Intermezzo by Sally Rooney | book review
Why this might be my last Sally Rooney book—brothers and unconventional relationships turn into indecision and ableism
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I’ll admit it: I do not like Intermezzo. Before I get into why, I want to clarify that I like Sally Rooney and have read all her books, beginning with Normal People with my friend E (hello!), then back to Conversations with Friends, then Beautiful World, Where Are You when it was published, and now, Intermezzo. I love many mainstream books and am enormously grateful for books that get people reading again—Sally Rooney has been a big part of the recent reading Renaissance. Her books capture specific slices of our age and present them unashamedly, making people feel seen and understood above all else. And even though her characters are often criticised as simply needing to go to therapy, they are far more nuanced. As writes, she masterfully tackles the complex relationship Irish people have with mental health.
I first wrote about Intermezzo in October, shortly after it was published and before reading it myself. In that post, I shared that I was excited to read it, but didn’t want to be pressured into reading it at the exact time everyone was. I wanted to let it breathe a little.
A few months after most of the hoopla, I picked up Intermezzo as my very first book of 2025, and I was excited to read it finally. One of Intermezzo’s selling points is that it is a book about brothers, and having recently read two books about sisters—Hello Beautiful and Blue Sisters—I was really looking forward to this. But it failed to live up to my hopes. Whilst I appreciated the very real, complex relationship between Peter and Ivan, I found it difficult to empathise with them, especially Peter, and substantive parts of the book grated on me.
I generally like reading about lives very different from mine and my friends’ as this gives me insights into parts of society I may not otherwise encounter. Conceptually, I found Intermezzo’s portrayal of polyamory in a mainstream book interesting. But Peter, please. I started somewhat sympathetic to him as it is difficult having your heart torn in two, but at a certain point, it read to me as I love her, but I love her, but I love her, and I love them both. Ad nauseum, ad infinitum. He literally refers to his two love interests, Sylvia (whom he has known since university) and Naomi (who is 23), as ‘she, and the other’. Whilst I appreciate characters who eschew society’s expectations, even when it is not how I would live my own life, Peter dithers so much that I find it hard to respect his choices—it is more indecision that leads him to his resolution, rather than an active decision on his part.
More troubling is the treatment of disability, and it is also through Peter and Sylvia that we see such blatant ableism—internalised and otherwise—that the rest of the book is lost to me. Sylvia and Peter are long-time lovers from university, whose perfect lives were shattered when Sylvia has an accident. Family lore has it that they tried to make it work after but couldn’t—they do speak about the breakup explicitly and it is clear they both have a part in it—but since Sylvia is part of the family, they basically… carry on while Peter dates and sleeps around? Sylvia apparently can still have sex, just in a different way from what they were used to, but this is not good enough for either Peter or Sylvia, and there is little counter to the ableism in this book. Sylvia never lets us forget that she feels no longer good enough for Peter, unable to fulfil his every need (and not listening to Peter when he says otherwise).
I just want you to remember me the way I was, she says.
[…]
Shaking her head, her hidden face. When they. Yes: the way she was. Perfect, everything. The life they wanted. Her pride in that remembrance worse than touching. Pity he feels and despises himself for feeling. Her pain, the impassable territory between their bodies. Sees her receding behind its monumental heights. Remember me the way I was.
I’m sorry, but I simply cannot deal with this, and it was at this passage that the book was lost to me. I understand that coming to terms with disability, acquired or otherwise, is a deeply personal and complex journey and I do not judge disabled people who are at different points. But I have no patience for such blatant, romanticised internalised ableism in fiction. I do not appreciate the insinuation that disabled people cannot be romantic partners (as I wrote in The New York Times’ Modern Love column) or that just because something, including sex, might need to be done a bit differently, it is not still inherently valuable. I have little patience for books that reinforce harmful, ableist narratives. Alexandra Harris at The Guardian says it well:
Sylvia is still charismatically alive, and Peter still deeply attracted to her, but he thinks grimly of their relationship as “mutilated by circumstance into something illegible”. The end of her sexual life is cast, in some of the novel’s most troubling passages, as tantamount to death. We find little counter to the notion that Sylvia is a broken sex provider who cannot offer him fulfilment.
This, combined with Peter’s approach to life, makes it hard for me to enjoy Intermezzo. However, there are a few bright spots. I do like Margaret, a 36-year-old divorcé, who I think is the bravest of all, truly daring to live outside the prescribed norms in an age gap relationship with the much younger Ivan (a 22-year-old chess prodigy), who has never been in love until now. She is afraid of the reactions of others, including her mother and alcoholic ex-husband, but unlike Peter, is more active in continuing her unconventional relationship. To hell with them is her approach, and just as well, because it is Ivan’s conclusion too.
And maybe it won’t last […] and Margaret will have to let him go after all, to bear that, the pain, the embarrassment, caught out again, making a show of herself. Serves her right. Or in ten years’ time, against the odds, they might look back and laugh together. Maybe. Sense of all the windows and doors of her life flung open. Everything exposed to the light and air. Nothing protected, nothing left to be protected anymore. A wild woman, her mother called her. A shocking piece of work. And so she is.
I do also like Ivan, and empathise with him for having a brother who loves him but does not know how. Whilst Peter thinks Ivan is ‘kind of autistic’, he does not try to understand him. It is only when seeing him through the eyes of Margaret that Peter seems aware that Ivan is, like him, capable of complex emotions and relationships, with all their intricate nuances. Ivan probably is autistic, though this is never explicitly confirmed ( has an excellent piece on neurodiversity in the book). In a way, this allows Ivan to navigate life with less attention to convention, though he struggles with feeling like he’s on the outside looking in.
How often in life he has found himself a frustrated observer of apparently impenetrable systems, watching other people participate effortlessly in structures he can find no way to enter or even understand. So often that it’s practically baseline, just normal existence for him. And this is not only due to the irrational nature of other people, and the consequent irrationality of the rules and processes they devise; it’s due to Ivan himself, his fundamental unsuitedness to life. He knows this. He feels himself to have been formed, somehow, with something other than life in mind.
The dialogue, I understand, is Marmite, as it is in all of Sally’s books. I happen to like both Marmite and the direct dialogue that Sally is so skilful at. Sally Rooney is a master at getting right into characters’ heads and delivering their thoughts to us with no middleman, saying things that we might be afraid to. And though there are many conflicted thoughts in the book, it is fundamentally optimistic, not in an everything-will-be-okay way, but in a simple recollection that humans tend toward goodness.
And what if life is just a collection of essentially unrelated experiences? Why does one thing have to follow meaningfully from another?
Yes, the world makes room for goodness and decency, he thinks: and the task of life is to show goodness to others, not to complain about their failings.
Nonetheless, it is better to feel hopeful and optimistic about one’s life on earth while engaged in the never-ending struggle to pay rent, than to feel despondent and depressed while engaged in the same non-optional struggle anyway.
So, there are things I like about Intermezzo after all, and I think Sally’s books are valuable in contemporary literature. But not all books are for all people, and Intermezzo is certainly not one for me. I’m also afraid I have been experiencing diminishing returns with each of Sally’s books, and after reading Intermezzo, I’m not sure I will read her next. That said, I will be excited for anyone who loves it, and (re)discovers a love for reading again because of it. I’m also a bit of a completionist and have read all her books so far…
P.S. For a more detailed analysis of disability in Intermezzo, check out ’s post.
P.P.S. If you like Sally Rooney’s books, you might also enjoy Caleb Azumah Nelson (Open Water and Small Worlds), Coco Mellors (more Cleopatra and Frankenstein than Blue Sisters), Alexander Chee (Edinburgh) and Otessa Moshfegh (My Year of Rest and Relaxation).
NOTE FROM ALICIA
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Book information
Title: Intermezzo
Author: Sally Rooney
Published: 2024
Length: 454 pages
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Author backgrounds, including influences on their writing, and book club questions for solo readers and group discussions for you to reflect on. Available this week only as a preview before it goes behind a paywall.
Author background: Sally Rooney
Sally Rooney, born in 1991, is an Irish author and screenwriter. She grew up in Castlebar, County Mayo, where she still lives, having spent some time in Dublin (where she studied English and American Literature in Trinity College Dublin) and New York City.
At Trinity College Dublin, Sally was a champion debater—Europe’s best—and wrote about her experiences for The Dublin Review. Her experiences as a debater have undoubtedly shaped her craft as a writer—she is sharp, precise, and has fantastic dialogue.
Sally considers her family leftwing, socialist, and not from a very wealthy background. This formed her personal views, with Sally describing herself as a feminist, Marxist, and critical of capitalism. Sally uses her influence to speak on political issues, including when she spoke about Palestine during her launch of Intermezzo urging people ‘not to turn away, not to give in to despair or fatigue, to keep protesting, to keep speaking out, to keep demanding an end to this horrifying war’. She has also spoken about other issues, including abortion, the housing crisis, and homelessness.
She was one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People of 2022, and when her latest book, Intermezzo, was published, they wrote an article about her cultural significance.
Fun fact: Sally used to keep a digital journal, but doesn’t anymore, and doesn’t read her old entries.
Sally Rooney in her own words:
Sally Rooney (2015). The Dublin Review. ‘Even if you beat me’. (On winning the World Universities Debating Championship.)
Michael Nolan (2017). The Tangerine Magazine. ‘An Interview with Sally Rooney’. (A detailed verbatim interview, largely about Conversations With Friends but also expanding beyond.)
Katherine Tschemerinsky (2018). Louisiana Literature. ‘Sally Rooney: Writing with Marxism’. (Podcast episode.)
Emma Brockes (2021). The Guardian. ‘Sally Rooney on the hell of fame: “It doesn’t seem to work in any real way for anyone”’. (An interview with Sally herself.)
Notable works:
Conversations with Friends (2017). Adapted into a 12-episode BBC Three/Hulu miniseries.
Normal People (2018). Adapted into a 12-episode BBC Three/Hulu miniseries.
Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021).
Intermezzo (2024).
Book club questions: Intermezzo by Sally Rooney
Book club questions to learn more about the book, yourself, and your friends. Whether you’re a one-person book club or read with a group, my book club questions are for you. *These questions contain spoilers.
‘Intermezzo’ is an in-between move in chess, something that is unexpected, posing a severe threat and forcing an immediate response. Do you think the book’s events are an intermezzo? Why has Sally chosen a chess analogy?
How do the characters each respond to fears of society’s judgment of their unconventional relationships?
What moments in Intermezzo do you characterise as being particularly brave or weak?
Does Intermezzo encourage you to pursue something unconventional?
What were your thoughts on age gap relationships before reading Intermezzo, and what do you think now?
How do the characters’ age gaps affect how they relate to one another?
Ivan is described as ‘kind of autistic’. Which of his traits, behaviours, or experiences do you think reflect this?
How does Ivan’s likely neurodiversity shape his worldview and actions?
Is Ivan’s love for his dog, Alexei, reflective of something greater?
Peter accuses a younger Ivan of being an incel. Margaret is Ivan’s first girlfriend. Do you think Ivan engages in incel behaviour?
Peter is torn between Sylvia and Naomi for most of the book. Have you ever been torn between two loves?
What does Peter value in each of his relationships with Sylvia and Naomi? Why does he struggle to let either one go?
Is polyamory the answer to Peter’s dilemma? Do you think he should have chosen one of them?
Do you think it’s possible to love more than one person romantically?
What do you think of Sylvia insisting Peter remember her as her pre-disabled self?
Sylvia seems to reject romantic and sexual relationships when she can no perform in them as she used to. Do you think this is healthy? What would your approach be?
How do you think Ivan witnessing Peter crying when they were younger, then ignoring this happened, impacted their relationship?
Peter says that he always loves and supports Ivan, even when it doesn’t seem like it. Do you think this is true? Do his actions match his words?
It is when Peter meets Margaret that he starts to understand and empathise with Ivan’s inner world. Why is this so?
What are your thoughts on the brothers’ relationships with each of their parents?
If you have read any of Sally Rooney’s other books or short stories, how do you think Intermezzo compares?
Fantastic review, Alicia! Thanks for sharing your thoughts, and particularly the ableist perspective you unpack so well. I admittedly hadn’t thought about this aspect as deeply and now it’s given me a lot more to think about in terms of Peter’s relationship, and the larger message Sylvia’s character plays in the narrative. I do wonder though whether this is also Rooney’s way of critiquing ableism—through Peter’s character rather than through Sylvia herself—as something he so desperately hates about himself and becomes such a source of deep self-loathing. I’ve thought a lot about how Rooney also chose to write about brothers, and still wondering why exactly she made this choice and what it says about the women in this book and their relationships with Peter and Ivan. How different would this story be if it were told from Sylvia’s pov, for example? So much to think about!
Love this review! I was feeling 50/50 about reading this book. I loved Normal People, and I thought Conversations with Friends was good, but I didn’t really enjoy it (if that makes sense). Even though her characters are often reduced to “they should go to therapy, and problem solved,” I like the emotionally complex characters, the integration of the Irish mentality, and the way she weaves the impact of contemporary capitalism and class dynamics into her storylines. So, I’m saddened to hear that ableism plays such a significant role in the storyline of two characters in this book. I’m leaning more and more toward not reading it.