I feel like if “What Now?” were a book, it would be this. At 29, reading Beautiful World, Where Are You feels like staring in a mirror you didn’t know was there—polished, kind of harsh, but uncannily familiar. Rooney doesn’t offer answers; she just hands you the quiet ache of adulthood, the messy intimacy of friendships and love, and the hum of existential panic that never quite settles.
Alice, Eileen, Simon, and Felix are painfully ordinary yet endlessly compelling. Their lives are stitched together with emails, late-night thoughts, small acts of care, and constant questioning. It’s tender, it’s sharp, it’s funny in a very “we’re all barely holding it together” way. There’s a melancholic humor to every interaction, a tension between desire and exhaustion, hope and resignation.
This isn’t a book that leaves you with neat conclusions. It leaves you thinking, maybe overthinking, but also strangely comforted that someone else sees the chaos and fatigue of adulthood as clearly as you do.
Song Choice : Fake Happy by Paramore
quietly ironic, a little raw, and capturing that bittersweet energy of pretending you’ve got it all figured out while knowing you absolutely don’t. It’s the soundtrack to being almost 30, realizing life isn’t simpler yet finding moments that make it feel a little beautiful anyway.
I feel like if “What Now?” were a book, it would be this. At 29, reading Beautiful World, Where Are You feels like staring in a mirror you didn’t know was there—polished, kind of harsh, but uncannily familiar. Rooney doesn’t offer answers; she just hands you the quiet ache of adulthood, the messy intimacy of friendships and love, and the hum of existential panic that never quite settles.
Alice, Eileen, Simon, and Felix are painfully ordinary yet endlessly compelling. Their lives are stitched together with emails, late-night thoughts, small acts of care, and constant questioning. It’s tender, it’s sharp, it’s funny in a very “we’re all barely holding it together” way. There’s a melancholic humor to every interaction, a tension between desire and exhaustion, hope and resignation.
This isn’t a book that leaves you with neat conclusions. It leaves you thinking, maybe overthinking, but also strangely comforted that someone else sees the chaos and fatigue of adulthood as clearly as you do.
Song Choice : Fake Happy by Paramore
quietly ironic, a little raw, and capturing that bittersweet energy of pretending you’ve got it all figured out while knowing you absolutely don’t. It’s the soundtrack to being almost 30, realizing life isn’t simpler yet finding moments that make it feel a little beautiful anyway.
