Sally Rooney: Intermezzo

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.

Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his 30s – successful, competent and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women – his enduring first love Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.

Ivan is a 22-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude – a period of desire, despair and possibility – a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.

Rooney is joined on stage by author, academic and literary critic Merve Emre to discuss this story of familial and romantic intimacies.

Sally Rooney is the author of Conversations with Friends, Normal People and Beautiful World, Where Are You. All three of her novels have been international bestsellers, and her work is translated into over 40 languages. Her first two novels have been adapted as television series for the BBC, and in 2022, TIME magazine named her among the 100 most influential people in global culture.

Merve Emre is the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University and the Director of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism. Her books include Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America, The Personality Brokers, and The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway. She is a contributing writer at The New Yorker.