By 
There is a particular and incongruous sadness about experiencing heartbreak and longing in the height of summer, a feeling intensified by the romance it seems you should be guaranteed during the season of bare flesh and cigarettes passed between fingers under the wide sky. These wistful summers are a recurring feature in the two TV adaptations of Sally Rooney's novels, in which nothing is more sexy than being so incredibly sad, or as sad as feeling quite so incredibly sexy.
In both Normal People, released during the skin hunger of the pandemic's 2020 peak, and now its successor Conversations with Friends, which is currently airing on BBC Three on Sundays (with all episodes available now on BBC iPlayer), summer holidays are used as a magnifying glass for moments of intense longing across the pool, where intimate words have to be exchanged in fleeting moments of privacy.
Conversations with Friends dials up the sense of the forbidden, focusing on the tangled liaisons between spoken word performers and best friends Frances (Alison Oliver) and Bobbi (Sasha Lane), and older married couple Nick (Joe Alwyn) and Melissa (Jemima Kirke). The quad – love square? – are each in pursuit of something from one another: friendship, mentoring, sex, acquiescence. But it is the need to be understood that seems to radiate from each of them most strongly, and it is this kind of longing that the Irish author has made a feature of her lost, millennial characters.
Rooney's books are embedded with email and text exchanges that ping between characters, often laced with double meanings. In Normal People, we are blind-copied into emails between Marianne and Connell over years as they push and pull against each other. Conversations with Friends, too, is filled with texts, that, even when seemingly banal, are still heavy with other possible interpretations. One reflection from Frances captures the ambiguity that lurks behind their exchanges: “Bobbi and I discussed at length what Bobbi would wear to the dinner, under the guise of talking about what we should both wear.”
In Rooney's world, or might we say, the Rooneyverse, this kind of interaction is a way of sending out a signal and allowing for the torture of waiting for a response. In this way, committing yourself to paper, or the screen, is a form of telegraphing your feelings in the hope you can be understood. Sex, then, when it finally arrives, is an exercise in pretending it wasn't always in the script. "I can't believe we did that," Nick says, after he and Frances kiss for the first time. "Yes, you can," she replies.
Beautiful World, Where Are You – another epistolary novel which Rooney published last year – is punctuated with email exchanges that link the two women of the book through their faltering romances, Marxist meditations, anxieties about motherhood and lockdown boredom. The novel contains a brief holiday to Rome, the glamorous promise of which sours as the would-be couple attempt the fraught dance of understanding one another in person. Here the holiday only amplifies the class gulf between the two – one a celebrated writer, the other a worker in an Amazon-like distribution centre – and a kind of ugliness that rears its head as the pair jostle to be top dog in a contest of who cares less.
Life moves slowly during these summers, where a single glance carries the weight of a chorus of longing sighs. The problem with this horny malaise is that it seems more concerned with reflecting a general atmosphere than the specific feelings of one person, or the dynamics of a particular relationship: instead it becomes an algorithm-formed Spotify playlist about generic summer heartbreak.
In the two TV series, we are immersed in the sunny locations of the novels: from the beachy enclave of Monkstown in Conversations with Friends, where Nick and Melissa's house stands at the edge of the sea, to the sprawling villa in Trieste, Italy, to which Marianne, Connell and their friends decamp en masse in Normal People. Summer is where the intense relationships that have been formed from messages crisscrossing between devices burn brightest but are also at their most forbidden.
The beautiful surroundings feel intended to provide a point of contrast to all the sadness and longing bubbling inside them. As alluring as it is to watch beautiful people desperately miserable about not getting what they want, or indeed getting what they want and being miserable about it, it doesn't necessarily make for good drama. In the Rooneyverse it's hard not to wonder: if everyone is sexy and sad then is anyone really either of those things at all?
‘Conversations with Friends’ is on BBC Three now
