
