Sally Rooney Won’t Option 3rd Book for TV After Normal People Success

Author Sally Rooney has two TV adaptations under her belt, but she might not keep the trend going.

In an interview with The New York Times published Saturday, September 21, the 33-year-old revealed that she’s “decided not to accept any offers to option the rights” for her third novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, for the time being.

“I felt like it was just time to take a break from that and let the book be its own thing for a while,” she explained of the bestseller, which was released in 2021.

The first of Rooney’s works to receive the TV treatment was Normal People, which was transformed into a Hulu miniseries that debuted in April 2020. The show starred Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar-Jones as Connell and Marianne, respectively, and served as a launching pad for their Hollywood careers.

Normal People was nominated for four Emmy Awards, and the positive reception from both critics and fans sparked even more anticipation for the adaptation of Rooney’s first book, Conversations With Friends.

Starring Joe Alwyn, Alison Oliver, Jemima Kirke and Sasha Lane, Conversations With Friends premiered on Hulu in May 2022. Despite the A-list cast, the series was met with more tepid reviews.

Rooney was credited as a writer and executive producer on Normal People, but she only took on the latter role for Conversations With Friends — and wouldn’t have done it any other way.

“The reason that I chose not to be so involved in the second adaptation was because I was working on what became my third novel,” she told the NYT. “The experience of working on the first one had been, in so many ways, amazing — the team of people involved in it. But it did also feel like a really big job.”

Rooney continued, “Then, when the show was broadcast, that felt like a lot in terms of the amount of discourse that it generated and the amount of media attention. I felt that world was not where I belonged. I felt like, ‘OK, now I know that my books are where I belong, and that’s all that I want to be doing.’”

While she’s taken a step back from the TV world, Rooney hasn’t slowed down. Her fourth book, Intermezzo, debuts Tuesday, September 24, and is already receiving rave reviews.

The story follows the complex relationship between two brothers, Peter and Ivan, who are 10 years apart in age. When asked whether she thinks her books resemble one another too closely, Rooney didn’t mince words.

“That’s a really good question. I would have to answer it by saying I don’t care about my career,” she said. “I think about, ‘How do I make this book the perfect version of what it can be?’ I never think about it in relation to my other work, and I never think about what people will say about how close or distant it is from my oeuvre. I don’t think of myself as even having an oeuvre. I just think about: ‘I’ve got these characters. I’ve got these scenarios. How do I do justice to them?’ I don’t feel myself thinking about my growth as an artist, if you will.”