To read Sally Rooney is to visit a realm of casual entanglements, bookish occupations, and abstruse debates about microaggressions and Marx. To adapt her novels for the screen is to pursue the kernel of truth beneath these seemingly trivial goings-on. Done well, as Hulu’s brilliant Normal People (2020) illustrated, a Rooney-inspired series can soar on the wings of its characters’ irrepressible youth. Executed poorly, as in the case of the streaming service’s disastrous new Conversations With Friends, such a production can sink like a stone hurled into the Irish Sea.
Conversations With Friends begins in Rooney’s beloved Dublin, where former lovers Frances (Alison Oliver) and Bobbi (Sasha Lane) are finishing their last-but-one year at university. A poverty-wage intern at a literary agency, Frances worries that her “unqualified” opinions about manuscripts are a poor “test of cultural excellence.” Bobbi, meanwhile, teaches English on a volunteer basis and possesses not a shred of self-doubt, so intense is her swaggering amour propre. Together, the two women perform spoken-word duets on such subjects as female empowerment and the transgressions of the diamond industry. When the well-known photographer Melissa Baines (Jemima Kirke) sees and likes their show, a rapport that comes to include Melissa’s actor husband, Nick (Joe Alwyn), is swiftly established.
