by Sally Rooney
I wish I knew what you thought of all this. I still have no idea what it will be like—what it will feel like, or how the days will pass, whether I’ll still want to write or be able to, what will become of my life. I suppose I think that having a child is simply the most ordinary thing I can imagine doing. And I want that—to prove that the most ordinary thing about human beings is not violence or greed but love and care. To prove it to whom, I wonder. Myself, maybe. Anyway: no one else knows, and we’re not going to tell anyone for a few more weeks, except for you and Felix. You can tell him if you want, of course, or Simon can tell him on the phone. I know that it’s not the life you imagined for me, Alice—buying a house and having children with a boy I grew up with. It’s not the life I used to imagine for myself either. But it’s the life I have, the only one. And as I write you this message I’m very happy. All my love.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The title of this book is a literal translation of a phrase from Friedrich Schiller’s poem ‘Die Götter Griechenlandes’ (‘The Gods of Greece’), first published in 1788. In the original German, the phrase reads: ‘Schöne Welt, wo bist du?’ Franz Schubert set a fragment of the poem to music in 1819. Beautiful World, Where Are You? was also the title of the 2018 Liverpool Biennial, which I visited during the Liverpool Literary Festival in October of that year.
I would like to acknowledge here some of the support I received while I worked on this book. Above all, I want to thank my husband, who makes it possible for me to live and work the way I do. John, I can only try to express in my writing some small measure of the love and happiness you have brought into my life. And to my friends Aoife Comey and Kate Oliver: I am grateful every day for your friendship, and I can never thank you enough.
I owe a great debt of gratitude to John Patrick McHugh, whose excellent early feedback led me to find a much-needed new direction for this book. And I am likewise indebted to my editor Mitzi Angel, who from the beginning helped me to see what was good in the novel, and how it could be better. I also want to thank Alex Bowler for his thorough and very insightful notes. Further thanks, personal and professional, to Thomas Morris, and to my agent and dear friend Tracy Bohan. For conversations that helped me to tease out the problems of the book, and in some cases for help with factual and practical queries, I would like to thank—as well as those previously mentioned—Sheila, Emily, Zadie, Sunniva, William, Katie and Marie.
I spent a blissful period working on this novel at Santa Maddalena in Tuscany. I would like to thank Beatrice Monti della Corte von Rezzori and the Santa Maddalena Foundation for their generosity in inviting me to take part in a residency there. And to Rasika, Sean, Nico, Kate, Fredrik—how can I ever thank you for those heavenly weeks?
I would also like to acknowledge the support of the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, where I was a fellow from 2019 to 2020. My thanks are due not only to the wonderful staff there but also to my ‘fellow fellows’, in particular Ken Chen, Justin E. H. Smith, and Josephine Quinn. Josephine’s 2016 piece on the Bronze Age collapse (‘Your own ships did this!’, London Review of Books) has clearly informed Eileen’s thinking in chapter 16 of this novel (though of course any errors are Eileen’s and mine).
Finally, to everyone who has worked on the publication, distribution or sale of this book, my warmest thanks.
ALSO BY SALLY ROONEY
Normal People
Conversations with Friends
A Note About the Author
Sally Rooney is an Irish novelist. She is the author of Conversations with Friends and Normal People. She also contributed to the writing and production of the Hulu/BBC television adaptation of Normal People. You can sign up for email updates here.
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Epigraph
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
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10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
Acknowledgements
Also by Sally Rooney
A Note About the Author
Copyright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
120 Broadway, New York 10271
Copyright © 2021 by Sally Rooney
All rights reserved
First edition, 2021
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following material:
Epigraph from ‘My Vocation,’ by Natalia Ginzburg, from The Little Virtues. Copyright © 1962, 1966, 1972, 1984, 1998, 2012, and 2015 Giulio Einaudi editore s.p.a., Torino. Originally published in Italian as Le Piccole Virtù. Translation copyright © 1985 Dick Davis. First published in Great Britain in 1985 by Carcanet, Manchester.
Excerpt in chapter 16 from ‘How to Get There,’ by Frank O’Hara, from Lunch Poems. Copyright © 1964 by Frank O’Hara. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC, on behalf of City Lights Books, citylights.com. All rights reserved.
Excerpt in chapter 18 from Within a Budding Grove, by Marcel Proust, translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, The Modern Library, New York, copyright 1924.
Excerpt in chapter 26 from The Waste Land, first published in 1922; copyright the Estate of T. S. Eliot. Reproduced by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd.
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