9. Normal People: Class, Ireland, and Heartbreak

Conal took Marianne into his arms and kissed her.

“She could feel like a physical pressure on her skin,”

that the others were watching them. Maybe people hadn't really believed it until then. Or else, a morbid fascination still lingered over something that had once been scandalous. Maybe they were just curious to observe the chemistry between two

people who, over the course of several years, apparently could not leave on another alone. Marianne had to admit that she, also probably would have glanced. When they drew a part, Conal looked her in the eyes and said, "I love you." She was laughing then and her face was red.

She was in his power. He had chosen to redeem her, she was redeemed. It was so unlike him to behave that way in public that he must have been doing it on purpose to please her, how strange to feel herself so completely under the control of another person.

But also how ordinary no one can be independent of other people completely.

“So why not give up the attempt, she thought,”

go running in the other direction, depend on people for everything, allow them to depend on you. Why not? So, hello everybody, that was from Sally Rune's best selling novel

and normal people published in 2017 to critical acclaim.

Made into almost a cultural phenomenon by the popular TV show adaptation starring Daisy Edgar Jones and my old friend, Paul Mascow, in 2020. And remarkably, it was only her second novel published when she was only 27. And it was long-listed for the 2018 Booker.

It was awarded the novel of the Year, the Cost of Book Awards. It was a very big deal. It's fundamentally a coming-of-age story, chronicling the very complicated, on and off romance of two young Irish people, Marianne and Connell.

We move with them from secondary school to University over the course of about five years and both are troubled and sensitive and intelligent and though they share this kind of strangely deep connection, both sexually and emotionally. It's also a book that's a really wonderful window

into kind of Ireland in the early 2010s and class and kind of abuse of relationships and anxiety in the modern day. So there's a lot going on there. So normal people as you say to Abby, it's a massive phenomenon, especially with the TV series which came out in 2020 during COVID.

So loads of people watched it and made a big star of Paul Mascow and also of Daisy Edgar Jones. And Sally Rune, a lot of people in their 20s and 30s see her as a touchstone, don't they?

Something that she's always resisted, people see her as the voice of a generation,

somebody who speaks for a generation that came of age after the financial crisis that have grown up with emails, texting, digital communication, online dating, all of this kind of thing and that normal people in particular is the work that captures what it feels like or what it felt like

to come of age in the 2010s and then to discover yourself in a world where people are very anxious about the state of the world, their mental health, all of these kinds of things. Yeah and she does have an uncanny ability to kind of climb into the mind of a late adolescent, you know, someone in the early 20s.

I was at university when the book came out and it was a massive massive deal. I mean it was kind of describing a period of life that I was actually living and people kept telling me to read it and kind of being an insolvable contrarian. I didn't. So reading it this time for the podcast was the first time I'd ever read it and yeah I did find it very touching. I love Rune's

writing style but I may not have fallen in love with it to the extent that maybe I hope that I would. I know Sad will touch on that more at the end of course but I did really like the way that she structured it and I really liked her writing in it. I didn't read it when it came out. I think partly because I thought well this obviously not aimed at me and it's not a

subject that really grabs me. Yeah. So I was a bit resistant to it and actually this is one of the butas of doing this show. One of the only good things about it Terry is that I get to read a lot of things that I wouldn't normally read and this was one that was on the list quite early on and I thought

you know I would never normally read normal people and rather like you I am quite

“contrarian so the more the people would say oh you should read it I would resist.”

But I was determined not to approach it in the spirit of a sort of grumpy you know middle-aged man looking down on it you know to approach it's open mindedly yeah bring all your marks this book levities into play. Precisely well you have to I mean Sally Rune herself of course is a bit of a Marxist. Let's explain it for people who's not everyone will have read it.

You can divide it very roughly into three parts so the first part they are at secondary school these two characters Connell and Marianne in a small town in County Slygo which is in the kind of far west of Ireland.

the relationship between them specifically the power dynamic between them begins to

“shift and then the third part is the end of their time really at Trinity they're”

traveling abroad they're now really no longer teenagers but they are young adults and they're graduating from university and thinking what they're going to do next.

And the way it's structured is it's not a continuous flowing narrative basically what

she does is she takes a series of moments snapshots almost in their lives which are in frequent intervals so irregular intervals they're kind of staggered sometimes their days apart sometimes months pass off stage and we the readers I think it's one of the very clever things about the book we have to kind of fill in what has happened in between those moments and then actually within each section there will be flashbacks

there'll be thinking about things that have happened as it were off stage or there'll be looking up things that we've already encountered but in a different light so telling it from a different perspective and so we're understanding the characters and their relationship in a different way and we're getting new insights and new perspectives with every page that we turn and I think it's a it's a very clever way of constructing it's

the architecture of the book a lot of thought has gone into it. Yeah I massively agree because

“you know that's what real life is like like life isn't made up of a series of kind of great”

totemic moments it's lots of small incidents that happen and gradually unfold and then even when the big moments do come along they're often more mundane than they seem so I thought it was really clever it was kind of grounded in reality and her writing style is too it's a very very intimate it's very unadorned she very rarely uses metaphors or anything like that life is

what it is and the writing is just as direct but also she never uses quotation marks so it

feels like kind of one long conversation between the reader and the characters and she does this wonderful thing where she'll focus on mundane kind of physical actions so making tea at one point moving a small piece of tincil and this anchor is these really high emotional stakes in the real world consistently and then brings great depth to kind of the minute moments of real life and this is also really effective in showing how our main characters know and understand each other they can

recognize that something has changed in the other one from the the tiniest action or or eyebrow race whatever it is yeah which is exactly how things work in a couple or in any kind of very close which is exactly with the the blink of an eye you know the the raising of an eyebrow or something that may speak volumes to you and nobody else will notice and there's this sort of sense that they're engaged in them I mean you could call it a dance the two characters or a chess game or a

debate so it's a very very intimate book it's really focused on these two people and Sally Runeez

we will discuss was a champion debate or something that's an every single profile always brings

up and it's very proud and there's a slight sense that the rhythm of debating the back and forth the prepared speeches that the sort of rebuttals encounter arguments that sort of almost very straightforward simple exchange the sort of transaction of a debate or indeed of a chess game is reproduced in the dialogue and in the relationship of the two characters although I have to say a huge theme of the book again something that somebody who's interested in debating you can

see why they're be interested in this is miscommunication and things that go missing and things that are misunderstood and they end up having a kind of toxic effect on their relationship but particularly in the modern age you know world in which communication has been carried out

“through technology a lot of the time these days so phones, emails whatever it is and I think that's”

sort of reflected in the writing you know the way that people speak whatever there's like a sperness and a flatness to it yeah agreed as you were text or whatever you know you're not going to go into great detail or go depth it's going to be almost quite sparse and she has said herself she used to use Twitter a lot she doesn't use it anymore and she's actually talked about how Twitter influenced her writing you know very you've got very few characters you are very direct

into the point but there's also a kind of irony often there which I think is there often in a writing you know when you first encounter it especially if you've been doing what we've been doing which is basically really in weathering heights and you know the great gatsby or something so you then come to normal people gosh it's very plain it's very unadorned it's very stark the writing but that's part of the point she wants to capture the honesty and the authenticity of these

teenagers lives without kind of artificial contrivance that's not to say there's no art in the book of course that is loads of art in the way it's constructed speaking of that so let's get into the plot a little bit sure yeah so the book as we said it's charting this very complicated relationship between these two Irish teenagers Marianne Sheridan connal wardrun and from their final year at secondary school in small town to university and then kind of briefly beyond so we start

in slido the secondary school connal is popular he's athletic he's well liked he's kind of a bit

nerd exactly she just speaks her mind she's an intellectual and she's self-conscious

“and she's a luke and she sort of sits a bit apart from the rest of the class and the rest of the”

school I guess but then the funny thing is that these statuses connal being above her sadly inverted in the actual social status is because connal's mother is a cleaner in Marianne's home which is kind of wealthy but their family is emotionally cold whereas you know connal has this lovely warm young mother but this creates a sort of strange social connection between them and despite their differing statuses at school they begin having a secret sexual relationship connal won't

acknowledge it in public because he's embarrassed and ashamed he cares deeply what people would think of him and so he doesn't want people knowing that he's kind of going out with the school so they do because she's uncle and he needs to be very cool and he wants to be liked by his friends he wants to be crucially and we would come back to this he wants to be perceived as normal

and she's not normal and he's embarrassed that she's basically his girlfriend but he does care

very deeply for her he just doesn't he just can't show it and we finally he goes to step too far and he invites another girl to their school dance and Marianne is very very upset and she stopped going to school she does her exams and stuff from home and it stopped talking and so then we leap forward in time don't we to Trinity College Dublin so they're both gone to the most prestigious

“university in Ireland the longest established I think set up by Liz but the first I might be wrong”

oh I think that has a fun detail so here the power balance shifts Marianne is now very socially confident there are lots of people like her there are lots of middle class students from professional parents and monarchy yeah well he intellectuals basically yeah as we will discover there are some people there with some very very red trousers indeed yes very red trousers colonel is there in his trainers now he'd been very cool at school to sporty boy but now he feels he's

the cleanest son who is out of his depth and he feels very awkward and he struggles to adjust over time they reconnect they become friends again they sort of slip back into their sexual relationship but they don't become a happy settle couple because the relationship is constantly being undermined by their own insecurities there are misunderstandings and their own miscommunications there's one particularly sort of sad misunderstanding which will come to I think it's the saddest scene

“in the book actually Marianne believes the coloners rejecting her even though he's not he's appealing”

to her and they end up separating it's so relatable that like being too afraid to say how you really feel because you're afraid of rejection essentially yeah exactly exactly so you ensure your own rejection actually and then Marianne ends up in a series of relationships a terrible meant retreat of very badly there's a sort of massacistic element to these relationships she thinks she has very low self esteem and she thinks she sort of deserves to be punished or whatever

and she's very submissive and all of this colonel ends up getting another girlfriend they all go to Italy disastrous trip to Italy oh Marianne ends up in a very strange relationship with the black and Sweden who's you know this is a very sademestic relationship it's a dominant submissive fitting essentially and colonel one of his mates from school takes his own life and colonel becomes depressed and has to seek counseling so there you have the sort of the mirroring of the mental

health crisis that you know we've seen so much about in the last 10 years or so and then finally the

last section of the book Marianne has a sort of reckoning with her family who it turns out have not treated her terribly well and the question that hangs over the last pages of the book are they going to get back together are they going to find a fulfillment I mean it's the ultimate will they won't they yeah which is why we'll also kind of explore whether or not this is in fact a love story is it truly a love story safely now let's talk a little bit about the woman behind

it's Sally Rune because I actually think it's quite rare the writers have big profiles these days so she was born in Castlebar County Mayo in 1991 where she also grew up her father was a technician for the national telecoms company and her mother worked at the local arts centre she didn't have a particularly wealthy upbringing but she said that the family would often kind of engage in discussions about left wing politics at the dinner table and Rune has maintained this kind of

interest about politics the rest of her life she's she often speaks out publicly yeah most controversially she's a very very keen support of the Palestinian cause and this has got her into hot water because of her support for groups that in Britain and more controversial we're not going to go into all that but you can google if you're interested and then she went on to study English at Trinity so the same university that Marianne Connola's head in the novel and she was

elected a scholar in 2011 also like Marianne Connola which graduated in 2013 she did a master's in American literature also at Trinity and it was there that she received the greatest accolade

debating champion yeah so this is often brought up and she's very proud of it now some people would say refreshingly she's not excessively modest about it so yeah I mean why should she be so in fact she wrote an essay about how good she was a debating yeah this essay was the foundation of her career

so it's called even if you beat me and she basically said I'm the best competitive debates

on the continent of Europe and this was seen by a literary agent and then she was catapulted to start and wasn't she yeah it's actually quite a cool story behind how the book was discovered and became what it is now and in a piece in the Guardian that I read from 2021 she was described as

“the most talked about novelist of her generation and I think certainly from my experience of university”

in 2019 and 2020 that was definitely true in that moment in time and she was only in her 20s when she wrote her first novel conversations with friends so she was young like Donna Tart there is a slight commonality between them both kind of young they both have quite a recognisable aesthetic they're both kind of waspish and known to be a little bit spiky I think that Sally Rooney Spikiness

is probably sort of born of an entirely natural and pretty healthy intolerance for public scrutiny

and the limelight so I kind of respect that but she can I have to say an interviews come off as a bit defensive so I read in one interview she said of people kind of prying into her politics she said well it's my job to write about whatever comes into my head to the best of my ability if as a reader you were to exercise control over the kinds of things that are depicted novels try writing one

“that's what I did and it worked out for me oh nice so we can talk a bit about how her own”

persona and her politics colour the book you know because some people on the left say oh she's writing my working class people she's not really working class herself there are lots of people including the may well be people who listen to a show who are resistant to her so Harry our digital guru is not by Sally Rooney he's not a Sally Rooney fan and I think that maybe particularly pronounced my guess is among men she's perceived as a writer for women and older listeners so she's

perceived as you know the voice of her generation and all that kind of thing and she's perhaps easily dismissed by a certain generation of reader which I don't think is entirely fair because if nothing else actually her book is very interesting about the context of its times it is this story that you've described tabs as set in island after the great crash of the late 2000s which took

“a massive toll on the Irish economy basically island was subjected to a kind of EU imposed austerity”

program so there was this great downturn they'd been this period before and it known as the Celtic

Tiger where Ireland heard prospered as never before in Irish history and then there was the sense

that it had all come crashing down and Sally Rooney's book is one of many published in Ireland in the 2010s that reflects the sort of shock of that so it's borne out of the anger and a sense of frustration of a generation who can't get housing can't get the opportunities they thought they were going to get but at the same time we just talked about this a lot herself there's a whole load of Irish writing no writers like E-Mum, Bride and Clare Keegan and so on that comes out of this context of

the seal is Little Magazine's one of which Sally Rooney herself edited called The Sneak Fly magazines that are supported by government grants and things and actually writers get support from the government you can apply for scholarships and things like that so the paradox is that while Irish society was struggling with the austerity program writing was really booming and you get a sense of that and the book because there's a literary event isn't where a writer comes

to Trinity to give a talk and everybody goes and it's very exciting but at the same time there's all the stuff about the kind of ghost to states which are housing a state's left unoccupied because of the crash and of course the class dynamic between colonel who's working class and Marianne who is much richer and mocked socially confident and moves very easily in a world of people who travel to Europe and read books to all these kinds of things. One of the things they bond over is

their politics you know at one point the fact that they are so well suited to each other's highlight by the fact that colonels sort of quite dull girlfriend at the time she wonders whether Marianne's interest in politics is performative whether she's genuinely interested in the Middle East because she thinks that's kind of odd and soluble and conceivable and they're both broadly left-wing though again the way that the approach politics is really interestingly illustrative

of their classes because for Marianne politics is kind of an intellectual exercise you know it's all about studying Marxism commenting on capitalism whereas for colonel it's personal and it's experimental and the fact that the way he actually live so yeah in this sense it serves to emphasize their

and saliroon is own politics so yeah they talk about Edward Snowden they talk about the war in Syria they go on kind of protest marches you know Gaza as mentioned so all of this kind of thing this is sort of laced throughout the book and that when they go to the ghost estate there's a very tellter line they're kind of puzzled about how there's this housing estate and nobody knows you know why they're there and why it's deserted and she says it's something to do with capitalism

yeah everything is that's the problem isn't it yeah such a throwaway comment it's so young person trying to be not knowing about politics yeah exactly so let's talk about the two characters

“because basically I think you can admire the book and you can admire its architecture but if you”

don't buy into the relationship of the characters as in if you don't care about them you probably won't enjoy the book as much as it's great devotees do and we'll start with the character who

the first character to speak connell the boy he is as you say he's sporty I think what saliroony

captures very well is the vulnerability the contrast between outwardly he seems very impressive he's well liked his popular and yet deep down he's struggling to work out what he's meant to be what normal people do he seems shy of expressing his true emotions the fact that he's keeping this relationship in Marianne secret from his friends tells us an enormous amount of about his kind of social insecurities he has this great desire I think which anybody who's been

a teenage boy I mean I don't want it this to become the therapy club but if you if you've been a teenage boy this is a safe space thanks to happy feeling like an outside of looking in

“feeling like an outside looking I think to not all teenage boys feel that at times a feeling”

like an outsider worrying about being taken seriously worrying about being cool enough all of those kinds of things saliroony captures that very cleverly I think very well in connell and actually the title normal people again and again we're told that he wants to be normal he just wanted to be normal to conceal the parts of himself that he found shameful and confusing he says he feels trapped he feels that he cares too much about what people think of him there's a wonderful line actually

when he thinks about going to Trinity College Marianne encourages him to go to Trinity College because he can't see why for a working class boy that might actually be it might be a course exciting we're told you know he would start going to dinner parties and having conversations about the Greek bailout and he could sleep some weird looking girls who turn out to be bisexual what's not alike well what's not alike is he whereas that he will lose himself and he'll be

out of his depth the old connell the one all his friends know that person would be dead in a way or worse buried alive and screaming under the earth I think that's really well observed that fear that the true you will be lost because you'll be trying to be something you're not but also these very profound thoughts and feelings that he experiences like he is very emotional

he really struggles with his anxieties and stuff they never show on the surface he's very

iconic in his behavior he's constantly scribes being big his physicality is emphasised and as having quite a hard face there has been need to surface he's writhing and and worrying and stressing and just out of in action sometimes he proves to be cruel yes that's such a telling and pertinent portrait of modern masculinity or millennial masculinity or whatever because people are encouraged to be open more now in a way that they never were but also connell is never not a boy

he's never not male he's very boy he's very masculine one of the themes of the book is how you're not truly yourself or you're not living a fulfilled life if you're not in relation to others that you cannot live an independent separate atomized kind of life everything is about your connection to other people but he doesn't really know how to make that connection to Marianne he doesn't even know what their relationship is he can't be honest with himself or with her about his

emotions and part of that I guess is because he I'm in both of them in a different ways come from broken homes don't they he doesn't have a father figure as a sort of role model of how to treat women and so on yeah he says at points that he kind of he wishes he had an imprint to follow to know how to behave and his relationships he doesn't know how to behave in his personal life yeah and I think that's quite relatable to two two people possibly particularly men

growing up and entering into your first relationships navigating the grown-up world and there is a

way of doing it that you're told about and that you were aware of but it doesn't necessarily seem

“to be how you were doing it and there's something that feels wrong with that you have to have”

great confidence to believe that you were doing what is right or you were living right all the time will you get that in the in the school sequences which are very true to life where there's a contrast between the tenderness and the vulnerability that he shows when he's alone with Marianne and then the sort of Joshing bantery way that he talks about girls with his friends there's a massive contrast between those two things which of course reflects how teenage boys talk about their relationships

very emotional emails when he's not with her but when he's with her he'd never speak like that yeah

so that you know that's really interesting I mean you can tell that Sally Rune is very interested in the idea of like an unassuming boy like this it's only having great power over another person because he does have this incredible power over Marianne and you know power is definitely a feature of all human relationship and so you get this guy with a limited experience of life and so how is he gonna negotiate this sudden rush of power that he has over another person so it's interesting

to see how he goes from kind of handling that when he's 18 and then 22 having a slightly more complex and kind of profound understanding of that and how to use it all right we're talking about Conal's power so the person who's in his power as it were puts herself in his power is of course

“Marianne and she's the character that I think a lot of readers of the book”

love the most particularly female readers I guess did you warm to Marianne as a character to be there's a lot about her I admired I liked her kind of relentless defiance and the way that she

never allows herself to be a victim and will explain why in a second I actually often found

her quite annoying I'm afraid to say oh no she comes across as quite arrogant but then you understand why actually that's more of a front than anything else yes in the same way that Conal is unwaveringly kind of masculine she's always very feminine and and delicate she has these beautiful slim hands and a feminine dress sense and stuff and so that means that when she feels vulnerable and she she's really really pityable and that's quite touching because on the other hand she

comes across as quite cocky like a little bit insufferable it's almost like has sex being a woman gives her a confidence that Conal's sex being a man takes away from him but in reality she's clever she's shy she says she's awkward she says to her friend Peggy at one point that she's not easy to like because there's a coldness in her but the coldness is partly because she's anxious no we learn over the course of the novel that she really doesn't believe that she's worthy of love

and kindness she kind of thinks it's her lot to be used and abused or to be totally within the

“power of another person and kind of their creature well that's why in her sex life there's”

the submission element right as her relationships progress she gets more and more extreme in

how submissive she is and her sex life you know her second boyfriend we discover kind of beats her

up which is horrible but it's almost what she wants because it's what she believes she deserves but unlike Conal she doesn't really care what people think this is a really wonderful feature if has it's school she argues with her teachers or she's kind of passive aggressive with her bullies and I like how there's this inconsistency in her portrayal because in real life no one is consistent no one is one thing day-to-day and no one is one thing on the surface I think that's

true both characters actually yeah definitely even the people who don't necessarily like the book or like the characters cannot deny that they are complicated and they are as you rightly say they're not reducible either of them to caricatures no about her security and insecurity it kind of absent flows so on the one hand she feels that she's like Conal that she's not normal and she can't be like normal people from a young life her life has been abnormal she knows that

she tries to be a good person this is a quotation but deep down she knows she's a bad person corrupted wrong and all her efforts to be right these efforts only disguise what's buried inside her the evil part of herself so that makes it sound like she's absolutely crippled with low self esteem and yet another times she will strike people as immensely poised and clever and socially confident and whatnot. Unusually confident and you know the implication is

slightly that she isn't bullied because she's genuinely weird or that her bullies are just straightforwardly awful people it's because she comes across as kind of unknowable and chilly but also because whereas most teenagers just desperate for social acceptance she is not and she refuses to conform and they resent her for this and they're kind of threatened by her intelligence and the way that she wittily responds to her abusers in a sense which anyone who's been at

“school as a teenager will remember right that there's if there's somebody who stands apart from”

the rest of the group just seems not to care what the others think who that can be quite intimidating to everybody else because they can basically just think this person's a bit of a weird or a bit of a loner but also that threatens everybody else who's feels that terrible noring need to conform you kind of think why don't they feel it as well what's so special about them exactly to be how much do you think Sally Runey is Marianne or Marianne is Sally Runey because people have

really debated this and there yeah well I was going to say because in their argumentiveness and their defiance obviously there's a common thread there so in many ways yeah she is a projection maybe of Sally Runey you know both a little bit spiky both intellectual possibly a little bit difficult or certainly in the way that they speak to people could be a bit difficult both debaters

I have opinions and I'm fairly ready to stand by them and defend them and obviously to be challenged

“into accept counter arguments and whatever I think that's all part of normal life she's also said”

that she wasn't massively popular at school neither is Marianne she has described herself as a Marxist Marianne too expresses kind of Marxist leaning opinions and Runey has also admitted that she was extremely insecure and she was young and you see this Marianne she said I had low self-esteem and a predilection for hero worship and I was extremely determined equally have a like what character particularly a character rooted in the real world is not in some way going to be a slight projection

of the author not intentionally is not the right is trying to create like a dream version of themselves how can you not draw upon your own experiences so Sally Runey has said you know I don't I have no interest in writing characters who don't share my way of seeing I have to be there with them I don't want to look down on my characters I don't want to insist upon the distance between

“me and them and I think in Marianne's case it's it's not hard to see the resemblance is however”

I think it's too simplistic to say well Marianne is merely a self-portrait or a wishful film and fantasy or any of these kinds of things because particularly when he comes this issue of class there are massive differences and also there is one other thing about Marianne isn't

there so Marianne we kind of get a sense of this from the beginning it's never fully explained but

we start to discover more and more about it as we go on there is a kind of trauma a secret that lies behind her very low self-esteem and so maybe to have it after the break we can explore exactly what this trauma is we can also talk about the theme of class which is a massive issue throughout this book and we can reveal what people are obviously gagging to know just whether these star cross lovers will end up together will they or won't they so we'd be back after the break

will they or won't they hi there Alice Campbell here from the rest is politics I'm here to tell

“you about a really important interview that's out now on our podcast channel the rest is politics”

leading this week I spoke to one of the defining political figures of our time president Rodmir Selinski of Ukraine it is a fascinating interview reflects on his upbringing reflects on his political rise reflects on a stating key during Russia's invasion redefining leadership in wartime and he warns us very much against anyone not least Donald Trump falling for Vladimir Putin's lies was that ceasefires may serve as a strategic pause rather than a sign of genuine peace

you offer a very blunt assessment of Putin looks at his enemy strength strategy and crucially his weaknesses in a war he is convinced Russia cannot win and he doesn't hold back on the international response at times particularly from the US you'd like to hear more and hope you do search the rest of his politics leading wherever you get your podcasts and now back to your show welcome back to the book club everybody now before the break we were talking about

Marianne and Connell the lovers of the center of Sally Rune's normal people and we were getting to grips with Marianne's quite contradictory complicated personality the golf between the in a Marianne that we sometimes see in her kind of interior monologues and the outer Marianne that she presents to the world because she has this secret she has this thing in her past that explains her vulnerability and her sense of low self esteem to tabby join to take us through this yeah so we gradually

horribly discover kind of why Marianne is the way that she is and there is nothing blunt or

on the nose about this you're kind of drip fed this this horrible knowledge and it's never

explicitly stated you kind of get it from pieces of conversation she's had a very abusive upbringing her father would hit her mother and herself her brother is horribly aggressive to her says things like I'd love if you killed yourself and at one point actually breaks her nose but equally there's another form of abuse on show here and that's kind of just an action saying nothing doing nothing being a silent observer to the suffering of in this case your child and that's Marianne's

mother so there's this passage and this is so Sally Rune to say this very dark deep thing in the most stark matter of fact terms so it's she says Denise this is Marianne's mother decided long time ago that it is acceptable for men to use aggression towards Marianne as a way of expressing themselves as a child Marianne resisted but now she simply detachers as if it isn't of any interest to her which in a way it isn't Denise considers this a symptom of her daughter's frigid and unlovable

personality she believes Marianne lacks warmth by which she means the ability to beg for love from people who hate her so these horrifying experiences have addition Marianne to enter into kind of unhealthy relationships and expect a degree of control in the way that she's treated

of in the back of your mind and then you'll remind it and she's so matter of fact in the way

that she refers to things so at one point you know Marianne says oh that her boyfriend Jamie is if oh you know he likes to hit me during sex and she's so unemotional about it and I actually think that so much of this book is actually about kind of the long-term impact on trauma the way that people carry it afterwards these don't have to be extreme instances or you know particularly out of the ordinary and Sally Rooney has said it seems to me like almost everyone has endured some kind of

pain or suffering that has changed their life that change can take the form of damage or of learning and growth or some combination of the two and ability to have dapped better in certain ways and worse in others and you can definitely definitely see that in Marianne her sort of chilliness and her willingness to be abused in relationships yeah it's it's actually just a form of survival but then her lifeline as it were her escape from that certainly when she was at school was

the relationship with Connell and that was the first I mean this is what gives the relationship so much of its power and its value is that he was the first person to ever show her any tenderness or

warmth it's when Connell says to her explicitly I would never hurt you and and this is the moment

when he says to her I love you I'm not just saying that I really do that's this passage even in memory she will find this moment unbearably intense and she's aware of this now while it's happening she's never believed to self fit to be loved by any person but now she has a new life of which this was the first moment and even after many years of past she will still think yes that was it the beginning of my life the extraordinary thing about this actually it's so well done this scene

because he says I love you in a slightly throwaway way later on he remembers this and he remembers it differently he remembers that he said it almost accidentally involuntarily kind of without you know having premeditated it and I wonder if he almost said it because you know we've we've been told he's trying to figure out what it is to be someone as boyfriend he says it because it's the thing you say and there's a point when you say it and he feels

odd when he says he has this rush of feeling himself but it has a different significance for the

“two of them and I think that's really really well observed but also because of this thing that we”

said about him earlier which is that he doesn't know how to express this overwhelming emotions that he feels so Marianne tells him this terrible thing you know she her dad used to hit her and he's like he doesn't know how to express that he hasn't learned how so he kind of goes oh I want her to feel better so I'll tell her I love her which is not to say that he doesn't but it's also I think this thing that I I mentioned earlier which is that he is kind of working out how to exercise this

power that he has over her as a young man he just doesn't quite know how that looks and he's slightly in love with it and slightly terrified of it terrified of what it could be in himself because Connell has his fair share of trauma as well and you know this affects how he behaves and a massive part of his arc is is coming to terms with the depression and anxiety that he battles with particularly later on in the book when he's very very badly affected by the suicide

of a other school friend yeah and Sally really has said of this I created this young man or teenage

“boy and I really think now looking back when we meet him he's already deeply racked by social anxiety”

he doesn't have the name for necessarily but he feels so uncomfortable in his own self with of guards to what's perceived as normal so unless he's a very millennial hero he is it's hard for him but precisely because he's a sporty young man or boy yeah from a close knit kind of working class community in which confessing weakness or vulnerability is not the done thing yeah I mean he ends up actually taking support from a counselor at the university which again is very of its time

you know a character in the 1990s would not have done that and was the help son offer yeah help son offer he's actually certainly has said herself you know in that scene what I one of the reasons that scene is there is because you know she's reflecting the social realities that are there in the 2010s that would not have been there early or on and actually this brings us actually

the pressures on him brings us very neatly to what I think is probably the most powerful

“theme of the book which is class I think you and I might disagree about how well or not she”

observes this but you know because Sally really is a self-professed Marxist it's really important her and she thinks people don't exist independently they exist in relation to other human beings and to the society which they're apart and the economic power relations and so on yeah shapes their confidence it shapes their behaviour absolutely it's like one of the great determining forces of every human life it's the air they breathe it's the scene which they swim all of that

and you get this from the very very beginning colonel is the cleanest son Mariana lives in the

interesting thing is it works sometimes counter to their social standing in the school for example he's the working class boy is popular well light she the middle class girl is disliked

and is a loner and more not yeah but there's always that sort of tension there and then when they

get to trinity to Dublin then it changes because at trinity there are loads of basically partial middle class students read trousers gila's pinky rings yes and I'm just trying to speculate to be on how you would have fitted in at trinity colors I have never worn red trousers I've never even owned I don't know anyone that owns a gila how day I don't believe that's true you know

“a lot of people who wear those quarters it I do I do yeah I'm always a calum for one I think”

the quarters zip is very gila adjacent I'm just gonna come out and stay it I think Kashmir cardigans are gila adjacent and I'm not wearing cardigan I'm wearing it being at jumper get it right that's so cool come on work on your work on your work on your refugee so actually colonel goes to this is precise to the kind of replete by the way the colonel would have disliked he would not care for this so he goes and he says basically all the guys in his class wear wax jackets and plum colored she knows

she's this is terrible those tips are virus fashions and actually there's one passage that really did make me laugh because I did think so much about my entire time as a student he goes to these seminars and basically he feels massively inferior because there's all these other kids in the seminars who appeal to be on an intellectual level far above him if they talk with such confidence and you know fluency oh this is so gorgeously well observed it's just so true to real life

it is it is let's hope people don't say that about this podcast they haven't actually read the books they're just walking at a very abstract level he understands now and I quote the disclassments are not like him it's easy for them to have opinions and to express them with confidence they don't worry about appearing ignorant or conceited and of course that's so true I mean that's

what people always say that was my university experience sitting around the seminars listening to

people like wax lyrical about a book they haven't read yeah or like a vague sense of philosophy or whatever with such confidence and you could tell that they were incredibly hungover and they literally like didn't even know what Marxism was exactly not like me of course right well I mean that frankly I mean I don't think I'm going to amaze the listeners to this show when to be completely honest neither you nor I are from colossally under privileged backgrounds and so we're very familiar with the

kind of people who have a fluency and a social confidence and an intellectual confidence they're perhaps is more a result of their educational institutions and privilege I guess and privilege than it is of native ability and Sally Rune is very caustic about that and she actually

“observes the way in which these things matter brilliantly I think with the scholarship oh it's so”

it's so well done yeah because the getting the scholarship at Trinity which she of course the author did is a huge thing it's an incredibly prestigious thing and Marianne really wants that scholarship because as an I quote she would like her superior intellect to be affirmed in public by the transfer of large amounts of money so basically she doesn't need her rent paying or tuition because her family do that she will get paid tuition free accommodation free meals all of this

kind of thing with the scholarship and she really wants it because she's clever and she wants the scholarship to say to everybody look how clever I am this is the affirmation I need. Connell the self-esteem boost of the scholarship is not as important as what Sally Rune calls the gigantic material fact of it. It actually changes his life. Exactly he needs the rent he needs the food the free meal in college. Suddenly he has possibilities whereas before

he could only do what he was able to do within the limits of his financial restrictions. Even if you're like our social guru Harry Bolden and you don't like Sally Rune's writing there is a real human sympathy to the way she understands what that would mean to somebody like Connell the liberation from anxiety and from financial pressure that the scholarship brings and then you contrast that with the slight glibbleness of Marianne's attitude to the scholarship.

“And so the casual way that Marianne says oh you should apply to Trinity which is we'll see a huge deal”

for a boy like Connell and I actually thought there's this bit where they go abroad for a while and Connell is only able to go because of this scholarship. The way that he observes the incredible things that he sees I thought that was actually oddly touching but also very well done.

Obviously coming from a much humble background in Marianne his world has always been in a quite

read about the size and and reality of them seems almost surreal to him. You know so for instance he says it's like something he assumed was just a pain to backdrop all his life has revealed itself to be real for and sit he's a real and famous artworks and underground railway systems and remnants of the Berlin Wall that's money the substance that makes the world real there's something so corrupt and sexy about it whereas you know Marianne in her kind of Italian

family villa is so at home she's so comfortable she's so casual about this extraordinary experience. I imagine she changed my mind back again to be to your perspective. You said you felt that the depiction of class sometimes came a little bit too close to not necessarily caricature but it was a bit heavy-handed almost. Yeah I mean initially I thought it was a little bit on the nose everyone with money was kind of a get a princess Jamie Jamie is case in point this Marianne's horrible

horrible boyfriend and his dad was involved in creating the financial crisis he doesn't do anything in life unless he's wearing red trousers he beats Marianne up during sex and he's he has a massive tantrum about the size of their champagne flutes and he is controlling her friend Peggy who is of a similar class kind of thinks that's all fine because you know he's from the right set and so I just kind of thought that it was lacking in kind of subtlety and nuance it was just so plainly

done and the posh character is basically served to emphasise Connors kind of kindness and gentleness and

maybe that of his mother or whatever but then having said that what after we spoke I kind of thought about it and I was like well I'm very lucky in that I haven't experienced that feeling of feeling like an outsider in the way that Connors does where people probably do seem like clichés and archetypes from his experience which is not mine. That's a fair point that we're seeing it through Connors eyes and maybe he would see it in a slightly you know understandably they all wear

“plum trousers and they all wear gelates or yeah and also just to stress I think these people are all”

full I'm not obviously class a huge thing about class is power and power dynamics are a really big part of this book and then there's not just about class you already mentioned

Connors has a kind of power over Marianne which is basically a sexual power. It's sexual exactly

it's it's yeah it's about desire. Yeah and desire is a big it's a huge thing for Sally Rooney in her books so Marianne desires Connors partly because he has social caché wearing their at school it's not just that he's sexy it's that he's popular he's an exciting person to be going out with she finds it transformative and do you see that when he says I love you and then obviously later he's not sure why he said it would ever well she says well this is the beginning of a new life for me.

Yeah exactly and then it turns on his head when there at Trinity she has the social capital and he feels the outsider left out in one art and so his desire for her is partly

“colored by that isn't it and desire for Sally Rooney is so important because it comes back to this”

theme of interconnectedness that none of us is independent that none of us is an atomized individual I mean she said many times in interviews she's not interested in writing about people on their own she wants to write about people in relation to others their emotions their sadness their happiness their lust their love whatever they are inevitably entwined with other people and actually just before we started recording I was flicking through the book and I realized that we hadn't talked

to talk about the epic raft which is from Daniel DeRonda by George Eliot and it's as follows it is one of the secrets in that change of mental poison which has been fitly named conversion that to many among us neither heaven nor earth has any revelation until some personality touches

theirs with a peculiar influence subduing them into receptiveness and that's basically the theme of

the book that you are changed not by abstract ideas or anything like that but by your relationship with other people and that nothing almost has any meaning except as its experience through your relationship to others but the the colonel Marianne relationship is so important because it's their mutual desire the changes them and exposes them to new possibilities and makes them realize that they can be different people and that the world contains more in it more kind of

emotional possibilities and they are previously imagined that you think yeah absolutely yeah I mean it's it's kind of about how you are a pinball in life moving from one bump to one bump with people and and how that changes you not necessarily transforms you I think that's kind of an

“ideal that she plays with in the book but certainly how yeah your life is basically you're”

moving from one kind of relationship from one encounter to another yeah but also for Marianne sex and intimacy it's all about like the loss of self so she wants to be utterly utterly in someone else's power because she doesn't have a very strong sense of self and and she kind of leans into that but equally that between her and Connell their desire for each other is not a bad thing it brings

kind of suggests that rather than independence being the ultimate goal that it's all right for

“women to need and I think that's why the sex scenes in the book they're always telling you something”

about what phase Connell and Marianne are at in their lives but also what phase they're at in their relationships you know the sex is illustrative and it also explains why they find each other so compelling why their connection is so you know strange and profound but then despite this incredible kind of avenue of communication between them one of the massive themes in the book which you mentioned towards the beginning is miscommunication despite this incredible connection and knowing

each other as they do trust each other as they do their relationship is constantly fragmenting thanks to a series of kind of misfire born of their own private issues and insecurities and so they can't communicate properly with each other and they break apart again it's really it's true touch your tragic element of the book but as you were saying it's me before it's very old-fashioned in what it is it's very classical so much of Jane Austen or George Eliot or something and your

favorite author Anthony Trollab so many of the plots are influenced by letters going to stray or misunderstood or communications that are misunderstood in some way the misfire results in the happy ending a lot of the time getting over the confusion or miscommunication and so I mentioned in the first half there's one scene in particular that perfectly encapsulates this so it's when their at Trinity College and connal because of his poverty is basically he's run out of rent money

he's going to have to move out and he wants to tell her about it he's sort of throwing himself a little bit on her mercy and he's basically says well you know I'm in a real mess I'm going to have

“to go home for the summer and he what I think is looking for her to almost put an arm around him”

and say well don't worry you know whatever whatever but she takes it completely the wrong way they he's deserting her and going off home for the summer because he's got cooler people to be with

or something I think she's right to see it that way I totally I get why Marianne like he never

gives any indication of his true intention because he's you know he's too embarrassed but of course he's embarrassed exactly he doesn't want to admit it and there's this line he couldn't understand how this had happened how he'd let the discussion slip away like this it was too late to say he wanted to stay with her that was clear but when it did become too late it seemed to have happened immediately he obviously hopes that she's not going to see other people and he says

very sort of limply I guess you'll want to see other people and she says sure in a voice that struck him as truly cold and then afterwards he cries because she's going to see other people and all of this but he doesn't realize the she's devastated that there are at total cross purposes throughout and that does capture the way that you speak when you're young and you're frightened to betray your emotions and you are frightened of rejection and of exposing your

vulnerability and all that kind of thing. I think the other slight implication is that because

you know often between you know young men and young women you know sex is always kind of

popping in the air between them how much can they have a really understand each other with you know sex which leads to vulnerability which leads to pride and stuff like that in the picture you know there's always going to be an uncrossable barrier but then this leads to I think kind of the question at the heart of the novel because I've been told so much about this book by kind of friends that love death and found it a very moving love story I kept thinking as as I was reading it

is this a love story and in a sense I think no in a sense I think it's one of the anti love story it's about how two people can change each other's lives for sure in a lasting way but it's suggest that love isn't enough to guarantee happiness or longevity in reality so for instance as these references to classical romance is like Emma in the book and I think that kind of serves to frame this message because in Emma for instance romance is kind of about social positioning

the stability of marriage and easily resolved misunderstandings resulting in kind of a clearly

“defined harmonious ending marriage is the ultimate goal and that's what you are overcoming the”

jeopardy to get towards and once achieved the story is kind of done and dust it but here you know

for Marianne and Connell like marriage is just it's never even in the picture it's never even

part of the end game or end point and they continue to drift in and out of each other's lives without resolve without any kind of clear definition of what they are that is so millennial dating like no one ever really knows what they are because of dating apps because there's so many other options on the table and there's no emotion resolution you know both remain damaged so the conclusion is kind of love doesn't heal everything love doesn't fix everything and uncertainty will always

prevail and they don't even really become a lasting stable couple do they they're never refers to each other's boyfriend and girlfriend no yeah there's never a point where they are oh we're gonna have Marianne and Connell around for dinner do you know what I mean then never you really betrayed like your age there oh come on do we have like the Sheridan's there for dinner

parties I've had one yeah you've had a dinner party you have people around for dinner with a couple no you're saying that and I think they probably were I think you're lying I don't know how he got here come on so you don't think it's a love story deep down or you don't think it's hold on you don't think it's romantic a lot of people clearly do no no I don't think it's a typical love story but it is you know rapturously romantic I mean you can't say that it's not I mean for one thing

okay so I'm gonna reveal what happens at the end of this book Connell gets onto a writing course in New York the indication is that he's gonna go and Marianne will stay but they're both enrich each other's lives Marianne says at one point that he's brought goodness into her life and she'll have that forever so it's a really hopeful ending it's not saying that you know love is pointless because it doesn't really change anything not at all it's deeply romantic you

know in part just because of the connection Connell and Marianne share for one another they're endlessly tender conversations and the way that they understand each other even amongst these

kind of infuriating missteps and also their sexual connection is incredible well we're told it's

incredible but we're not we don't really see it no of course not we do be with that and it's people think of it as they believe that it is though I mean I think obviously the TV series is much more blunt about this but I think the implication is that they share an unusually deep connection and also the fact that it's a will they won't they that is the most romantic formula in the book yeah and there's also this thing that it plays with the idea of soulmates even in amongst

the realism of it all and frankly I mean that is one of the most romantic concepts out there and it's something that everyone can deep down I think is sort of fascinated by but tap it you know what yesterday as you know I was listening back to our first episode that we did about weathering heights yeah and in that you poured score on a little bit on the idea of the soulmate when you were talking about Kathy and Heathcliff so don't you think that in this the

power of the book needs to derive from us believing that this is an unbelievably special connection between these two people that they are soulmates you were mean about his girlfriend who I think is called Helen and you said oh she's a bit dull and she's you know all of this she's very unsympathetic when his best friend dies I think she's fine I think she's all right

“yeah she's fine but that's the thing that's what Tali Renew is saying these two people are not”

fine they are exceptional they're exceptionally clever they're exceptionally traumatized they bring something uniquely vulnerable tender and also physically charged into each other's lives that's why it is a very romantic book capital R romance and that's why in a sense their relationship despite it being set firmly rooted in the real world and against the backdrop of text messages and you know what are we and anxiety and that kind of thing it is an idealised relationship you

know they share an inexplicable connection despite the fact that they come from different backgrounds they have different friends it's about this kind of intellectual, intangible connection and the idea of that the idea that it plays into of soulmates is an idealised projection of love you have to sort of buy into that a little bit and I'm gonna give myself away now and betray my hand and this is where all the Sally Runey great fans will give up on the podcast because I don't

deep down find them very likable characters you know I believe in them I think they're very well observed you made the point when we were chatting about this before before we recorded they don't

“have any fun they're not funny they never make each other laugh which I think is a crucial component”

of relationships and love of course I think a key component of any really successful relationship there has to be a shared sense of humour I mean you have to be able to laugh and enjoy yourselves

they never really enjoy themselves you get a sense that it's always raining and they're always

running out of money and they're always very miserable oh you can't say the running out of money thing that's just real life I mean I have to set it all right there's it was where you are just having a laugh and you're having a really nice time and especially in a couple with somebody you meant to be getting on really well with you know the sex for example everyone says well the sex is tremendous they have sex and they talk about Gaza for a bit then they have sex and they talk

about Marxism I mean to me that doesn't sound like a brilliant recipe for a Sunday yeah but you're like a middle aged English man I mean that's kind of the idea of you know there's that film the dreamers about young people in sex and love and stuff right it's all about talking about Marxism in between sex basically yeah but also I mean yeah I do agree like you know you said

for instance you never see them going after dinner at people's houses I mean God why would they

“be invited they're so miserable but that's how those two like long faces around like that being”

said this book is all about the silences in between what we are allowed to see so we don't know what goes on off stage and also I do like the kind of rounding it up message at the end of

it is freely available to anyone out there and the wonderful thing is that Marianne by the

“end of the book kind of comes to believe that and I think that's that's a lovely thing but then”

still I mean we're talking about the sex the romance little this leads beyond to the question like why was it such a cultural phenomenon it's said often these days people don't read these do books like this kind of below that trend the readership is young sadly really has definitely got a gift for capturing how a lot of young readers think about their lives and about how they think about their relationships so without again we're not the rest is therapy but when you read it

do you think oh this absolutely captures my experience of you know being young relationships all that kind of stuff the coming of age element of it for example yes I think it definitely captured parts of that the miscommunication element because of pride and and fear the fact that you feel like when you're young there should be some kind of rule book that you're following but

actually you never quite sure that you're doing it right like there's this wonderful bit where

it says oh Marianne has this sense of her real life was happening somewhere very far away happening without her and she didn't know if she would ever find out where it was and become part of it she had that feeling in school often but it wasn't accompanied by any specific images of what the real life might look like or feel like you know that feeling that technically you know you're following all the steps and everything but you're just an observer watching the world you know

turn around you everybody has that feeling don't they you're missing out the real part is happening somewhere else the you're doing it right that you've misjudged your course because of fear and anxiety and you've chosen the wrong path all of that that's part of being human colonel wishing that he had an imprint for how to conduct his personal life when you're having your early relationships

it's so feels like that it's so feels like you know when you first get irritated by someone

you're like oh my god that is so bizarre I've seen that happen in movies but I didn't know like it actually felt like that or are I doing this wrong you know that kind of thing so it's that it's it's the kind of the the relatability of this coming of age story in the early 2000s for I suppose people in my age all younger it's an idealised romance but seemingly can I've set in the real world which means that people can maybe indulge in the in in in it a little bit more

kind of the will they won't they for modern audiences perhaps and then of course the TV show rocket TV show new heights but the TV show is interesting because the TV show can show you things that the book can't and you work less hard obviously on a TV show because you don't have to use your imagination and the TV show was famously very explicit I mean the sex which we're imagining

“really in the book we see in the TV show and of course the TV show I think came out during COVID”

so basically people were trapped at home watching you know two very good looking people pretending to have sex and people were delighted by it and it was a phenomenon in a way that the book wasn't I would say I mean even more so than the book with it with a different kind of audience anyway so we are going to mark this and a way that Sally Rune would undoubtedly despise and see as the

marketisation of literature we're going to mark this out of ten as we always do and the scale

this time tabby is long lingering love-rorn looks out of ten long lingering love-rorn looks points for a literary should very good lots of points to you there so I have been dithering about my mark because on the one hand I don't imagine Sally Rune was which was picturing the reader I don't think she was picturing me however I think there are lots of good things I like the architecture of the book I think it's written in a great care and construction

there is actually some beautiful writing so people who think it's just Spartan here's a passage Dublin is extraordinary beautiful to her and wet weather the way gray stone darkens to black and rain moves over the grass and whispers on slick roof tiles rain coats glistening in the undersea color of street lamps rain silver as loose change in the glare of traffic deep down I would have liked a little bit more of that I know it's not really her thing crucially I don't

really like the characters and I think if you don't like the characters I mean there's no reason

“why you should of course but if you don't then the affair between them feels less cosmicly”

significant and so for that reason perhaps partially I'm going to give it a six okay fair enough I grew with you about the writing I mean I think that was beautiful and I actually quite like the slightly introspective spare style that nevertheless kind of cuts to the quick of feelings uh I like the way that I felt like you had kind of this privilege insight into the minds of too young people I recognized much of it from having been at age myself I thought the pacing was done beautifully

and the fact that it's a book where not much actually happens very readable you you turn the pages willingly and you know I love how nuance the two main characters are they're not cliches at all but I am like you and that I wasn't massively invested in their relationship I wasn't that bothered by whether or not they ended up together I wish that they'd had the odd laugh maybe or just cracked a smile from time to time that's so reductive I know so forgive me and I also just occasionally

found whilst pitying her and really admiring parts of her if I'm marrying quite annoying from

that's kind of idealised about it you know they're both very bright they're both looking

the both get scholarships all of that so I am going to give it a six point five you know I love

“my point five you like the point five I don't think there's I think there are very few marks”

that you've given that one to fraction hey it's my bookcase I can do it at like wow gully I cobblew she's gone there and said that about she has so yeah coming up after this we have and

another of your suggestions actually sorry it's a very it basically if you haven't started really

“it's starting reading it now because it's east of Eden it's quite long I have to say it's incredibly”

readable yes it's an east of Eden by John Steinbeck California great epic there's a lot of very peculiar goings on in that book a lot of small sparkling white teeth lots to discuss then a massive change of a pace and tone when we do surathecona doors the hand of the basketballs

“and then the greatest change in pace and tone in podcasting history as we finally tell”

we get to dream and we venture into the murky waters of romantasy don't pretend that wasn't your idea don't it come on with serer jay masses book how would I even have heard of it tabby so serer jay masses book a court of thorns and roses and then after that just to give you a preview what's coming up after that uh Wilkie Collins the woman in white Tony Morrison's book a beloved

friend of the show Virginia Woolf's book Mrs Dalloway and finally another book actually that I haven't

read that I'm really looking forward to getting stuck into another tabby so I read suggestion the hunger games so we've got it all happening and both of our listeners have got all that little forward to which is great tabby thank you very much for that and bye bye everybody bye