the alice and eileen of it all
amarah discusses her beautiful world where are you annotations, moving away from her cozy undergrad life, and literal/figurative 'next chapters'
Dear Tess,
This first post is a letter, even though you are currently sitting three feet away from me on our shared couch. The shared couch that is, by the way, the namesake of our blog; a couch that has been dusted, scrubbed, and bathed in baking soda, in an attempt to cleanse it of our house’s previous tenants; a couch that has swallowed headphones, wallets, and laptops whole; a couch that seats seven comfortably or fourteen uncomfortably.
This first post is a letter because I’m practicing for being very far away from you. Not sure how far away, exactly, when I could be anywhere from Toronto to Dublin. But the distance will certainly be greater than the walk from my bedroom to yours. My bedroom, separated from the kitchen with the thinnest, flimsiest wall; home to the memories of a hundred lazy Sunday mornings when I’d hear you opening cabinets just a little too loudly, to see if you could get me to open my door; home to a vent that connects our rooms together through some sort of sound tunnel, meaning you can always hear me laugh late at night; home, also, to me.
This first post is also a letter because, last night, I started rereading Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You, a book that has made me romanticize long-form online correspondences in a way you’d never believe. Growing up, I never felt that the email was a sacred medium. Before I had a cell phone, my friends and I would sometimes trade sentence-long emails back and forth with one another, experimenting with the joys of font size and colour. Emails were casual. They were silly.
Nonprofessional, non-spam, non-calendar-invite-from-mom emails feel very special to me now. Maybe it’s because ‘snail mail’ is basically obsolete, but more likely it’s Rooney’s novel working its magic on me. In the book, Alice and Eileen are best friends who met in undergrad, now staying in touch via email. They trade essay-like emails back and forth throughout the novel, working through their relationships alongside broader issues like capitalism, climate change, and patriarchy. As a creative choice on Rooney’s part, the emails have received mixed reviews; I’ve seen people liken them to personal essays from Rooney’s perspective and ask why she didn’t simply write an essay collection instead. Maybe it’s the liberal arts student in me, but I love the emails. More than that, I believe them. As a frequent sender of text walls and 20+ minute voice memos, I too have a lot to say to my friends, about subjects both personal and political. And, as someone who’s about to be very far away from a lot of people I love, I understand the appeal of writing a whole essay for someone important to you.
So, this first post is a letter to you, Tess, because a letter in a Substack blog is akin to an email. And because I’ve been thinking about emails. And because I’m re-reading Beautiful World.
I read and annotated the first two chapters of Beautiful World last night, in an attempt to get something from the text that I haven’t gotten before.
The first time I read this book, it was about gender. The second time I read it, it was about making meaning in your life and finding your way in the world. This time, I’m determined to find things I haven’t noticed before, making close-reading and annotating a convenient means to an end. Below are the two new themes I’ve pulled out so far:
(1) Performance
“She looked outside now at the sunset as if it were of interest to her, though she hadn’t paid any attention to it before.”1
“Performance” was the first word I wrote in my copy of Beautiful World, on page four. I wrote it twice more in the first eighteen pages of the book, and I know it came up more times than I wrote it down.
The way we see characters perform has been fascinating so far. For one, the removed style of writing doesn’t let us into the characters’ heads; we don’t see them making the conscious choice to project one persona or another. Rather, the close observational tone of the narration allows us to notice when they take contradictory or confusing actions, and we can infer, from that, the ways they perform or pretend.
In a sense, the emails between Alice and Eileen offer a much needed break from watching the live theatre of interpersonal interaction. Here, in the world they’ve created, Alice and Eileen can be wholly and intimately themselves. Except they can’t. Of course they can’t.
There’s a second level of performance at work in the emails, and it’s the level at which Alice and Eileen perform for each other. It’s harder to pin down, especially at the start, because they don’t think of themselves as performing in that space. On page 15, Alice writes to Eileen, “I am going crazy thinking about the rent you’re paying in Dublin.”2 As she says this, Alice is living rent-free in a large house outside Dublin.
Now, I don’t mean to suggest that Alice doesn’t feel for Eileen, but the claim that she is “going crazy” is certainly for the benefit of her friend. And this isn’t necessarily a bad thing! Performing empathy for Eileen doesn’t make Alice apathetic or dishonest; all it tells us is that performance is ubiquitous (especially online?).
I may say more about performance in future posts, as I continue my reread of Beautiful World, because it’s definitely the sort of theme that’s more interesting on conjunction with other themes. When the book starts to become about gender, about class, about religion, I’m sure that the thread of performance will remain constant and will begin to intersect with all those other things. I think it’ll be cool, and I’ll keep you updated.
(2) The City
“Dublin is, and I mean literally and topographically, flat – so that everything has to take place on a single plane.”3
Focused on Alice’s perspective, neither of the first two chapters actually take place in Dublin. Still, Dublin is a character from the very start. In her first email to Eileen, in chapter two, Alice describes Dublin as flat (with regards to its geographic features, its architectures, etc.). She tells Eileen that, while this may make Dublin seem like a democratic city, it also gives the sky a sort of total dominance over the human world and its inhabitants.
To be honest, I’m not totally sure what to make of any of this, at least not yet. I don’t know much about Dublin – how it may or may not be a “democratic city,” whether it looks and feels as “flat” as Alice claims – and further research is probably outside the scope of this blog post. But, I have to say, I really like that Dublin is already such a major thematic piece of the story, and I’m curious about the relationship that Beautiful World is trying to cultivate with the city. Both the city (Dublin) and The City (conceptually).
More on this later, as I keep reading and probably do some research on the tradition of writing the city in Irish lit.
Thinking about the city in a Beautiful World context makes me think about it in my own context too. That could probably be its own blog post (and, hey, maybe it will be!), but the gist is that Hamilton has become a really dynamic and active part of my life.
Hamilton, where I took my first legal drink; Hamilton, where I made the first friends of my young adult life; Hamilton, where I discovered book launches and record store concerts and poetry readings and why people care when something says “locally-sourced”; Hamilton, which makes me think of the line from that one Lemon Twigs song whenever I wander;4 Hamilton, which the GPS in my phone now calls ‘home.’
And now I’m getting ready to leave it. I’m getting ready to leave a lot of things. In a purely geographic sense, I’m getting ready to leave you, Tess! And I don’t really know where I’m going yet.
I decided I was going to write on “literal/figurative next chapters” before figuring out how exactly I would compare and contrast rereading your favourite book to moving into a new stage of life. In the first version of this paragraph (written and deleted), I wondered if perhaps I chose to pick up Beautiful World because it provides me with familiarity in the face of newness, confusion, and change. But that’s not quite right. If I thought Beautiful World could quell all my fears and uncertainties, I would have picked it up months ago. I actually think, somewhat conversely, that rereading Beautiful World is a lot like moving into a new stage of life – I have no idea what I’m going to get out of the process or what major themes I’m going to learn, but I’m pretty sure I can count on the characters to be there.
As I move into my own “next chapter,” I am of course grateful for my own sense of self, for the knowledge that I can rely on that, but I am also immeasurably grateful for the people I love. And, while Alice and Eileen’s relationship is not necessarily the model of a perfect friendship (if it were a contest, Tess, we would decimate them), it does remind me to stop and appreciate the relationships that we forge in a single moment and choose to take with us forever.
As I move into the literal next chapters of Beautiful World, stay tuned for updates! I’m sure there will be more Sally Rooney blog posts to come. But, for now, I’ll end it here. To quote Alice in her first email:
“Love love love always,
[Amarah]”
Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You (Faber, 2021), 4.
Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You (Faber, 2021), 15.
Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You (Faber, 2021), 15.
The line is, “I can find a place that is pretty / 'Cause I know my way in the city,” and the song is “Everything Harmony”
And we are so much cooler than they are
I would so gladly write you such wordy emails and blog posts and physical letters that are so lovely