You know that satisfied feeling you get when you finally read a book that’s been on your TBR list forever and actually like it? That’s exactly how I felt when I finished Conversations with Friends. It’s the second novel I’ve read by Sally Rooney and I’m definitely a fan of her work. I enjoy the way she writes her characters and how her stories unfold.

Conversations with Friends is about best friends, Frances and Bobbi, and their budding friendship with a with a well-known photographer, Melissa, and her husband, Nick.  Frances is just your typical bisexual, communist, poetry-writing college student, who happens to be having an affair with Nick. Okay, so not typical—but makes for a great voice. I like the way that Frances thinks—even though it’s radically different from me. I think that’s part of why I loved relaxing and cracking open this book. It felt like an escape from my normal thought process. 

Bobbi is quite the character as well. She has a bossy, out-going personality. She serves as a foil to Frances’ calm and emotionally-detached demeanor. Bobbi and Frances dated in high school but stayed friends after their breakup. They are understandably very close and hang out all the time. One thing they like doing together is performing poetry that Frances writes. It’s at one of their performances that Melissa enters the picture. Then later Nick comes along.

I would describe their marriage as deeply unhappy. I honestly can’t understand why they’re still together, because they clearly don’t enjoy each other’s company. But then that brings us to the affair which is written in such a weird ambiguous way, because it feels like the characters cared about the affair but they didn’t care at the same time. Yes, Frances and Nick were guilty and secretive about it. But it kept on going.

In an interview I read in the back of the novel, Rooney says she didn’t think the characters “were any worse than protagonists in other novels” and she viewed them as foolish instead of evil. That was interesting to me, because so often people try to label fictional characters as a good guy or bad guy, when sometimes they just exist in a weird gray area.

Overall, I thought that book was thought-provoking and fascinating. It makes me look forward to the next novel Rooney writes whenever that happens. If you don’t mind a little moral ambiguity, lack of quotation marks, and enjoy witty banter, then you might need to add this novel to your own TBR list.