A placeholder for something more valuable

Who even gets married? said Bobbi. It's sinister. Who wants state apparatuses sustaining their relationship?

I don't know. What is ours sustained by?

That's it! That's exactly what I mean. Nothing. Do I call myself your girlfriend? No. Calling myself your girlfriend would be imposing some prefabricated cultural dynamic on us that's outside our control. You know?

You know? Conversations with Friends, by Sally Rooney, is just what I needed. It's effortless, casual and fresh. I like reading Rooney.

There's something very Salinger about Rooney's tone, something astute and authentic, featuring characters of culture and privilege, with an educated right to be subversive, who all the while excel at the art of conversation and knowing which fork to use.

This is how privilege gets perpetuated, Philip told me in the office one day. Rich assholes like us taking unpaid internships and getting jobs off the back of them.

Frances, a 21-year-old college student playing grown-up, embarks on an adventure in relationship anarchy with a married man some dozen years older than her. This challenges her relationship with best friend Bobbi, former lover and spoken-word performance partner. 

Of course, Nick and Melissa are the type who a have a house in France available to them for the summer, so they invite Frances and Bobbi, along with another couple of friends.

Drama ensues, for all parties, and continues after France. Nick tells his wife about the affair, and when  he and his wife resume a physical relationship, Frances doesn't know what to feel.

The sex itself was similar, but afterward was different. Instead of feeling tranquil, I felt oddly defenseless, like an animal playing dead. It was as though Nick could reach through the soft cloud of my skin and take whatever was inside me, like my lungs or other internal organs, and I wouldn't try to stop him. When I described this to him he said he felt the same, but he was sleepy and he might not really have been listening.

A New Yorker profile notes, "one wonderful aspect of Rooney's consistently wonderful novel is the fierce clarity with which she examines the self-delusion that so often festers alongside presumed self-knowledge." (This is a revelation to me; I have great admiration for people with self-awareness, I wish I had more of that. But now it dawns on me: the more self-aware a person becomes, the more complex the delusions the subconscious must fabricate to keep the self placated. I wonder what my therapist would say about that. I wonder what the self-aware people in my life would say about that.)

It was hard not to notice the many references to "normal people," as if these characters weren't them but aspired to be them, or at least live among them without drawing too much of the wrong sort of attention.

My body felt completely disposable, like a placeholder for something more valuable. I fantasized about taking it apart and lining my limbs up side by side to compare them.

See also
Chapter one 
The Hysterical Hamster: Clips and astute observations
The New Yorker: A New Kind of Adultery Novel