For Fans of Sally Rooney

Most literary adaptations of interiority-heavy novels smooth out the inner texture and replace it with incident. The BBC/Hulu 'Normal People' (2020), directed by Lenny Abrahamson and Hettie Macdonald, did the opposite: it slowed down, trusted silence, and let Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal carry scenes that were almost purely atmospheric. The result was one of the rare occasions where a screen version deepened rather than illustrated its source. The show understood that Rooney's realism is not about events but about the weight of presence and absence between two people in the same room.

Rooney is often called a millennial novelist, which is accurate but partial. She is also a class novelist in the tradition of English fiction from Austen to Alan Hollinghurst: in her books, every relationship is shadowed by who has money and who pretends not to care. The Line of Beauty by Hollinghurst and Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan (the latter practically a companion novel to Rooney) do this with similar surgical patience. On screen, the series Succession ran the same game at operatic scale: what does desire look like when it is always also a transaction?

Games are not Rooney's territory, but the experience of being inside a mind negotiating desire and language has a surprising home in text-heavy, dialogue-driven games. Disco Elysium is the most obvious parallel: a game that is fundamentally about ideology, self-deception, and the stories we tell ourselves to survive. Conversations with strangers carry moral weight. Nothing is resolved cleanly. Fans of Rooney who have never touched a game often find Disco Elysium the first that genuinely makes them feel something.

Rooney studied at Trinity College Dublin and her fiction is set in recognizable contemporary Ireland, but she is not a pastoral or mythological Irish writer. The literary ancestor she most often acknowledges is Edna O'Brien, whose early Country Girls trilogy was banned in Ireland for its frank treatment of female desire and whose ghost runs through Rooney's work. On screen, the films of John Carney (Once, Begin Again, Sing Street) chart a very different Irish emotional landscape but share the quality of finding enormous feeling in small, low-budget moments. They are worth knowing as a counterpoint.