While they don’t become “normal people”,Marianne and Connell do help each other to become more whole. Normal People takes the reader through the subtle, ever-shifting intricacies and negotiations of Marianne and Connell’s connection to each other. She believes she is broken, and cannot want what normal people want from a relationship.

Marianne, having endured abuse at home, takes up with haughty, cruel men and engages in exploitative, degrading sexual behaviour with them. Connell lacks the elegance–and money–to feel at ease within the cultured atmosphere of Trinity College. At a wealthy acquaintance’s pool party, Connell wonders aloud about this privileged setting and the people who, like Marianne, operate comfortably within it. Throughout the course of the novel, Marianne and Connell both struggle with what it means to be “normal people”. Throughout their university years, Marianne and Connell continue a relationship that is no longer secret but is still undefined and interspersed with other romantic interests. However, the two end up studying at Trinity College, where Marianne fits in effortlessly, while Connell’s background leaves him floundering. Connell’s mother cleans Marianne’s home, and a secret relationship develops between them it ends with Connell’s implicit rejection of Marianne when he takes another girl to a year-end formal. As teenagers, Connell is a popular athlete from a working-class background, while Marianne is a social outcast from a wealthy family. Sally Rooney’s Normal People details a few years in the lives of Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan, who, at the start of the novel, have little in common except their hometown in Ireland.

Normal people sally