Different Selves in Cross-Media Narratives: An Analysis of Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends

Abstract

Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney depicts a love story between Frances, a Dublin college student, and Nick, a married, middle-class actor. The author creatively integrates film narrative and digital media narrative into the novel, thus employing different media for expression. When the novel was successfully adapted into a TV series in 2022, fan participation, media interviews, and actors’ interpretations fleshed out the characters, extending the process of cross-media remediation. Frances gradually accomplishes self-construal in the process of cross-media narrative, searching for the individual self, relational self, and collective self. In this article, Frances’ individual, collective, and relational selves are analyzed by exploring the effects of film and digital media narrative and cross-media remediation. We develop new perspectives on the interaction of multiple media and the intersection of narrative techniques. In breaking down the barriers between the text and the real world, millennials’ breakups, adherence to communist ideals, and awakening of female consciousness are well depicted. Due to Rooney’s cross-media narrative, the novel’s features could also bring the readers a film-like experience, thus making it suitable for visual adaptation.

1. Introduction

Novelist Sally Rooney is one of the representative “millennial” Irish women writers (Darling 2020). Her first novel, Conversations with Friends, received praise for its observations on contemporary relationships and examination of millennial culture upon publication. Since its publication in 2017, Conversations with Friends has been covered by major foreign media, and studies of it were published almost immediately.

Rooney was born in February 1991 in Castlebar, County Mayo, Ireland. Exposed to literature at an early age, she had been influenced by her mother, who was the director of a community arts center, where Rooney often attended plays, visual arts exhibits, and other events with her siblings. She also showed great insight into the economic and political trends of the modern world. While at Trinity College, Dublin, she earned a degree in English literature, was a member of the debating team, and earned the distinction of being the most competitive debater in Europe at the age of 22.

Aware of the structural similarities between the love crisis and the economic crisis, Sally Rooney analyzed and criticized the post-anarchist tendencies in the Western world. Rooney’s writing highlights issues of class inequality, intimacy, and politics. Her debut novel, Conversations with Friends (Rooney 2017a), tells of a love affair between Frances, a college student, and an older married actor, Nick. The novel, which emphasizes the construction of personal political identities in complex interpersonal relationships, was voted the most popular debut work in 2017. Rooney’s second novel, Normal People (Rooney 2018), follows a twisted but unshakeable romantic relationship between the two protagonists, Cornell and Marianne. It conveys themes of class inequality, patriarchy, and identity and received the 2018 Irish Book Award for Novel of the Year. Her next novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You (Rooney 2021), features four protagonists’ intertwined lives and won the 2022 Dalkey Literary Awards prize for Novel of the Year. She is seen as a representative writer of the Irish youth in responding to the global capitalist economic crisis through her novels.

The novel Conversations with Friends follows the complex relationships between four young people living in Dublin, Ireland. A highlight of this novel is the intersection of narrative media, as Rooney incorporates online communications into the text. The internet provides important background support, exemplifying the extent to which the younger generation has integrated technology into their daily lives and thoughts. Email, texting, instant messaging, and Facebook posts are undeniable components of the characters’ daily lives. Underpinned by these media, the characters in the story engage in diverse conversations that unravel the mystery of Frances’ series of relationships. Strange and awkward intimacies are the focus of this story and are the source of Frances’ self-contradiction. The novel centers around how she comes to recognize, accept, and truly be reconciled with herself. Conversations with Friends was successfully adapted into a TV series in May 2022. The audience participation and fan effect rounded out the entire storyline, thus constructing a whole storyworld. The narrative technique in Conversations with Friends has been highly praised for its multi-media conversations.

Current academic discourse on connotations of ‘cross-media narrative’ takes two perspectives. The first refers to the joint accomplishment of the narrative of events through media such as pictures, sounds, and text. Wolf (2017) makes a distinction between intra-compositional and extra-compositional cross-media narratives. The former includes synaesthesia, temporal narratives, and spatial narratives. Ryan (2000) states that creating syncretic and synaesthetic language in textual composition engages all the senses and simulates the effects of the medium. She also introduces the concepts of ‘temporal immersion’ and ‘spatial immersion’. Extra-compositional cross-media narratives consist mainly of social media, film, and music narratives. The narrative function of social media is achieved through sequences of social media posts on platforms such as X, Facebook, and Instagram, and interactions on social media platforms constitute the main content of the narrative. Western scholar Bordwell (1987) discusses narrative issues in the medium of film, exploring what film narrative is, its mechanisms, film language and pictures, and its space and time. Chinese scholar Long (2019, 2020) suggests that words are still the basic tool through which novelists create cross-media musical narratives. However, by imitating or borrowing certain features of musical art, they create an aesthetic effect similar to that of music in content and form. The second perspective on cross-media narrative refers to ‘remediation’, which means adapting one medium to another based on the intersection of multiple media (Bolter and Grusin 2000, p. 45). Marie-Laure Ryan proposes the concept of ‘storyworlds’ based on cross-media, where literature on multiple platforms is seen as a whole storyworld. When viewed as the convergence of multiple media, remediation has led to the creation of storyworlds (Ryan and Thon 2014). Due to the large amount of internet references used by Rooney, the novel Conversations with Friends could also be seen as an internet novel. Many scholars have noticed the revolutionary impact of computer network technology on literary communication. The traditional clear boundaries between the author’s works and readers in the information flow have blurred, leading to redefined functions and intertwined roles for each (Gendolla and Schäfer 2007). To some extent, modern people see their social media platform posts as a new form of personal history, which could be the stories written by themselves.

Based on the proposition of ancient Greek philosopher Socrates to ‘Know thyself’, the academic community has long researched and discussed the concept of ‘self’. At the psychological level, Markus and Kitayama (1991) first introduced the concept of self-construal, which refers to individuals’ tendency to perceive themselves in the context of a referential system. Western individualistic cultures emphasize the significance of each person as an individual, while Eastern cultures believe in the value of interpersonal relationships and require people to connect with and depend on each other. Thus, Markus and Kitayama (1991) distinguish between independent and interdependent self-construal, typical of Western and Eastern cultures, respectively. The former focuses on uniqueness, personal independence, and self-representation associated with personal traits, abilities, and preferences. The latter emphasizes connections with others and the desire for favorable interpersonal relationships, mainly in the context of interpersonal interactions (Markus and Kitayama 1991). Lam (2006) defines self-construal as the extent to which individuals perceive themselves to be in a socially relational situation. Later research extending Markus and Kitayama’s (1991) theoretical system has further divided interdependent self-construal into group-oriented and relational-oriented. The former is universal in collectivist cultures, while the latter is individualistic, typical of the self-construal of females in North American cultures (Cross et al. 2000). Brewer and Gardner (1996) and Sedikides and Brewer (2001) have advanced Markus and Kitayama’s theory in two major ways. First, independence and dependence are two basic human needs, and both personal and interpersonal self-construction coexist in each individual. Second, interpersonal self-construction can be further divided. Sedikides and Brewer’s (2001) tripartite model of self-construal posits that each individual’s self-construal has three components: the individual self, the relational self, and the collective self. This involves defining the self in terms of its own uniqueness, in terms of its relationship with intimacy, and in terms of its relationship with the group to which it belongs.

Hayles views internet literature as a practice that integrates human and machine cognition, which she terms “intermediation”. She also notes that traditional books will not disappear, but they will inevitably be influenced by digital technology, which will become the textual form of literature in the 21st century (Hayles 2008). The popularity of Rooney’s novels could be a great example. Readers can see that the author’s unique cross-media skills allow her to construct a unique “storyworld”.

In this article, we attempt to connect the two core concepts, “cross-media narrative” and “self-construal”, as the former could influentially shape the latter in a piece of literary work. The concept of “digital personhood” has already been noticed by scholars in the field of business, and social media users could operate online as their “authentic selves” can be empowered, and each user has the potential to present and construct multiple selves (Kerrigan and Hart 2016, p. 1701) In this Rooney novel, in what ways does the author’s cross-media narrative technique help the protagonist’s self-construction? How did these writing techniques facilitate the subsequent successful adaptations of the TV series? What kind of female protagonist’s self does the author want to portray and construct through these techniques? In this article, we try to answer the above questions by exploring the experiences and growth of the heroine, Frances, and finally depict the millennial generation’s exploration and deconstruction of the individual self, relational self, and collective self.

2. The Individual Self Presented in the Film Narrative

Individual or personal identity refers to aspects of self-definition at the level of the individual person. These may include goals, values, and beliefs (Marcia 1966; Waterman 1999). In the novel, Frances’ construction of the individual self involves identity loss, identity awakening, and identity formation. Both fiction and film have narrative languages, but the key to film narrative is to transform the flat art of straightforward fiction narration into three-dimensional art. To some extent, Sally Rooney’s writing also has the characteristics of a film narrative, and therefore, its later adaptation into a TV serial also became a great success. She uses visual writing to script and strongly visualize the fictional text. She integrates techniques of film narrative into the text, such as visual focalization, flashbacks, and psychological monologue, to present Frances’ growth.

2.1. Identity Loss in Visual Focalization

Research on the adaption of the novel to a BBC TV series, directed by Lenny Abrahamson and Leanne Welham, has also emerged since its release. From the perspective of cinematography skills, there is something almost sacred about how the kiss is filmed, and sexual frankness is key to this adaptation of Rooney’s debut novel. The director employs diegetic silence to showcase the kiss between Frances and Nick in Conversations with Friends, thereby capturing the secrecy and intimacy of the moment. So, the kiss is filmed in a manner that conveys an almost sacred aura. This effect of visual focalization could also be traced to the original text in the novel.

The series is set against overcast Irish backdrops and strikes a romantic, melancholic mood (Chaney 2022). When describing the characters, the camera rarely feels intrusive yet misses nothing. It sees how other characters note these, often with an air of stubborn nonchalance (Han 2022). The frequent close-ups make viewers feel like they are cocooned in the same space that Frances and Nick create for themselves. Remoteness is designed between the characters, who find themselves speaking for the first time with genuine vulnerability. The show is restrained, and the characters’ detachment threatens to be bloodless and opaque. Music is also a key topic. Conversations with Friends is a love story enhanced by a pop soundtrack of Roxy Music and Irish band Wyvern Lingo. The show’s eclectic sounds are underpinned by the atmosphere of Irish indie and rich, neo-classical piano by composer Ólafur Arnalds (Hunt 2022).

The film differs from the text in that it is a multi-sensory medium using visual representation as the main form of expression and achieves the purpose of narrative through the use of a changing lens. The technique of visual focalization applied in film narratology refers both to the optical system of the camera providing the picture and to the person who witnesses it. This means that when choosing the point of view and determining the camera position, the film is concerned with responding to questions of who is filming, how to film, and in what position to film.

Since this is a first-person novel, the author leads us to follow Frances’ eyes into her world. Where is her sight focused? Is her vision blurry and out of focus? These are what we, as readers, have to experience through Frances’s perspective. First-person novels have this characteristic, and their narrative focus allows us to see the protagonist’s own identity focus. When fictional texts draw on cinematic focus at the level of narrative perspective, they focus more on who, how, and where the situational character is observed and perceived. In Conversations with Friends, Rooney’s visualization of language gives the novel a graphic quality. As Frances becomes the visual narrator, focalization, ambiguous focalization, and shifts in focalization appear through her eyes. The author demonstrates Frances’ identity loss through colorful, spatial descriptions of Melissa’s house, depictions of performances with Bobbi, and comparisons with Nick on receiving a photo image file.

The focalization of Melissa’s house demonstrates Frances’ self-disguise. At the beginning of the novel, Frances’ perception of herself is unclear owing to the inferiority of her class, family, and even character. This leads to the beginning of her self-disguise, which is essentially the concealment of her true self, and is especially evident when she prepares to be photographed by Melissa: ‘I felt excited, ready for the challenge of visiting a stranger’s home, already preparing compliments and certain facial expressions to make myself seem charming’ (Rooney 2017a, p. 9). Frances pretends to be a charming person when confronted with strangers. When she first steps into Melissa’s middle-class home, the splendor of the house makes her feel uncomfortable and nervous. Here, instead of depicting a panoramic view of the house, Rooney focuses her lens only on small objects with implied meanings. The camera focuses on a spaniel barking in the hallway, showing company, and then turns to a stack of change, a hairbrush, and an open tube of lipstick, illustrating temporal traces of living. When it focuses on the Modigliani print on the wall, the warm, comfortable, happy, and artistic sense of this home completely conquers Frances, making her feel that this is a whole house and a family could live there. Frances depicts the house from the outside to the inside. She remembers the color, space, temperature, lights, and decorations in detail; however, the more detailed the description of the house, the more emotional ups and downs she experiences. The more comfortable and gorgeous the house, the stronger Frances’ insecurity grows because she knows that she does not belong there, so she hides her critical, envious eyes and acts as a warm and polite house visitor.

The poem’s performance with Bobbi highlights Frances’ self-loss. Whenever she is with Bobbi, her eyes follow Bobbi, while Frances is a character with ambiguous focalization. It seems that she sometimes forgets herself when she focuses on Bobbi. Frances and Bobbi often perform spoken word poetry as a double act at Trinity College, Dublin. Descriptions of their performances in the novel present Frances’ loss of identity. The narrator, namely Frances, always focuses on Bobbi on the stage, even though Frances is the one who writes the poems. She admires Bobbi deeply since Bobbi has an independent personality, catching everyone’s attention. On stage, Frances keeps reminding herself what to do by watching and imitating Bobbi. After the performance, Bobbi always points, exhales, and says nothing, so Frances must act as their representative, which means a lot of smiling. In the TV series, the contrast between cool Bobbi with focalization and smiling Frances with ambiguous focalization could also be clearly observed by the audience. Frances describes herself as ‘a smiling girl’. Smiling has an implied meaning here—in this context, it is not one of heartfelt joy and happiness, let alone confidence and satisfaction in her performance; on the contrary, smiling is the expression of a false ego caused by a lack of self-confidence. This is a polite ‘stage image’ that Frances presents to everyone. The smile is a false mask, suggesting Frances’ loss of self-perception. Comments by others also play a role in her self-loss. Bobbi tells Frances by way of compliment that she does not have a ‘real personality’. Frances reflects on these comments: ‘At any time I felt I could do or say anything at all, and only afterward think: oh, so that’s the kind of person who I am’ (Rooney 2017a, p. 29). Her self-perception is limited to the standards of others’ judgments. Frances treats herself as seen through the eyes of others as her true self and constructs herself through others’ comments, which is essentially a manifestation of loss of self-identity.

The image files with Nick show Frances’ self-deprecation using the perspective of a focalization shift from Frances to Nick. Self-disguise may gradually lead to loss of self-identity; in such cases, comparison with others will cause self-deprecation. After their first acquaintance, the narrator’s focalization is always on Nick as Frances searches for photos of him on the internet. The readers of the novel may not portray Frances’ appearance since she does not give much description at the beginning of the novel. Her focus has either been on Bobbi or Nick.

Nick’s career as an actor means there are plenty of resources and information available online to learn about him, most directly through pictures. In fact, by this time, Frances is already attracted to Nick, whose pictures on the internet remind her that she is the one who has accomplished nothing. Frances thinks that at twenty-one, she has no achievements or possessions that prove she is a serious person. This is a kind of self-deprecation from the perspective of ability, and Frances also self-deprecates from the perspective of appearance. When Melissa sends Frances the image file, she begins to compare herself with Bobbi and Nick from the viewpoint of appearance. Even before seeing the image file, Frances thinks she will be the supporting character in the pictures. She subconsciously feels that she will be the one who is ignored, will not be noticed, and will not be placed at the center of the picture. However, when she unexpectedly finds that the photos are not bad, she finally becomes the focalizer of her own camera. Nick again catches her attention, rather than appreciating herself: ‘He looked luminously attractive. It was difficult to look at the photo set and not feel that he was the primary presence in the room’ (Rooney 2017a, p. 30). In the photo, Frances is symbolic, but Nick is shining, and maybe that is what makes him a successful actor. The lack of physical appearance makes Frances feel even more self-deprecating. The visual focalizations in the novel, led mostly by the narrator, Frances, show the audience that she subconsciously thinks both Bobbi and Nick outshine herself. It should also be noted that she has had intimate relationships with both Bobbi and Nick and while she sees herself as much less important than them, that is because of the identity loss at the beginning of the novel—and later, she successfully pulls herself together step by step. This process will be analyzed in depth in later sections.

2.2. Identity Awakening with Flashbacks

Traditional films use flashbacks as an artistic technique, with fleeting images showing the characters’ mental activities, psychological states, and emotional ups and downs. Researchers have also studied symbolic meaning in the text. For example, hands are a recurring motif, emphasizing the book’s concern with connection and figures thereof (Rooney 2017b). In addition, Nick is referred to as ‘handsome’ at least 11 times in the novel, although it is unclear whether this is pointedly to objectify him or an editorial oversight. Money is something that Frances’ acquaintances do not seem to care about, whereas, for her, it is a matter of real anxiety (Rooney 2017a, p. 321). Mirrors appear 23 times in the text, implying that Frances is confirming her own image. Flashback is a montage narrative technique in which a scene is suddenly inserted into another scene shot or fragment. Rooney uses several specific images in the novel to create the effect of flashbacks. The repeated images represent the awakening of Frances’ personality through pain. The symbolic description of film narrative is applied in the text, especially the symbols of ‘face’ and ‘mirror’, which represent Frances’ insistence on maintaining her self-image. Also, the awakening of the heroine’s consciousness is reflected mainly through body pain, which is connected with her psychological trauma.

First comes the blurry face in the mirror. ‘Mirror’ appears 27 times in this novel as a manifestation of Frances recognizing herself. She practices the smiles of others in a mirror. She thinks that Bobbi is another version of herself from how she actually appears in the mirror. When Frances feels insecure, the image of the mirror appears as a flashback. When Melissa shows her hospitable face, a flashback appears to a scene in which Frances is learning how to smile nicely through imitation in front of a mirror. In the novel, Frances says that when Bobbi talks about her, it feels similar to seeing herself in a mirror ‘for the first time’. Before a poetry performance, Frances becomes so nervous that she immerses herself in the mirror, trying to stay awake while being confused with anxiety. Her face is plain and extremely thin, and she chooses to wear dark clothes with severe necklines to make herself interesting. She checks her outfit over and over again, so much so that she cannot recognize her own face: ‘Eventually the features of my face seemed to come apart from one another or at least lose their ordinary relationships to each other, similar to a word you read so many times it makes no sense anymore’ (Rooney 2017a, p. 51). Here is actually the awakening of her own sense of identity, her first acceptance of her mediocre self, making efforts to make herself interesting. Through repeated observation and confirmation, she switches back and forth between the ambiguity of self-awareness and self-loss.

Body pain caused by self-harm leads to sobriety, which helps to awaken Frances’ personality. When she sees her father’s dirty room and thinks of her unhappy childhood and family, the camera flashes back to a scene of her self-harming. Self-harming behavior appears many times in the novel and is a process of self-psychological recovery for Frances. She is loathsome and resistant to her body when she is in a bad mood, and hurting herself is a way for her to maintain her ego. The broken body comes to her mind as a flashback when writing poems because of being caught having an affair. She starts to view her own body as an item of garbage, an empty wrapper, or a half-eaten and discarded piece of fruit. After the crisis of a fake miscarriage, she chooses to console herself with an over-long shower and self-harm. She showers until she feels really clean, and the tips of her fingers start to turn a creepy whitish-grey color. Then she starts to hurt herself: ‘I reached for the soft part on the inside of my left elbow and pinched it so tightly between my thumbnail and forefinger that I tore the skin open’ (Rooney 2017a, p. 151). The torn skin seems to be able to eclipse her pain, and the blood purifies her mind. It is only through physical pain that spiritual liberation can commence: ‘That was it. It was over then. It was all going to be okay’ (Rooney 2017a, p. 234). This is the sobriety she gains after self-harm. Sickness and disease also surround Frances and serve as flashbacks from time to time, bringing her pain while reminding her of who she is and how she really feels confronted with hard reality. This gives her the courage to be brave and not dare to escape. Every time Frances experiences menstrual pain, the camera always pulls into the bathroom, shattering all the false goodness she experienced before and reminding her that only the pain is real. The diseases depicted throughout the text include severe dysmenorrhea, cystitis, a miscarriage scare, and endometriosis. Being sick makes her aware of the differences between Nick and herself, which helps her to recognize the reality of the situation. When she develops cystitis, she spends the evenings looking at her own hands or trying to focus on a laptop screen, but it feels disgusting, as if her body were full of evil bacteria. She compares herself to Nick to remind herself that they are not the same kind of people: ‘I knew that Nick was suffering no similar after-effects. There was nothing equivalent about us’ (Rooney 2017a, p. 117). The illness is also a reminder of the financial gap between her and Nick. One day, she dreams she has a problem with her teeth. Her mother is sitting far away from her and says: It’s expensive to get these things fixed.’ It is when the blood flows in her mouth that she feels the existence of her entity.

2.3. Identity Formation Through Psychological Monologue

The awakening of Frances’ self-consciousness is generated in the dialogue with herself, which resembles a film monologue. Monologuing is a technique often used in movies, which may be less obvious in literary works. Here, we use the term “psychological monologue” to refer to the literary technique where a character delivers an extended internal thought process, essentially speaking directly to the reader about their inner turmoil, motivations, and complex emotions, often revealing deep psychological insights into their mind, usually through the use of stream of consciousness or a close-to-first person perspective. This technique could easily be overlooked because the novel itself is a first-person narration.

Rooney uses lots of psychological monologues to express Frances’ inner emotions directly. When actions cannot express the characters’ psychological state, monologue is used to supplement them. When confronted with Melissa’s raised camera, Bobbi-like hair, and almost unconscious suffering from illness, Frances’ psychological monologue promotes the construction of her individual self.

The first stage is her self-defense against Melissa. The formation of self-identity is first demonstrated by the self-defense mechanism triggered by the offense of others. In Melissa’s previous photo shoot, Frances was always passive but cooperative and did not consider being photographed as offensive. However, when Frances receives a phone call from her father reminding her to save money, she feels very frustrated and even angry with Melissa’s raised camera, provoking an inner monologue: ‘In the corner of my eye I could see Melissa lift her camera and I turned away irritably, as if Melissa had wronged me by lifting her camera, or by doing something else a long time ago’ (Rooney 2017a, p. 166). Here, Frances makes a defensive gesture towards the camera, which represents progress and independence from the previous numbness of accepting others’ opinions. Melissa is a well-known writer and journalist who enjoys a middle-class lifestyle and has a handsome actor husband. Confronted with these facts, Frances shifts from her previous self-abasement to courageous resistance, manifesting the independence inspired in her character.

The second stage of the awakening of Frances’ self-consciousness is her self-uniqueness, which is distinguished from Bobbi. The pursuit of uniqueness is an important facet of identity construction. Moving from the pursuit of conformity with others to the pursuit of individual independence is the embodiment of her confident personality. Frances tends to imitate and follow Bobbi to such a degree that she forgets her original personality and appearance. In Chapter 2, she thinks about how, when she is doing something dull, such as walking home from work or hanging up laundry, she likes to imagine that she looks similar to Bobbi. She thinks that Bobbi has a better posture than she does, with a memorably beautiful face. This kind of presence is so real to her that when she accidentally catches sight of her reflection and sees her appearance, she feels a strange, depersonalizing shock. At this stage, Frances seeks consistency with others, but she has no perception of her own identity. However, she gradually realizes that this consistency is not her true self and begins to loathe the pretend self: ‘I wasn’t the kind of person I pretend to be. I thought of myself trying to be witty in front of Nick’s friends in the utility room and felt sick. I didn’t belong to rich houses’ (Rooney 2017a, p. 84). She realizes that she is only ever invited to places similar to that because of Bobbi, who has a quality that makes Frances invisible by comparison. She previously thought of Bobbi as her ideal twin sister, but she begins to realize that she wants to speak up for herself and live her own life. This uniqueness can be seen when Bobbi helps Frances to cut her hair:

We could give you a fringe, said Bobbi.

No, people mix us up too much already.

It’s offensive to me how offensive that is to you.

(Rooney 2017a, p. 88)

The act of cutting her fringe makes Frances’ pursuit of her own uniqueness most obvious. It indicates that she is trying to announce to the world that she and Bobbi are not the same, nor must she be invisible on occasions when Bobbi is around.

The third and last stage of Frances’ awakening self-consciousness is her meditation in the church. Her final step of individual self-construal is established by a cognitive reawakening after an episode of illness. In December, Frances suffers complications after taking her medication. The cramps come on in waves and leave her weak and sweating when they recede. As she walks home down the street, her legs tremble, her vision begins to disintegrate, and then she comes to the church. Never having been in a church before, she embarks on introspection and meditation before God in an almost delirious state. She starts to address a series of questions to herself in the name of God’s help:

Am I myself, or am I them? Is this me, Frances? Do I sometimes hurt and harm myself? Do I have a troubled relationship with my body, yes. Do I want to be free of pain and therefore that others also live free of pain, the pain which is mine and therefore also theirs, yes, yes.

(Rooney 2017a, p. 399)

When she opens her eyes, she feels that she has understood something, and the cells of her body seem to light up, similar to millions of glowing points of contact, which is something profound. The awakening in pain is a crucial part of Frances’ self-development. This moment in conversation with herself makes her realize how she actually perceives the world and how she wants to live her own life.

3. The Relational Self Revealed by Digital Media Narrative

Since the 20th century, literary creation and its medium of expression have become progressively inseparable. With regard to the communicative properties and specific functions of the medium, Marie-Laure Ryan regards it as the material form of narrative and expression. The convergence of multiple media is emerging as an essential instrument of narrative. Jenkins (2003) first proposed the concept of ‘transmedia storytelling’, referring to constructing a storyworld that unfolds across different media platforms, with each platform contributing its own value. Opinions still differ on the concept of ‘transmedia storytelling’. Wolf (2017) characterizes the involvement of such works across different media as ‘intermediality’. Rose (2011) describes it as ‘deep media’, while Ryan (2004) defines it as ‘cross-media’, the term used in this article.

The relational self highlights one’s interpersonal side, which consists of attributes shared with close others, such as partners, friends, and family members, and defines their roles within the relationship. Murray (2011) regards digital media as a new stage on which old narratives are replayed in new dimensions. The media explosion that followed the so-called digital revolution boosted media studies tremendously. There were not only brand-new artistic media and modes of communication to investigate, including hypertext, computer games, web pages, email, chat rooms, virtual reality installations, and other media that depend on digital support but also old media to revisit.

3.1. Awkward Love Affair Through the Internet

As computers have taken over our lives, the word ‘cyberspace’ has invaded our vocabulary. This is a brash neologism coined from two venerable roots by science fiction writer Gibson (1982). Computers take us into cyberspace, and cyberspace is a virtual reality dominated by the internet. In the current era of digital media, communication between people relies increasingly on the telephone, the internet, messages, and emails. Since ‘Conversation’ is also a keyword in the novel’s title, this conception is also heatedly discussed in related studies. Rooney is said to be of the ‘tell-don’t-show’ school, and the many conversations that comprise most of the novel are presented as ‘he-said she-said reportage’ (Kilroy 2017). The novelty of the conversation described in the text lies in its integration of modern technology.

The internet is an important medium through which Rooney assimilates online communication into a new kind of prose. She is interested in exploring ‘e-mail voice’ in the text (Collins 2018). Digital communication is conveyed by making the chat available to readers, who watch the character correct, type, and erase text. Rooney’s transposition of internet voice to the page brings a certain tension to her narration (Collins 2018).

The development of literature is based on progress in reality, so digital media narratives inevitably emerge in these works. However, the effectiveness of storyline development and narrative varies because each medium is adopted in different ways.

Frances and Nick’s cyberspace acquaintance may be fake and concealed. Internet relationships may be intimate or distant. The internet plays a role in establishing Frances and Nick’s extramarital relationship. Frances’ crush on Nick begins with her searching for information about him on the internet. Probably because Nick is the only actor she knows, she pays particular attention to his updates and acting experience. Searching for his information on the internet leaves no traces, providing a hidden space of intimacy. The openness of information and the transparency of the virtual world shorten the distance between Frances and Nick, and Frances is able to learn a lot about him without talking to him, so they become ‘familiar strangers’. In this case, Frances fantasizes about feelings that do not actually exist. For instance, her favorite photo of them together, taken by Melissa, highlights a vaguely ambiguous relationship: Frances looks straight into the lens with a dreamy expression, and Nick looks at her as if waiting for her to say something. She thinks it captures something intimate that has never really happened. Frances subsequently falls gradually into this love affair with Nick.

Cyberspace leads to false intimacy in the virtual reality of their relationship. After Melissa gives Frances Nick’s email address, they gradually begin to communicate with each other. At first, their communication is polite: Frances says thank you for some tickets, and Nick replies that he would like to see her performance. They gradually become familiar with each other. While communicating online, some factors make the relationship more and more ambiguous, leading to a kind of false intimacy. The first point is that Nick does not follow a formal format and language in email replies to Frances. Putting all the letters in lowercase narrows the distance between them. After Frances and Nick cross the line and kiss, Nick sends an email with the initials still in lowercase, which is a relief to Frances as it means that their ambiguous relationship can continue. Frances thinks it would have been dramatic to introduce capitalization at such a moment of tension. Their relationship becomes even closer on the internet than in real life. When she is out there with Nick and others, she might not comment on something right away but might think of a humorous way to retell the story in her email. This hidden intimacy of affection is rising rapidly in the context of the internet.

Finally, Frances has to recognize and return to harsh reality. As previously mentioned, the internet may both shorten and widen the distance between people because on-screen emotion cannot be perceived exactly, the voice cannot be heard, facial expressions cannot be seen, and over-interpretation of emails may trigger relational crises. At the same time, the illusory ambiguity on the internet is eroded by harsh reality. Internet communication has inherent disadvantages, meaning that Frances and Nick cannot have effective conversations. This is the direct reason for their breakup:

Nick: i don’t know what you want

Nick: obviously we can’t see each other very often

Nick: and having an affair is reasonably stressful

me: haha

me: are you breaking up with me

Nick: if we never actually see one another

Nick: then the affair just consists of like

Nick: worrying about the affair

Nick: do you see what i mean

me: I can’t believe you’re breaking up with me over instant message.

(Rooney 2017a, p. 120)

Their internet conversations have no punctuation or expression, presenting an indifferent tone and an elusive mood. Furthermore, the internet blurs the moral shackles of reality. Frances and Nick’s extramarital relationship goes against morality, even though Melissa has also previously cheated on him. When Nick says that he still loves Melissa and will not change anything and divorce, Frances finally realizes that the relationship is not real. Although it is desperate and painful, she is ready to move on.

3.2. Broken Family Tied Together Through Telephone

In the novel, the father is a character who never actually appears. Frances’ parents divorced many years ago due to her father’s alcoholism and propensity for domestic violence. Frances says that her father had ‘moods’. The psychological damage caused by her father since childhood is the root cause of her lack of an independent personality. As a result, she never knows what attitude and tone of voice to adopt when confronted by her father.

For such a character, the author chose the telephone as a medium. When you are on the phone, you do not need to see the other person’s face, nor do you need to let the other person see your real expression. However, the phone is different from messages on the Internet, and what comes from the other end of the phone is real voice—not only the speaker’s real voice but also the real sound of the speaker’s own environment, which can reflect the real-life situation of the person to some extent.

For Frances, her father is such a person hiding behind the phone. The reader seems to be the same as her, not needing to see the father appear but still eager to hear his voice. At the same time, her relationship with her father is also very delicate. She does not need him to really show up, nor does she need him to really participate in her life, but she needs him to “just exist”. Given this ambivalent attitude toward her father, the telephone is a suitable medium for them to communicate, using only their voices without expression, enabling them to be intimate in a distant way.

An unanswered phone call is the breaking point for a longstanding conflict between Frances and her father. The presence of the father in the novel relates entirely to the medium of the telephone, but not every call is answered, and there is a certain resistance in Frances’ attitude when calling her father. The first unanswered call occurs when she goes back to see her parents on vacation. After visiting her mother, Frances intends only to make a phone call to her father, but no one answers, so she has to visit him. However, her father is not at home, and the description of the environment in his room makes Francis feel scared and tempted to hurt herself. Rotting food, dirty paper towels, empty bottles, and maggots in the garbage bin makes Frances step back immediately out of the room. She makes another call, still with no response: ‘Standing in his house was like watching someone familiar smile at me, but with missing teeth. I wanted to hurt myself again, in order to feel returned to the safety of my own physical body’ (Rooney 2017a, p. 242). She sinks into self-loss again, and she knows she seems not to love her biological father.

However, ultimate forgiveness between Frances and her father is also achieved through the telephone. Frances does not genuinely hate her father; she is still grateful that he brought her into the world. However, she cannot bear the poverty and pain that his misbehavior brought to her and the family. She calls her father morning and evening with no answer, so she can only improve herself fundamentally by writing novels to make money and becoming financially independent before she can face all these things normally. She is always the one who made the initial calls, just as she is the one who always took the initiative in a father-daughter relationship. The medium of the telephone meant that her father did not have to be physically present or do anything. When she goes to her father’s house to look for him before, she only sees a horrible scene and does not find her father. The phone seems to be her father’s shield. He could hide behind it without showing his face and only needs to make a sound to let his daughter know that he is there. Moreover, when he does not want to show up, he can just not answer the phone.

When her father finally takes the initiative to call Frances to apologize, the relationship between them is eased, and she no longer has any complaints or grievances. His father keeps saying ‘sorry’ over and over again for her going through a tough year without earning enough money, and he is proud of his excellent and independent daughter. At this point, she partly understands her father’s frustration, and they reach some kind of reconciliation. The change of roles in the call actually indicates a change in emotional needs and power relations. After the father takes the initiative to call, it shows that he is no longer just lying safe and comfortable behind his shield. As a result, their father–daughter relationship is eased in this reversal of medium.

3.3. Reconciliation with Friends Through Email Conversations

Frances’ self-construal has been a key focus of the previous studies. Analysis suggests that Frances is at first at a loss about her self-identity, as mentioned in the text: ‘I enjoy playing this kind of character, the smiling girl’, ‘I didn’t have a real personality’. The fierce clarity with which she examines her self-delusion runs alongside presumed self-knowledge. The specific anxieties and pressures experienced by young millennial women are central to Conversations with Friends (Rooney 2017b). Frances’ attempts to repress or deny her feelings leave her estranged from her physical self, leading to self-harm. She is a contradictory creation, so clever yet so blind (Kilroy 2017). Her emancipation and self-invention are created through a long, introspective email sent to Bobbi.

Therefore, the email conversations depicted in the novel are also of great importance through Frances’ journey toward self-reconciliation. Emancipation is also described as ‘the paradox of freedom’, meaning one is never too young or too old to become closer to obtaining the love one wants and breaking free of exploitative relationships (Rooney 2022). Awkward relationships contribute to Frances’ self-construction. Her primary relational crisis is a paternal disappointment. Her affair with Nick is an expression of exquisite, compulsive selfishness: never before has she had so little control of herself. Her defensive and deceived self-awareness is obvious when confronted by Melissa. Her ‘betrayal’ in friendship presents the idealization of herself, and the short breakup helps her to reorient herself.

Sally Rooney said that in the novel, she explores the email voice, so there is a lot of email communication. In descriptions of friendship, email plays an important role. Abstract communication with Bobbi on politics, love, and other topics, as well as conflicts and reconciliation with Melissa, are all completed through email.

Bobbi is undoubtedly viewed as Frances’ ideal twin sister in this novel. As Frances’ most important friend, Bobbi is confident, calm, independent, and humorous and can handle any problem with ease. In fact, Bobbi is Frances’ ideal self, which is why she imitates Bobbi’s behavior and imagines herself as Bobbi:

Often I found myself believing that if I looked like Bobbi, nothing bad would happen to me. It wouldn’t be like waking up with a new, strange face: it would be like waking up with a face I already knew, the face I already imagined was mine, and so it would feel natural.

(Rooney 2017a, p. 89)

Bobbi is the ideal version of herself, which is a significant reason why they fall in love, and when they breakup, they continue to be good friends without weirdness. However, when Frances falls in love with Nick, saying Bobbi is a homosexual jealous of men, their relationship begins to be endangered. It breaks down when Frances uses Bobbi as material for a book and publishes it without informing her during her financial crisis. This relationship crisis is resolved through email. Frances and Bobbi often have email discussions on abstract topics, which contribute to the formation of Frances’ identity. Compared with face-to-face communication, email has the advantage of permanently recording and retaining the content of conversations. When Bobbi is disappointed that Frances is hiding the affair, Frances begins to re-read the transcripts of conversations she has had with her on the internet. She downloads their exchanges as a huge text file and reads it by searching for a particular word, ‘love’. When Frances says ‘anti-love’, Bobbi reminds her that she has to do more than say she is anti-things. Bobbi understands early on that Frances’ anti-love attitude is unrealistic. Ultimately, Frances realizes that her statements are too idealistic, and the gap between what she says and what she does lays the foundation for her taking the initiative to apologize to Bobbi. When Frances publishes her novel based on Bobbi, Bobbi fights with her again because of her lack of honesty. This is their worst friendship crisis, but it makes Frances realize how much Bobbi means to her and what kind of role she plays in the relationship: ‘My relationship with you is also produced by your relationship with Melissa, and with Nick, and with your childhood self, etc.’ (Rooney 2017a, p. 389). This email makes Frances completely aware of Bobbi’s importance in her heart, and she expresses her guilt about her previous treatment of Bobbi. Thus, Bobbi seems to be Frances’ ideal twin sister.

Melissa is both a friend and a competitor in the novel. The portrayal of Melissa’s character provokes Frances’ sense of crisis and desire to compete. Melissa is a well-known journalist and writer whose work has been published in journals. Their initial encounter begins with a poetry recitation performance. The relationship is supposed to be of friendship, but animosity arises between them amid complications. Antagonism between Melissa and Frances is first reflected in a comparison of their careers. Frances, as a college student, has no outstanding work yet, but at this level, Frances appreciates Melissa more as a predecessor. Further opposition lies in their class differences: Frances is a communist with no capital, while Melissa leads a bourgeois lifestyle. Frances’ rejection of capitalism and monetary inequality makes her feel uncomfortable. Finally, this antagonism culminates in their intimate relationships. Bobbi, Frances’ ex-girlfriend, kisses Melissa, while Frances and Melissa’s husband start an extramarital affair. Thus, they each threaten each other’s intimate relationships. An email from Melissa reveals the antagonism beneath the peace. This is the longest email in the novel. There are no subparagraphs in the format, and the whole paragraph is similar to emotional catharsis. The email does not use offensive words, but it does judge Frances on a moral level:

Nick doesn’t want to leave me & I don’t want to leave him. You will not be able to draw a sustainable sense of self-respect from this relationship you are in…

(Rooney 2017a, p. 303)

Frances reads the email several times and thinks Melissa has written the email for effect: ‘always remember who is the writer, Frances, it’s me’. The tension in the relationship is reflected here. No matter how Frances responds, the relationship becomes odd after this email, which makes Frances think further about how to deal with her relationship with Nick.

4. The Collective Self Stratified by Cross-Media Remediation

Representation of the collective self reflects membership of valued social groups. Research has also been conducted on Frances’ collective self. She sees herself as a systemic victim of the socioeconomic dominance of masculinity and capitalism combined. The text allows readers to link recent figurations of the female millennial in Western culture with representations and creative iterations of what Lauren Berlant calls ‘crisis subjectivity’ (Gray 2020). As Rooney called herself a “firm communist”, the collective self could be the ultimate destination of the female characters in her novel. Most of them were deeply trapped in love relationships, but the collective self could, to some extent, lift them from those disturbing memories.

The author’s cross-media techniques could provide us with some attainable ways to reach that goal. In addition, the novel’s adaptation into a TV series is an example of cross-media remediation. Incorporating sound and images enhances the richness of the story and resonates more easily with the audience. At the same time, Frances’ collective self expands from the context of fictional characters to the real world in the process of cross-media remediation, including the author, readers, fans, TV director, and viewers. In this section, we analyze how Frances’ collective self is constructed more realistically by combining the content of the novel with fan participation, media interviews, and actors’ interpretations. The heroine’s retrospective consideration of text messaging, instant messaging, and email conversations surrounding prose narrative produce textual nonlinearity. Allusions to certain books, music, films, TV series, and even historical events occur naturally in the characters’ conversations. Rooney has linked herself with experimentalism in newspaper interviews, literary magazines, and podcasts (Gray 2020). She highlights the potential for new communicative media to enable her to relate to others and gain access to self-construction. To some extent, it may be said that the heroine completes her own self-construction through the process of conversation.

4.1. Breaking Uncertainty as a Millennial

Millennials are the generation born between 1981 and 1996, whose formative years coincided with the formation and rapid development of the internet and computer science. They grew up in the era of the internet and mobile technology. The media have claimed that Frances’ treatment of homosexuality, bisexuality, and extramarital relationships reflects the boldness of the millennial generation.

A common feature of millennials is their freedom from traditional moral shackles. The specific anxieties and experiences of young millennials are central to Conversations with Friends. As the group known as the “Millennial Generation” gained the internet as their new platform, they were also seen as the first generation to inherit the destruction of the social system by neoliberalism and enter the over-competitive post-collapse labor market. Even though the definition of the “Millennial Generation” is still controversial, and its age and ethnicity have not yet been precisely defined, the emergence and characteristics of this group have caused widespread debate and research. The characters and their interactions in Conversations with Friends could reflect these features and thoughts of this generation.

An important characteristic of millennials is the awakening of personal identity. They like to define themselves in conversations with summary words and do not shy away from others’ opinions. When the four characters in the novel first encounter each other in the first chapter, Bobbi is unapologetic about her sexuality and Frances’ political stance: ‘Well, I’m gay, said Bobbi. Moreover, Frances is a communist’ (Rooney 2017a, p. 12). Speaking frankly about one’s differences and daring to break inherent prejudices is an important feature of this era that may resonate with the audience. When it is mentioned in the movie that Nick’s character is bisexual, Frances also touches on her own sexuality. She says she is kind of an ‘omnivore’. Many viewers may still crave such openness in real life.

Thus, the millennial characters are seeking to explore new modes of broken relationships, which trigger various kinds of responses from fans. Frances’ back and forth transition from lover to best friend with Bobbi gives her new ideas for facing awkward relationships. Lovers need not necessarily become strangers after a breakup. Despite being very familiar with each other’s personalities, interests, hobbies, and even bodies, they can also become best friends. Bobbi knows Frances’ habits, her indifferent surface but delicate inner character, and even what she does not say. She is exploring a new mode with Bobbi: ‘Well, she’s not my girlfriend as such. We are sleeping together, but I think it’s a way of testing the limits of best friendship’ (Rooney 2017a, p. 427). But it is worth exploring where the boundaries should lie. Throughout her affair with Nick, Frances consistently tries to preserve her pride and self-esteem. Sarcastic and offensive remarks are her mechanism for self-protection. She is humiliated by the sheer triteness of the feelings that come to govern her, including lust, jealousy, and above all, vulnerability, raw and excruciatingly real: ‘We can sleep together if you want, but you should know I’m doing it ironically’ (Rooney 2017a, p. 140). She sounds similar to the millennial she is. After a long breakup, both she and Nick recognize the uncertainty and uncontrollability of the relationship. However, ultimately, rationality cannot overcome the intense affection, and Nick cites a wrong phone call as an excuse to meet Frances again. When they talk about how the relationship will not work out, a new pattern emerges:

Well, but what does it mean for a relationship to ‘work out’? he said. It was never going to be something conventional.

Come and get me, I said.

(Rooney 2017a, p. 432)

Reviews for the TV series are generally mixed, with many praising the show’s authentic portrayal of young adult relationships and the nuanced performances but also criticizing its slow pace, lack of character depth, etc. The messy ending of both the TV and the novel has provoked heated discussions on the internet. To some extent, the TV series receives more attention on social media. Audiences have tweeted, for example, ‘The ending pissed me off! Oh to be young and dumb again’, ‘I’m imagining them finally being together forever more and everyone else just disappearing!’ and ‘The ending is one of the most complicated messiest glorious debacles and I love it’. ‘I want to give a negative score just for this ending’. The spirit of millennials who dare to break with tradition culminates at the end of the story. Frances opens herself up to Nick, even though she knows it is going to hurt. She has made peace with the fact that Nick can love two people at once, and she, too, loves Nick and Bobbi at the same time.

Even more interesting is that the majority of readers of this novel are actually also millennials. This novel was written by a millennial, Rooney, and read by thousands of millennials all over the world. In the meantime, the characters are also millennials. The relationship between Frances and Nick originated in a break with tradition, so there is no need for a traditional outcome. At the end of the story, they dare to be honest about their desires. Love is not illusionary; Frances cannot always take an analytical position. Although the process is painful and the result uncertain, it is her final choice to love with pain.

4.2. Refusing Dominant Capitalism as a Communist

Rooney, a lifelong Marxist, is particularly outspoken about issues that stir her social conscience. When writers create fictional characters, no matter for what purpose, there will be a more or less isomorphic or projective relationship between the two. It is also noted that Rooney has included her own characteristics as an author in all main characters in her early novel. For example, in Conversations with Friends, Frances, and Bobbi are both into poetry; in Normal People, Marianne is a big fan of novels, and Connell studies literature major; in Beautiful World, Where Are You, Alice and Eileen both work in the realm of literature, since Alice is an Irish novelist, and Eileen is an editor at a literary magazine. In the “Acknowledgments” section of the novel Beautiful World, Where Are You, when referring to a certain thought of Irene in the book, Rooney also said that if there is any fallacy, the responsibility lies with “Eileen and me”, which shows the audiences how deeply Rooney is connected with the fictional characters she builds (Yi 2022). Rooney pours her own thoughts and emotions into the characters, and it is impossible to sever the relationship or separate them completely.

Therefore, Rooney’s self-claimed role as a communist or Marxist could also be connected with the life of Frances. Many of her political leanings and views are embodied in Frances and conveyed to readers and viewers. Rooney highlights the structural similarities between romantic and economic crises, showing how post-structuralist power views influence their education and disrupt their political awareness and romantic lives (Gao 2024). In Conversations with Friends, she illustrates how this mindset disrupts the political awareness and romantic lives of the protagonists, leading to dysfunction and even pathology, advocating a return to classical Marxism to address the issues posed by capitalism.

In this novel, money is the poison of self-deprecation. Frances’ acquaintances do not seem to care about money, whereas, for her, it is a matter of real anxiety. Melissa and Nick are middle-class and do not lack money. Bobbi’s parents are divorced, yet her father still provides her with a sufficient allowance so she can recklessly say she hates the rich. Frances cannot do so because she needs the money to survive. At one point in the novel, Frances comes close to experiencing real poverty when her unreliable father stops paying her allowance, and she has to survive for a month on what little cash she has of her own, plus food borrowed from Bobbi. This is a particular kind of poverty: a student receiving financial aid to pay for college and surviving with the protection of the National Health Service. Money becomes the source of Frances’ low self-esteem and is an important reason for her lack of personal identity. The only solution is financial independence, yet she still hates the suffering generated by money.

Furthermore, equality should be the key to breaking class barriers. Frances is committed to a version of herself as principled and disciplined, motivated by a stringent brand of altruism that seems to her to be the only rational response to the world’s grotesque unfairness (Collins 2018). In the text, Frances’ distaste for Yeats is actually an attack on aristocracy and capitalism. She has had a relationship with a guy on the Tinder dating app who liked Yeats, which she comments on harshly: ‘He was awful, I said. He told me he loved Yeats, can you believe that? I practically had to stop him reciting “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” in the bar’ (Rooney 2017a, p. 290). Frances is very hostile to Yeats and thinks that no one who likes Yeats is capable of human intimacy.

Similarly, Sally Rooney has openly expressed criticism of Yeats:

‘I hate Yeats!’ she shrieks. ‘A lot of his poems are not very good but some are obviously okay. But how did he become this sort of emblem of literary Irishness when he was this horrible man? He was a huge fan of Mussolini, he was really into fascism, he believed deeply in the idea of a “noble class” who are superior by birth to the plebs’.

(Collins 2018)

While Rooney expressed her criticism towards Yeats, this novel also received criticism in China, mainly because of Rooney’s claim to be a firm Marxist. According to the book reviews on the Chinese website Douban, most readers call themselves “young workers”—who newly graduated from college and entered the labor market. One of the top-liked Chinese comments proceeds as follows: “What a boring novel. The sorrow of capitalism, I, a working girl who rides an electric bike to work, got in an accident, went to the hospital for treatment and then went back to work, will never understand”.1 This comment gained more than 800 likes on Douban. There was also a quite sharp Chinese comment that directly pointed out that the author’s claim to be a Marxist was a disguise: “An author who claims to believe in Marxism has written beautiful works that are very much to the taste of the petty-bourgeois readers who believe in elitism”.2 This also gains more than one hundred likes among the Chinese readers. The “young workers” in China, who are so cautious of the influences of capitalism and hold a grudge of their low wages and long overworking hours, could be critical of Frances’s situation. To some extent, they also make comments from a Marxist view, though culturally different from Rooney’s Marxism. By observing the different reactions of readers in different cultural environments to the Marxist elements in the novel, we can also see that the author’s Marxist stance can actually be understood in multiple dimensions.

4.3. Making Her Time as a Feminist

The adaptation of the TV series follows the first-person narrative perspective of the novel text and, to a large extent, fully reflects the author’s cross-media narrative strategy in the adaptation. Alison Oliver, the actress who performed Frances, once said in an interview that the book is written and read from the perspective of Frances while performing the novel is different because she must first orient herself as the character and then add more dynamic personalities to Frances. However, the essential personality of being an independent feminist did not change because Oliver herself was also experiencing her development as a Dublin college student.

Kilroy (2017) notes that whereas previously the Church and state have been the ‘apparatus’ of female repression in Irish fiction, now ‘the women have repressed themselves: they are too guarded to articulate their vulnerabilities’ (Rooney 2017b). Frances’ feminine awakening is reflected in the two important men around her: her father, Dannie, and her lover, Nick.

Resistance to the patriarchal society is highlighted in Frances in both the book and the TV series. In this society, a domestically abusive father brings a lot of pain and hardship to Frances’ family. Her sensitive personality and tendency to self-harm are rooted in her family’s unhappiness. Her mother is gentle and considerate and is financially independent following her divorce from her father. However, her mother has always urged Frances to visit her father, saying that she should love him no matter what he did before, showing that she still suffers from the patriarchal society: ‘You must love him, she told me when I was sixteen. He’s your father. Who says I have to love him?’ (Rooney 2017a, p. 240). At a young age, Frances’ feminist consciousness was already awakening, and she did not blindly follow her mother’s advice. She wrote in her teenage diary that ‘as a feminist I have the right not to love anyone’. This echoes the alcoholic and irresponsible fathers often featured in Irish literature, except that Frances, as a representative of a new generation, maintains herself under the domination of feminist ideology and defends her right to love people independently.

The women’s diseases described also reflect women’s reproductive rights. Rooney has touched on the sensitive topic of women’s abortion rights and freedom in Ireland when creating the novel. Frances’ illness embodies the pain that only women can experience. The novel devotes considerable space to the pain of menstrual cramps. Waking up with menstrual cramps, Frances is sweating, unconscious, and confused about whether it is a dream or a film; wrenching pain makes her gasp out loud. Her conversation with Bobbi then has a certain symbolic meaning:

You suffer, she said

Everybody suffers.

Ah, Bobbi said. Profound.

(Rooney 2017a, p. 31)

The straightforward and bold portrayal of menstrual pain, to a certain extent, reflects encouragement to abandon female menstrual shame. Females suffer profoundly in this way.

The most painful experience for Frances is the panic of a suspected miscarriage, which is also the most hurtful as a woman. When she notices that along with the blood are thick grey clots similar to skin tissue, it scares her very awkwardly. She feels herself starting to panic as if going mad and hallucinating an alternate reality would be less frightening than what is happening. At this point, Nick, the panic maker, still has no idea what is going on and does not give her enough encouragement and love. The pain of pregnancy and miscarriage is destined to be borne only by women. After finding out that it is just a panic, Frances decides that there is no need to tell Nick what has happened, which would only make her more vulnerable. She protects her self-esteem by covering up the truth. In the end, she reassures herself that everything will turn out fine by self-harming. Rooney’s portrayal of Frances’ blood-soaked upbringing is a microcosm of many ordinary women under the influence of patriarchy.

5. Conclusions

Conversations with Friends depicts people’s unique personalities and growth in the age of digital media. In this article, we analyze Sally Rooney’s narrative techniques of incorporating the internet and technology into the characters’ daily lives and drawing on multiple media to complete the narrative. Frances, the heroine, accomplishes the construction of three aspects of self-identity. From the perspective of the individual self, Frances experiences the three stages of self-loss, self-awakening, and self-construction. These are illustrated through visual focalization, flashbacks, and psychological monologues. Though all of these are common narrative techniques applied in film, it is still revolutionary of Rooney to apply these in a novel. The cross-media narrative techniques are so prevalent throughout the whole novel, thus making it a perfect fit for visual adaptation. Rooney’s writing skills are well suited to the discourse system of various media in the new era in which we are living. She can easily apply the expressions on social media to her novel writing; in the meantime, her novel can also be smoothly adapted into a TV series that retains the charm and characteristics of the original text.

From the perspective of the relational self, her reconciliation with her father, her search for unbound love, and her exploration of her closest friendship allows her to become more independent. We also analyze a variety of forms of communication, including email, instant messaging, and phone calls, which affect the distance between interpersonal communication and how reconciliation is reached in the midst of conflicting relationships. From the perspective of the collective self, following the adaptation to a TV series, Frances’ characterization has expanded from fiction to reality, creating real-world connections with millennials, communists, and feminists. The novel reflects the coming of age not only of Frances but also of millions of girls in our time.

As Orlaith Darling points out, Rooney engages with and critiques capitalism in her writing, not only in terms of content but also in form, which shows the neo-modernist turn in Irish fiction post-2012 (Darling 2023). Rooney’s novels are noted for their self-reflexive use of art-making, and her fragmentary, cross-media narrative techniques fit perfectly with this fragmentary age of modern society. Computer technology has influenced and transformed the writing and dissemination of literature. Glazier concludes that electronic space is the true home of poetry and, in the 20th century, has become the ultimate “space of poesis” (Glazier 2002). The spaces and selves are of great fluidity in Rooney’s novel since she is skilled in making the narrative across different media. This article could also meet the aesthetic demands of new media literature. This is indeed a brand new era of literature, while social media is just an external manifestation. We have been living with social media for a long time, but few people realize that we can write this way. However, Rooney does.

Of course, this article has some shortcomings. The novel is relatively new, and little academic research is available, so this article draws mainly on news articles from The New Yorker, The Guardian, and the Fabian Society. However, this article marks the beginning of the study of this novel and its TV series adaptation. Future research might examine, for example, interactions between fans of the TV series and the author, as well as representations of the novel’s characters in the TV series. Interpretations will change, and Frances will be re-shaped as audiences’ tastes change to reflect the broader social background, leaving much room for further exploration.