Sally Rooney and the two sides of fame

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This weekend, Sally Rooney will be crowned a #1 Sunday Times bestseller. Her fourth novel, Intermezzo, was published last week to fanfare and hysteria. There were late night and early morning queues outside bookshops; ticketed gatherings to watch an online screening of her sold-out London event . . .

The bestseller charts are dominated by uninspiring fiction. Rooney is a phenomenon in the literary fiction world for becoming one of the best known novelists writing today, and for doing so while being genuinely good. Yet I anticipated the release of her novel with gritted teeth. The hot takes and bad faith reviews felt as inevitable as the hysteria.

Rooney has spoken before about her unease around being in the public eye. She gets called a private person but she is only someone who wants a life undisrupted by the trappings of fame. When you make art, the side effect is scrutiny. Built into the nature of releasing something to the public is an imbalance. You know little of the people experiencing your work while they build a connection with you. That’s why fans can get enraged if celebrities don’t stop for a photograph or a signature or a chat. When someone ascends to fame quickly, they have no time to acclimatise to this imbalance. (Neither do the public — there is little online record to feed off, and sometimes a wariness as to whether the person has earned it).

Pop sensation Chappell Roan has suffered the effect. The viral success of one of her songs led her into a sudden spotlight and prompted delayed attention for her 2023 album The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess (her monthly listeners on Spotify increased by 500 per cent between February and April). “I don’t care that this crazy type of behaviour comes along with the job,” she said in a TikTok video about her experience of stalking, harassment and online bullying. “That does not make it okay . . . [That] doesn’t mean that I want it.”

Social media has only intensified this relationship. I’m not surprised Rooney quit Twitter. People don’t queue at midnight for my novels but I’ve still contended with messages — some creepy, some sweet — that can overwhelm. It’s a negotiation that happens at any level of public success. A relationship to the press becomes a trade-off, too — how much are you willing to give to promote your art: a confessional that links to your novel? A print interview slot where they prettify you beyond recognition and stick a crude quote in the headline but which is known for good sales effect?

It is not a binary choice (exposure or obscurity), you negotiate between the two. There is a genuine tension in that what you do in public is in service to your work. If you’ve spent years writing a novel, of course you’re going to say yes to talking about it, even if talking risks discomfort. Rooney, in a recent interview with writer Chris Power, said “Whenever I publish a novel I feel obliged to answer questions about it — as if it would be poor form not to . . . Maybe I ought not answer any questions at all. But I feel like it’s a way of remaining loyal to my work and not shying away from it.” It’s a tricky subject because fame and success are usually merged together as a concept. Readers, viewers, listeners — they are fundamental. It can be profound to see people building a relationship with your work. But the work is meant to be on stage, the maker in the wings.

There’s a gendered slant too. From my own experience, there is a particularly charged assumption that my fiction is probably about myself, and that — if that’s a contract I’ve already initiated — I ought to give more. This is sometimes obvious — a live radio interviewer demanding I tell them the extent of my experience of sexual harassment — and sometimes insidious. It makes me think of the circus around Elena Ferrante, whose pseudonym was disregarded as journalists hunted for her real name . . . all for the crime of writing fiction without wanting to participate in the publicity.

The problem with how we tout women and youth is not new. We patronise, generalise, scrutinise, fetishise. Rooney is not the voice of a generation, nor of young women — she is her own thing. (As, by the way, we all are — so stop calling Irish female writers “the next Sally Rooney”.) It’s not new, either, to feel a tension between acclaim and attention: even Virginia Woolf observed her sales figures, reviews and growing profile while decrying the harm some of it had.

Yet acknowledging the impact can still be taken as ingratitude. “They think I’m complaining about my success,” Roan says of disgruntled fans. “I’m complaining about being abused.” Fame, particularly in fields where it isn’t the default, is simplified into a blessing, rather than understood as a complicated byproduct of commodification and success. No sustained good thing is uncomplicatedly so — admitting that doesn’t take away from the fact that being the subject of careful thought is a rare privilege.

Rebecca Watson’s new novel, ‘I Will Crash’, is published by Faber

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