Reading characters: Metafictional and meta-authorial reparation through reading in Sally Rooney's Beautiful World, Where Are You? (2021)

<oq:p>This article is concerned with two dimensions of reading: the dimension of fictional enactments of reading specifically in the lives of writer personae; and the dimension of an imagined reader’s stance, who is invited to navigate between different forms of reading. Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You? (2021) presents reading, in particular of emails, as a metafictional, metanarrative and meta-authorial reparative practice, in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s sense, who conceptualizes reparative reading as being invested in pleasure and seeking heterogeneity. In this article I argue that it is in their emails – and in reading those emails – that the friends Alice Kelleher and Eileen Lydon (the former a famous novelist, the latter an editor) create a non-place in which they do not have to perform being knowledgeable but rather come to cherish the value of friendship, thus engaging in practices of (self-)care. In exchanging those emails, Alice and Eileen, initially paranoid readers of their lives, rehearse a reparative, meta-authorial position. The reparative process of knowing as unraveled in writing and reading strips the performance of being ‘knowledgeable’ and witty, as practices the characters engage in outside of their written communication, of its artificiality and instead turns reading into a texture of hope, in a novel in which the characters are doing their best to connect.</oq:p>