By this point in lockdown, most sensible people have binge-watched the BBC adaptation of Normal People, reread Sally Rooney’s critically acclaimed novel, and invested in a summer dress just like the one Marianne wore to cycle around the Italian countryside. Some of us, however, still cannot let the drama go and move onto another TV programme, no matter how romantic it may be. (Case in point: the sheer volume of otherwise reasonable adults now following Connell’s chain on Instagram.)
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So, here’s some good news for those lying awake at night, wondering about the fate of the star-crossed millennial lovers: Rooney has already written about what happened after Connell leaves Marianne behind in Dublin to attend a graduate writer’s programme in New York. In fact, Normal People is based on At the Clinic, a story she published in the literary magazine The White Review in 2016, which follows the pair on a trip to get Marianne’s wisdom tooth removed when both are 23-years-old.
As Rooney told The Telegraph before Normal People’s release, she had just finished writing a draft of Conversations with Friends when the idea for a piece of fiction chronicling an intimate relationship on a “granular, almost forensic level” came to her. After she published the original story, she decided that Marianne and Connell’s romance deserved to be explored in more detail – and devoted herself to writing what would ultimately become her second novel.
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So, what does At the Clinic tell us about the Sligo natives’ life post-graduation? Both are still in love with each other, and still engaging in verbal sparring matches – sleeping together in between conducting ill-advised relationships with other people (in Connell’s case, ones without any emotion, and in Marianne’s, ones that border on masochistic). In short, not much at all has changed between them, in the best way possible – so you can finally stop rewatching the last episode and crying over their separation.
Read the story in full on The White Review’s website, and enjoy the liberating sense of closure it brings.
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