Sally Rooney got famous really fast.
Her first novel, “Conversation With Friends,” won 2017’s London Sunday Times Writer of the Year Award. “Normal People,” published the following year, was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, became a bestseller in the U.S., and was adapted as a widely watched TV series.
According to the New York Times, her name has become “an easy shorthand for a certain cultural sensibility, even to those who haven’t read a word she’s written.” The Times goes on to say that Rooney has been called “the first great Millennial novelist” and “Salinger for the Snapchat generation.”
But with the publication of her third novel, “Beautiful World, Where Are You,” Rooney has been talking about the downside of fame. She told the Guardian: “As far as I can make out, the way that celebrity works in our present cultural moment is that particular people enter very rapidly, with little or no preparation, into public life, becoming objects of widespread public discourse, debate and critique. … It’s in the interests of profit-driven industries to exploit those gifts and to turn the gifted person into a kind of commodity.
“Why should someone have to disclose facts about their upbringing and family life to the public, just because they’ve written a novel? Shouldn’t they be allowed to maintain a dignified silence about their personal life? The privacy of the individual seems to come up against the wider demands of the culture here.”
In Rooney’s new novel, Alice, a writer, has a nervous breakdown after her novel becomes wildly successful. Her fame makes her miserable. “I never advertised myself as a psychologically robust person, capable of withstanding extensive public inquiries into my personality and upbringing. … What is the relationship of the famous author to their famous books anyway? If I had bad manners and spoke with an irritating accent, which in my opinion is probably the case, would it have anything to do with my novels?”
You may be thinking, “Boo-hoo. Poor rich, famous Sally.” But let’s consider for a moment what our current culture demands offiction作家,通常非常私人的人花的majority of their time alone in a room writing: a book tour, at the very least, answering questions not only about their books but as frequently about their personal lives, and about “how much of this is biographical?” And novelists are frequently encouraged by their publicists to have active social media accounts to keep their readers engaged.
At what price? Admittedly, there have always been writers who adore the attention andclearlysee it as a way to connect with their readers. Novelist Joyce Maynard’s Facebook page, for example, shares almost daily details about her personal life, replete with videos of her early morning meditation, family vacations and singing in her living room with old friends. Oh, yes, and book promotion too. It must work: She has 33,000 followers.
Other writers eschew the limelight entirely. Before the publication of her first novel, “Troubling Love” (1992), the notoriously private Elena Ferrante,author of the wildly famous “Neopolitan Novels,”told her publisher, “I do not intend to do anything for ‘Troubling Love,’ anything that might involve the public engagement of me personally. I’ve already done enough for this long story: I wrote it. If the book is worth anything, that should be sufficient.”
Books, said Ferrante, “once they are written, have no need of their authors. If they have something to say, they will sooner or later find readers; if not, they won’t.” Amongtheother famously reclusive writersareJ.D. Salinger, Thomas Pynchon, Harper Lee, Emily Dickinson and Cormac McCarthy. Didn’t seem to hurt them much.
We all can name writers whose public personas got the better of them. I remember seeing Hunter S. Thompson at the Mabuhay Gardens, the epicenter of San Francisco’s punk scene, in a “performance” in the 1980s. Thompson, so drunk he could hardly stand up, much less read from his work, was cheered by the audience, several of whom waved bottles of Wild Turkey, his favored libation. They had clearly come to see their favorite outlaw in action.
So I’m arguing that Rooney has a point. There are plenty of celebrities famous for being famous. Let them bask in the spotlight. If writerschooses to preen and opine in public, fine. But let’s let those who prefer privacy have it. Let their work speak for itself.