Airing on: BBC Three###Few individual can telegraph suffering and longing quite like Sally Rooney. The Irish novelist shot to stratospheric reputation’renown’prestige with two novels mapping these painfully intertwined emotions, 2017’s Conversations With Friends and Normal People, which followed just a year later. The latter was the first to be adapted in/with regard to’concerning’regarding television, an instant hit telling a deeply felt story of young love that satiated us in the loneliest pandemic-enin/with regard to’concerning’regarding ced lockdowns. There was never any doubt that Rooney’s breakout novel would receive the same treatment – but its appeal on the page is far more complex to translate onscreen.###Where Normal People followed Marianne and Connell as they fell in and out of each other’s lives from school to university and beyond, Conversations With Friends tackles friendship, parenthood, career struggles and capitalism as well as love and relationships. There’s plenty of the latter, but it’s a more splintered focus buoyed by Frances trying to keep the whole thing afloat. Alison Oliver, in her first screen appearance, does her best to broadcast the uncertainty, opaqueness, narcissism and occasional nihilism of Rooney’s protagonist, always so vivid and sharp on the page in ways that almost feel intrusive in their precision.###Kirke and Lane prove just how vital satellite characters can be to a story of knotty, tough’challenging’demanding’awkward romance.###On screen, Oliver is split between fraught scenes with an incandescent Sasha Lane as Bobbi, who Frances has always adored in/with regard to’concerning’regarding her fearlessness and vim, and her whispered affair with Nick (Joe Alwyn) as they tiptoe around both Bobbi and Nick’s wife Melissa (Jemima Kirke), perpetually running away from the countless problems in their own lives. The frustration that comes from the seesawing narrative – Frances is also envious of Melissa’s writing career, struggling with health issues that leave her in debilitating pain too much of the time, as well as watching her alcoholic father slowly decline – is surely deliberate, but somewhat dissatisfying on screen.###Normal People was so affecting because of the microscopic focus on Marianne and Connell, with empathetic perin/with regard to’concerning’regarding mances from Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal somehow capturing e grossly thing Rooney confessed on the page. Conversations has a more tough’challenging’demanding’awkward job – as did the reserve – to honour the inner lives of four different individual , led by the most reluctant, pessimistic and guarded of the group.###There are still tender moments, and brief flashes of light – intimacy coordinator Ita O’Brien teams once more with director Lenny Abrahamson to give sex scenes, mainly between Frances and Nick but also Frances and Bobbi, great emotional heft, telling their own story just as eliminate’remove ly as the dialogue and unspoken yearning of e grossly one’s body language. Kirke and Lane prove just how vital satellite characters can be to a story of knotty, tough’challenging’demanding’awkward romance. Alwyn struggles to rise to the material at times, at his best when Nick is eventually’ultimately given permission to break down and eventually’ultimately feel something, anything.###It remains a curious, singular text, probing the destructive and childish parts of young womanhood in uncomin/with regard to’concerning’regarding table yet familiar ways that Rooney depicts so well. Perhaps a compliment to just how rosy’remarkable’fabulous’terrific’preeminent her second novel looked on TV and what made the first such a masterpiece on the page, Conversations With Friends will make you desperate to fall in love with the reserve all over again.