Reflecting on the prolonged impact of early romantic relationships.
Just over a month ago, a friend messaged me asking if I was familiar with Normal People. I hadn’t (still haven’t) been able to get hold of the book, but had just watched the first episode of the TV adaptation. “Let me know what you think of it <3”, she said.
I suppose the relationship I have with each of my friends is set against the backdrop of the period in which we met. This is a friendship that was born of that college-era age, a summer job abroad, four weeks of utmost intensity of experience — but then everything was intense during those years, each term of my undergraduate degree felt rich enough to hold a lifetime.
It is important through, because it informs the question posed.
Normal People traces the arc of an on-again off-again relationship between a young couple who are each other’s first love. It is beautifully shot, which doesn’t necessarily make it easy to watch. Its language, verbal and videographical, is that of ecstasy and rapture. At times it is violent in the way it seeks to seize attention, to draw us out of ourselves. It is raw, it exposes, it is uncomfortable. It is excess.
All of those things of course are entirely appropriate characteristics of the lexicon of First Love (– which, as a footnote, differs from later love in the depth of the pain it causes, which many mistakenly equate to worth). Sometimes I think my whole adult life has been a struggle to subdue the aftershock of my own first love, to subjugate the feelings it engendered, to identify and begin to heal the all-encompassing damage it wrought. The story of Connell and Marianne portrays some of the terror and pleasures of falling in love, but more importantly it documents and demands acknowledgement of their lasting impact.
So I am not surprised by the acclaim that Normal People has received, if anything perhaps I am more inclined to question those who set themselves apart from it. That might sound patronising. What I mean to say is: I find it more plausible that, for some, the intensity of Normal People falls so outside of a carefully re-constructed emotional landscape that, in order to keep their own world intact, it is necessary for them to deny the experience. I find that more readily understandable.
Either way, it is of little importance. In my case the story was successful in disturbing dust that had not long settled, even though I am now over a decade removed from the original impact. It awoke a host of memories both tender and painful: the intimacy and struggle of communication, the many facets of anxiety and shame. But what I found most interesting was the way in which its carefully curated moments could be read to amplify and emphasise the role of chance.
‘What happened??” — is a question I have so often posed myself with regard to my own experience. What happened?? In truth, when I was absent. That day, that it came crashing down. At first, to make me fall for him. But also: what happened to rob me so utterly of dignity and self-respect that I allowed and accepted it?
This was the question that consumed me for years after it ended, one obsession replaced by another. It sent me sifting through childhood memories and re-examining family dynamics, trying to shine light into gloom. It was the first thought I had every day when I awoke, any moment when my mind fell idle. On a positive note, it was what pushed me to start writing again, to take control back and find joy in my own experience.
I spent so long searching (before finally forgiving and letting go), but what Normal People showed me was that I might have been looking for the wrong thing. That it could have been as simple as a string of chance moments and misunderstandings that led up to what came to be, caught in the trappings of course of everything that makes up a life, but in many ways out of our control.
I look forward to reading the book.
Mad to Live 