If I could shake some sense into these two… Sitting through the TV adaptation of Sally Rooney’s novel Normal People, I kept thinking when will they actually get out of the way of themselves and take a chance to be happy? You know, give it a real go. What are they scared of?

I get it, this is a formative ‘relationship' between two troubled teens, which secretly develops at school and stop-starts as they stumble into adulthood. Everything’s in flux. They’re still trying to figure out who they are, where they fit in, what they want, what they are deserving of etc Many of us felt a similar way at 18. But if a Marianne consumed, captivated and understood me like that (like, this is the one person I can confide in and be myself with), I would have read the signs. And I wouldn’t have cared so much about what other people think.

Perhaps I was thrown by how mature the leads look relative to their characters – in the sense that, surely they should know better – particularly Paul Mescal who stars as Connell. By the way, are you the last person to know that Connell’s chain has its own IG page? That’s no euphemism. His actual chain. Thirst levels for this guy are off the charts. Sales have soared.

Why is Connell so hell-bent on denying the strength of his feelings towards Marianne (played by Daisy Edgar-Jones)? He can’t even bring himself to show affection towards her in public until halfway through the series. Could it be that he is more ashamed of his primal attraction to Marianne than we can appreciate early on the the series?

As Angelina Chapin points out in The Cut, the very photogenic Edgar-Jones doesn’t match Rooney’s image of Marianne in the book – a feral teenager who is “an object of disgust at school”. That’s why, as Chapin goes on to explain, “When Marianne delivers one of the book’s best lines after seeing Connell for the first time in Dublin – ‘It’s classic me. Came to college and got pretty’ – it doesn’t feel true. All she did was put on some eyeliner and big earrings, more of a day-to-night transformation than ugly duckling to swan.”

Now it’s plausible that mean kids at school might (unfairly) target looks (“ugly, flat-chested”) to vilify and ostracise someone that either doesn’t fit in or chooses not to. However, reflecting on Marianne’s journey from Sligo to Dublin and seeing some of the old wounds open up in the episodes that follow, it felt like we had missed something. And that made it harder to fully inhabit her character and appreciate why she thinks others view her in a certain manner.

Connell declares his love early on, not in a twee way but with the sincerity and conviction of someone at last in the company of the one person that gets them. Yet he is willing to stand by while Marianne is ridiculed at school, groped in the club and later mistreated by ill-suited partners. For what? It takes Marianne's brother to draw blood for him to step up and show he really cares.

When he loses his job while at Trinity College, Connell would sooner go back to Sligo and derail a rekindled romance than ask Marianne to stay with her for a couple of weeks. Is working-class pride getting in the way or does he fear he’ll send the wrong message as his friend Niall suggests? Marianne is more decisive, acknowledging her feelings as “real” from day one. Cast adrift – and estranged from family and friends – she embarks on submissive relationships with the likes of Jamie, for whom she merely plays the role of being “in his power”. Again, it’s hard to appreciate the true extent of her self-hatred and why she would allow others to treat her like this unless we witness the full force of others’ revulsion to her appearance at school and why Connell would describe his attraction to her as “perverse” in the book.

Side discussion – does it matter if a TV adaptation deviates from the text in this manner? It depends on how curious you are about the origin stories of these characters and their psychology. Why they think and do, or in Marianne’s case allow herself to be done to, in a certain way? How else will be know what’s truly at stake in the present? Normal People is frustrating in this regard.

There are occasions where the show does bring us closer to the leads and what they are feeling, either through the acting (Mescal’s portrayal of Connell’s breakdown) or scripting (Marianne not wanting to be liked by boyfriend Lukas, wanting the opposite in fact). Elle writer Lauren Puckett also points out how Marianne’s abusive relationship with her brother Alan is less overt than in the book. The abuse is more twisted and psychological than physical. “This helps us understand how Marianne becomes a self-possessed person who nevertheless believes herself to be so worthless that she deserves abuse,” she says. “It's absolutely gutting to watch, but an accurate and stunning portrayal of manipulation.”

The series is intoxicating, intense, nuanced and triggering in its depiction of young love. We can all be the third (or fourth, fifth, sixth) person in that relationship. In fact, Normal People is so well rendered it will have you pining for the young love that never was. The pain feels real and you do sympathise with the impossible lovers at different points through the years.

Credit goes to the exceptional two leads, who some fans have said made them care even more about these characters than the ones on the page. The Skype call where Marianne keeps a low Connell company overnight while she works in Sweden is an understated yet precious moment. Mescal’s depiction of Connell’s struggles with mental health while alienated and grieving at Trinity is also affecting.

Sally Rooney is masterful when it comes to writing dialogue – both direct and internally. Her first book, Conversations With Friends, stayed with me long after I turned the final page (particularly the poignant line “you live through certain things before you can understand them”). At a London Review Bookshop event with Kishani Widyaratna in 2019, Rooney talked about the stories that interest her and what she tried to explore in Normal People. “What I really love to read and write about are experiences that are extremely banal but don’t necessarily conform to our narrative about what normality is. I try to write in a way that recognises myths we tell about our own individual identities and how those stories don’t always match up with the way we feel and live in our everyday lives.

“I’m not trying to write about Marianne as an example of womanhood or young Irish womanhood (it’s not a parable). What interests me is to have this particular person in those particular set of relationships and watch her navigate them with a sensitivity to what is irreducibly individual about her, while also observing how [other] forces shape and condition her responses to things.”  

Rooney co-scripted the first six episodes with Alice Birch, who gives voice to the author's creations beautifully in the second half. The final few exchanges between Connell and Marianne in episode 12 are the emotional apex of the series. “We’ve done so much good for one another,” says Marianne, delivered with such gratitude but in resignation, before Connell reveals just how significant their relationship will become.

The director of episodes one to six is the brilliant Lenny Abrahamson, who made What Richard Did, Frank and Room. He was very astute in his approach to this TV adaptation, acknowledging the need to build momentum by having short 30-minute episodes that focus on key moments or encounters between the two (almost like mini-chapters). 

On the subject of sex, a key element in Normal People (so much so that a few critics have even dusted off salacious old tabloid adjective “steamy”), he says: “It’s something that we thought about from the beginning, because of the strength of the sexual intimacy of Marianne and Connell was a big part of the story and we wanted to honour that. The rule when writing was that we wanted to make sure the scenes were always in the service of the story and the characters.”

They had an intimacy coordinator on set and this lent a certain authenticity to those scenes as we see two people finding solace in one another through tight close-ups and lingering looks. "We didn’t stop the story for sex [during shooting],” he adds. “It had to feel like a continuation of the same concerns and focus that preceded it in the scene.” [Abrahamson also mentions photographer Nan Goldin as a cinematography reference, which makes sense.]

The camera conveys what Marianne and Connell are feeling for each other in other ways, even when apart. As Mescal put it in this Q&A with Edgar-Jones, “You remember the first person you ever fancied or fell in love with? How you could always tell where that person was in the room? I think Lenny gets that right in the school stuff. We always feel the presence and absence of each other in the room.” (The careful choice of music also heightens emotions and evokes the push and pull between them.)

After watching the first few episodes with me, a friend quipped: “They should have called it something else!” Hilarious but does he have a point? I suppose it depends on where you are in life and how black or white you see it. In the book, Rooney described Marianne and Connell as being “like two little plants sharing the same plot of soil, growing around one another, contorting to make room, taking certain unlikely positions”. If we extend the analogy, does that mean that two young people are destined to outgrow one another?

The appeal of a series like this is that it encapsulates the chaotic, kinetic, all-consuming thrill of a particular period in life, one that we can all relate to in some way. The tricky thing is to simultaneously experience it anew as a viewer, without the benefit of hindsight. That’s why this idealistic 40-year-old can’t get over the self-sabotage at play and desperately believes that two people with a unique connection – soulmates, dare I say it – should be together. (Perhaps they are. Fans are speculating.)

NB Sally Rooney will again team up with Lenny Abrahamson and production company Element for the TV adaptation of Conversations With Friends. More information here.