Follow-up Conversations with Friends also provides a steamy setting, and similarly to Marianne, protagonist Frances never knows how to carry herself. The female lead in that story, Marianne, starts out as an outspoken outsider clearly compensating for her lack of confidence, only to grow into a literary cool-girl once she hits college. She does this in her 2018 novel, Normal People, which captured our special attention in 2020 when Hulu turned it into a steamy 12-episode series.

Rooney does many things well, but one particularly notable flex that’s evident here is her ability to write self-loathing women with empathy and poise. The relationships in this story elicit much betrayal, gnashing of teeth, tense exchanges and emotional warfare, but it all makes for some damn good TV-obviously. Consenting polyamorous relationships are on the rise, but the love square in Conversations with Friends, with 21-year-old Trinity College student Frances (played by newcomer Alison Oliver) at the center, is fraught. Can you love two people at once? Even if you’re in a committed relationship, do you ever feel desire for a person who isn’t your partner? If so, what are you supposed to do with that desire? Empty it, ignore it, destroy it, act on it? These are the questions at the center of Irish author Sally Rooney’s debut novel Conversations with Friends, which has now been adapted as a limited series on Hulu.

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