Normal People is and always will be my favorite story ever told. Sally Rooney’s show is as good as her book. It’s true and so careful but never restricting - just entirely loving and moving. It untangled me in a way that then made it all right to care so much. Like it’s okay to invest in it and cry and obsess about it because everything in it and about it is so deeply thoughtful and genuinely concerned with staying truthful. I think everyone has the Marianne “Now can we take our clothes off” question inside them at all times (however raring to go). What’s great about Normal People is everybody is fully safe to fully experience it. It’s wildly affirming. “All these years, they’ve been like two little plants sharing the same plot of soil, growing around one another, contorting to make room, taking certain unlikely positions... He probably won’t come back, she thinks. Or he will, differently. What they have now they can never have back again. But for her the pain of loneliness will be nothing to the pain that she used to feel, of being unworthy. He brought her goodness like a gift and now it belongs to her. Meanwhile his life opens out before him in all directions at once. They’ve done a lot of good for each other. Really, she thinks, really. People can really change one another. You should go, she says. I’ll always be here. You know that.”