Normal People by Sally Roney is a story that feels familiar when you have loved someone who was never fully yours. it is not a typical love story. it is a story about connection, timing, and the ache of watching the person you care about choose someone else.
The book follows Marianne and Connell from school to college. They understand each other more deeply than anyone else in their lives. Yet they keep drifting apart.
- sometimes because they are scared to speak honestly.
- sometimes because one of them is with someone else.
- Sometimes because they are waiting for a sign that never comes.
The part hits hardest when you read it while carrying your own story. When you know what it feels like to care about someone who trusts you, who opens up to you, who talks to you in ways she does not talk to others, but you say nothing, because saying it might ruin the small space you already have with her.
Rooney captures that exact feeling. The silent bond. The hesitation, The moments when you think maybe she feels something too, but she never moves toward you. The moments when you almost tell her, but you hold back because she already has someone she loves. You end up loving in the background, quietly, almost like a secret you keep from yourself.
What makes this book good is how honest it is. It shows love that is real but uneven. it shows how two people can mean the world to each other, yet never manage to meet at the same time in the same way. It shows how affection, pride, fear, and timing mix together and create a story that could have been something else if one sentence had been said a little earlier.
Normal people stays with you because it reflects a truth many people live with. Sometimes you meet someone who changes you. Someone you cannot forget. Someone you would choose, even when she is choosing someone else. and you live with that truth quietly, the way Connell does.
You are close enough to care, but too far to keep.
Normal People by Sally Roney
If you have lived a story like that, this book does not feel like fiction. It feels like memory.
Seems like an interesting plot. I think when you have lived enough…loved enough…you stop seeing goodbye like a death knell. It’s still eye contact and a loving gaze…just that you blink first…and lose. Will try to read this.