{"id":306937,"date":"2026-02-24T07:10:00","date_gmt":"2026-02-24T12:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/?p=306937"},"modified":"2026-02-23T17:26:28","modified_gmt":"2026-02-23T22:26:28","slug":"i-love-sally-rooneys-books-but-i-love-her-essay-about-college-debate-even-more","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/i-love-sally-rooneys-books-but-i-love-her-essay-about-college-debate-even-more\/","title":{"rendered":"I Love Sally Rooney’s Books but I Love Her Essay About Competitive College Debate Even More"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A typical conversation about Sally Rooney often includes some version of the question: Are you a Normal People<\/a> <\/em>person or Conversations with Friends<\/a> <\/em>person? Rooney readers tend to have a strong, if not fraught, preference. Whenever people have asked me this question, however, I\u2019ve had a different answer. \u201cActually,\u201d I say, \u201cI\u2019m an \u2018Even if you Beat Me\u2019 person.\u201d My answer, Rooney\u2019s first published essay, has stumped some ardent Rooney fans, including those familiar with the broad contours of the story it chronicles.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cEven if you Beat Me,\u201d appeared in 2015 in The Dublin Review<\/em>, two years before Rooney\u2019s debut novel. It traces the future author\u2019s climb from an anonymous college debater to the number one competitive debater in Europe, followed by her disillusionment with the debate circuit altogether due to its \u201cpolitical frivolity\u201d and disconnect from real-world issues. It\u2019s considered the essay that launched Rooney\u2019s fiction career, too, after catching the attention of the Wylie Agency. And while the specifics of the debate world and the essay\u2019s significance in the arc of Rooney\u2019s career are interesting, what I admire most about \u201cEven if you Beat Me,\u201d is Rooney\u2019s unflinching portrayal of her own hard work, competitiveness, and ambition. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since we live in a moment where the self-conscious cultural elite both valorizes success but treats visible striving with distaste and even suspicion, owning one\u2019s own voracious ambition is startlingly refreshing. In many of the circles I move in, peers deride institutional meritocracy even as they define themselves and their work by its standards. They hide their ambition and self-interest behind nonchalance or appeals to ethical and moral concerns. But not Rooney, at least not the Rooney in \u201cEven if you Beat Me.\u201d She straightforwardly admits her desires. She was a \u201cnearly friendless teenager living away from home for the first time\u201d when she stumbled into the debate hall and, to her delight, quickly identified the debate community as one where she could become \u201csuccessful and popular.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

No more free international trips. No more \u201cthrills from counterfactuals.\u201d No more sycophantic fans. In other words, Rooney puts her money where her mouth is.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s not to say the essay doesn\u2019t grapple with what it means to desire acclaim and popularity within unfair systems. The opening scene depicts Rooney and her \u201cprivileged, English-speaking university students\u201d riding past \u201cdwellings made partly of cardboard advertisements\u201d on the way to a debate competition in Chennai. She comments, \u201cNo one failed to notice this fact, but what was there to say about it?\u201d echoing how many of us feel when confronted by an injustice so enormous we struggle to know what to say or how to make it a little bit better. And yet another strength of Rooney\u2019s essay is that she does land on a way to make it a little bit better: by the end of the Chennai debate, Rooney quits debating. No more free international trips. No more \u201cthrills from counterfactuals.\u201d No more sycophantic fans. In other words, Rooney puts her money where her mouth is. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Again, this kind of action feels like a breath of fresh air during a time\u2014or, perhaps, all times\u2014when it\u2019s easier to say the right things than do the right things. Reading Rooney\u2019s first novels through the lens of \u201cEven if you Beat Me\u201d<\/em> can also clarify the intentional tension between personal drive and ethical awareness that underpins the inert, shallow politics of many of Rooney\u2019s characters. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Conversations with Friends<\/em>, for example, Frances identifies as a communist yet feels drawn to fame and affluence: \u201cShe was a big fan of seeing the insides of other people\u2019s houses, especially people who were slightly famous like Melissa.\u201d Bobbi, Frances\u2019s ex-girlfriend, faces a similar predicament. She\u2019s critical of capitalism while desiring the social and artistic opportunities that can come from proximity to capitalism\u2019s victors. When Melissa suggests introducing Bobbi to Veronica, her \u201cold money\u201d friend who \u201cwas very helpful with getting her book published,\u201d Bobbi responds, \u201cWealthy people sicken me\u2026but yeah, I\u2019m sure she\u2019s great.\u201d Knowing any of these characters, it\u2019s not a stretch to imagine each might accept Veronica\u2019s help while privately maintaining their critique of wealth and privilege.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But by quitting debate right when she\u2019s at the top of her game, Rooney proves herself to be above her characters: a woman of convictions. She writes, \u201cMaybe I stopped debating to see if I could still think of things to say when there weren\u2019t any prizes.\u201d On the one hand, this reflection, along with others like it, underscores the essay\u2019s achievement as a rare piece of millennial writing that doesn\u2019t downplay, ironize, or disguise raw ambition, but rather demonstrates it as a real meaning-making driver in many of our lives. On the other hand, it\u2019s also a bit of a riddle when considered alongside Rooney\u2019s later literary success and Marxism. Are we to believe so much success simply fell into her lap? Not necessarily. In her essay, Rooney acknowledges that she is \u201cstill working on that,\u201d suggesting that her relationship with \u201cprizes\u201d is an ongoing process.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think I will ever again want something so meaningless so much,\u201d Rooney confesses about her obsession with college debate. Another, more cynical version could go: I don\u2019t think I will ever again show that I want something so meaningless so much.<\/em> Performative modesty and what the Italians call sprezzatura<\/em> (a kind of studied carelessness) are, after all, learned skills in\u00a0elite social spaces that reward effort only when it appears effortless. Effortless is cool, credible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By quitting debate right when she\u2019s at the top of her game, Rooney proves herself to be above her characters: a woman of convictions.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Effort is for the pitiful, for the lesser gods. With that in mind, Rooney\u2019s own trajectory offers an example of\u2014take your pick\u2014genuine growth or learned restraint. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

More than a decade after \u201cEven if You Beat Me,\u201d and its delightfully unflinching closing lines\u2014\u201cI was number one. Like Fast Eddie, I\u2019m the best there is. And even if you beat me, I\u2019m still the best\u201d\u2014a New York Times<\/em> piece<\/a> about Rooney bore the headline \u201cSally Rooney Thinks Career Growth Is Overrated.\u201d In the interview, she is portrayed in what has become her signature posture: one of ambivalence toward her effort, fame, and success.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is impossible to determine whether this framing and adaptation to elite norms is Rooney\u2019s own doing or the industry\u2019s presentation of her. In contrast, recall the example of actor Jeremy Strong, who was mocked for being openly ambitious \u2014 \u00e0 la \u201cEven if You Beat Me\u201d-style \u2014in a 2021 New Yorker interview, \u201cOn \u2018Succession,\u2019 Jeremy Strong Doesn\u2019t Get the Joke.\u201d Throughout the piece, the interviewer, a Yale graduate, implies that Strong\u2019s hard work, seriousness, and ambition are uncool. Essentially, Strong is punished for violating the unspoken rule that true talent never tries too hard. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But why is this so frequently the case in elite or creative spaces? Why must achievement often appear accidental or uncontrollable? You see this same treatment of achievement in Rooney\u2019s first three novels, where her characters\u2019 ambition and hard work are often muted or pushed to the margins of her stories. Many of her characters suffer from what I think of as latter-seasons Rory Gilmore Syndrome<\/em>: things just come too damn easily for them. This is also true of her socially mobile characters, such as Connell from Normal People<\/em>, the son of a house cleaner, who ascends to Trinity College Dublin and later, a prestigious M.F.A. program in New York. Rooney\u2019s characters attend the best schools, write celebrated essays and books, win major scholarships, and maintain flawless physiques without breaking a sweat or counting calories. With few exceptions, they possess the right shibboleth, exert the right amount of effort, and easily forge connections with the right people: journalists, literary editors, film stars, scholarship committees, and graduate school admissions officers. There\u2019s little trial and error amongst her successful, ambitious characters. Neither is there much aggression, jealousy, rage, or other neurotic behaviors associated with highly competitive people, except when concerning les affaires de c\u0153ur<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is not the case for Rooney in her essay. At its start, she \u201csuffers from intense nerves\u201d yet submits to \u201cthe continual low-level humiliation of failure.\u201d She admits to knowing \u201cnothing about the outside world\u2026when the war in Afghanistan had started, or what the Patriot Act was, or where exactly the Arab Spring was happening.\u201d In fact, Rooney makes \u201cdisastrous attempts to fake [her] way through\u201d her early debates until she finally \u201cjust starts to read the news.\u201d Although this is a story about debate, not art, this kind of growth smells of a traditional K\u00fcnstlerroman, a story of an artist’s development. Tellingly, when no longer a novice debater, Rooney learns \u201cto hide [her] ambition behind concern.\u201d Concern for what? For whatever topic of debate was on the table for the day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rooney explains that \u201ccompetitive debating takes argument\u2019s essential features and reimagines them as a game.\u201d I read this now like a prophecy of our broader public discourse, where winning and losing can feel like everything, and the performance of conviction and concern often acts as a substitute for real action. In high school, I remember being drawn to Jaques\u2019s famous monologue in As You Like It<\/em>\u2014\u201cAll the world\u2019s a stage \/ And all the men and women merely players\u2026\u201d I wondered how many of us understood ourselves as performers. Did I understand myself as one? How did this relate to free will? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It seems to me that one\u2019s understanding of oneself as a performer is closely tied to one\u2019s idea of oneself as part of a narrative or within a narrative arc, and the more we adhere to a narrative about ourselves, the more we cling to performance. In other words, the more we live narratively, the more our lives resemble performances. Or the more we live narratively, the more we assemble our lives like performances.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In other words, the more we live narratively, the more our lives resemble performances.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s commonly accepted today that the Internet, and particularly social media, has intensified this performance culture by giving every person the means to narrativize their lives constantly. There\u2019s no more waiting for the holiday card or high school reunion to make narrative sense of your life. The public jury is always there waiting to see if you are sticking to script. Here, Rooney\u2019s reflection resonates: \u201cSuccess doesn\u2019t come from within; it\u2019s given to you by other people, and other people can take it away.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For a long time, I considered \u201cEven If You Beat Me\u201d a singular text within Rooney\u2019s oeuvre. Of all her characters, Rooney, as a character in the essay, was the most legible to me as a striver surrounded by other strivers. Then Rooney released Intermezzo<\/a><\/em> last fall, and once again I found\u00a0the striver voice with fraternal protagonists Ivan, a chess champion, and Peter, a former successful college debater. Both brothers, like Rooney herself in her essay, hustle, and they aren\u2019t afraid to admit it. In one conversation, the brothers discuss achievement. Peter remarks, \u201cWell, there just wasn\u2019t anyone good enough to beat us,\u201d and \u201cIvan considers this, then answers: I wanted my life to be like that. Me too, says Peter.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cEven if you Beat Me\u201d highlights how desire, ethics, and merit intersect, while\u2014to use a common expression from where I\u2019m from\u2014showing us how the sausage gets made<\/em>, a typically messy business, especially if someone is hailing from the working class or other marginalized backgrounds. It\u2019s not until Ivan that we really see this sausage-making process again in her work. Ivan might be described as handsome, but he also wears braces, studies chess moves, and attempts a professional comeback, all while wearing his heart on his sleeve and battling the grief of losing his father. Ivan describes the \u201ctrapped knight\u201d inside himself; it\u2019s both an allusion to Ivan\u2019s knights in the game of chess, making the right moves, and to the medieval knights of legend, those possessing the noble ideals that Ivan himself wants to possess: sacrifice, courage, and loyalty. Rooney in \u201cEven If You Beat Me\u201d also ultimately wants something more virtuous than what the debate circuit has to offer. However, it\u2019s not so easy for strivers to kill the competitive beast inside us. Peter, who struggles with performance more than his younger brother, exemplifies this. At one point, he admits that he doesn\u2019t need his rich friends to be poor, or even for himself to be rich, but rather, \u201cTo be right, to be once and for all proven right.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n


\u201cEven if you Beat Me,\u201d with its messy, authentic examination of ambition, is still my favorite text by Rooney, only now Intermezz<\/em>o is a close second. Success never appears effortless in Rooney\u2019s latest novel, nor are the main characters detached observers of the world around them, like the debaters Rooney once envied\u2014\u201cI wanted to be aloof and cerebral like the speakers I most admired.\u201d The setting where Ivan meets Margaret, his future love interest, is a local community arts center, is different than any other Rooney setting. It buzzes with potential. It\u2019s there that we witness Ivan teaching a ten-year-old girl how to correct a flawed move and encouraging her to practice. It melts Margaret\u2019s heart (and mine too), while calling to my mind a moment in \u201cEven If You Beat Me\u201d when Rooney admits that despite all her ambition and awards, \u201cI haven\u2019t contributed to anyone\u2019s understanding of anything, except maybe my own, and that only partially.\u201d But that\u2019s not the case with Ivan, as this scene shows, and it doesn\u2019t have to be the case for the rest of us either.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A typical conversation about Sally Rooney often includes some version of the question: Are you a Normal People person or Conversations with Friends person? Rooney readers tend to have a strong, if not fraught, preference. Whenever people have asked me this question, however, I\u2019ve had a different answer. \u201cActually,\u201d I say, \u201cI\u2019m an \u2018Even if […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1807,"featured_media":306953,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,488,85],"tags":[579,6409,6115],"class_list":["post-306937","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","category-culture","category-essay","tag-capitalism","tag-class","tag-sally-rooney"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nI Love Sally Rooney's Books but I Love Her Essay About Competitive 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