I Love Sally Rooney’s Books but I Love Her Essay About Competitive College Debate Even More

A typical conversation about Sally Rooney often includes some version of the question: Are you a Normal People person or Conversations with Friends person? Rooney readers tend to have a strong, if not fraught, preference. Whenever people have asked me this question, however, I’ve had a different answer. “Actually,” I say, “I’m an ‘Even if you Beat Me’ person.” My answer, Rooney’s first published essay, has stumped some ardent Rooney fans, including those familiar with the broad contours of the story it chronicles. 

“Even if you Beat Me,” appeared in 2015 in The Dublin Review, two years before Rooney’s debut novel. It traces the future author’s climb from an anonymous college debater to the number one competitive debater in Europe, followed by her disillusionment with the debate circuit altogether due to its “political frivolity” and disconnect from real-world issues. It’s considered the essay that launched Rooney’s fiction career, too, after catching the attention of the Wylie Agency. And while the specifics of the debate world and the essay’s significance in the arc of Rooney’s career are interesting, what I admire most about “Even if you Beat Me,” is Rooney’s unflinching portrayal of her own hard work, competitiveness, and ambition. 

Since we live in a moment where the self-conscious cultural elite both valorizes success but treats visible striving with distaste and even suspicion, owning one’s own voracious ambition is startlingly refreshing. In many of the circles I move in, peers deride institutional meritocracy even as they define themselves and their work by its standards. They hide their ambition and self-interest behind nonchalance or appeals to ethical and moral concerns. But not Rooney, at least not the Rooney in “Even if you Beat Me.” She straightforwardly admits her desires. She was a “nearly friendless teenager living away from home for the first time” when she stumbled into the debate hall and, to her delight, quickly identified the debate community as one where she could become “successful and popular.” 

That’s not to say the essay doesn’t grapple with what it means to desire acclaim and popularity within unfair systems. The opening scene depicts Rooney and her “privileged, English-speaking university students” riding past “dwellings made partly of cardboard advertisements” on the way to a debate competition in Chennai. She comments, “No one failed to notice this fact, but what was there to say about it?” echoing how many of us feel when confronted by an injustice so enormous we struggle to know what to say or how to make it a little bit better. And yet another strength of Rooney’s essay is that she does land on a way to make it a little bit better: by the end of the Chennai debate, Rooney quits debating. No more free international trips. No more “thrills from counterfactuals.” No more sycophantic fans. In other words, Rooney puts her money where her mouth is. 

Again, this kind of action feels like a breath of fresh air during a time—or, perhaps, all times—when it’s easier to say the right things than do the right things. Reading Rooney’s first novels through the lens of “Even if you Beat Me” can also clarify the intentional tension between personal drive and ethical awareness that underpins the inert, shallow politics of many of Rooney’s characters. 

In Conversations with Friends, for example, Frances identifies as a communist yet feels drawn to fame and affluence: “She was a big fan of seeing the insides of other people’s houses, especially people who were slightly famous like Melissa.” Bobbi, Frances’s ex-girlfriend, faces a similar predicament. She’s critical of capitalism while desiring the social and artistic opportunities that can come from proximity to capitalism’s victors. When Melissa suggests introducing Bobbi to Veronica, her “old money” friend who “was very helpful with getting her book published,” Bobbi responds, “Wealthy people sicken me…but yeah, I’m sure she’s great.” Knowing any of these characters, it’s not a stretch to imagine each might accept Veronica’s help while privately maintaining their critique of wealth and privilege.

But by quitting debate right when she’s at the top of her game, Rooney proves herself to be above her characters: a woman of convictions. She writes, “Maybe I stopped debating to see if I could still think of things to say when there weren’t any prizes.” On the one hand, this reflection, along with others like it, underscores the essay’s achievement as a rare piece of millennial writing that doesn’t downplay, ironize, or disguise raw ambition, but rather demonstrates it as a real meaning-making driver in many of our lives. On the other hand, it’s also a bit of a riddle when considered alongside Rooney’s later literary success and Marxism. Are we to believe so much success simply fell into her lap? Not necessarily. In her essay, Rooney acknowledges that she is “still working on that,” suggesting that her relationship with “prizes” is an ongoing process. 

“I don’t think I will ever again want something so meaningless so much,” Rooney confesses about her obsession with college debate. Another, more cynical version could go: I don’t think I will ever again show that I want something so meaningless so much. Performative modesty and what the Italians call sprezzatura (a kind of studied carelessness) are, after all, learned skills in elite social spaces that reward effort only when it appears effortless. Effortless is cool, credible.

Effort is for the pitiful, for the lesser gods. With that in mind, Rooney’s own trajectory offers an example of—take your pick—genuine growth or learned restraint. 

More than a decade after “Even if You Beat Me,” and its delightfully unflinching closing lines—“I was number one. Like Fast Eddie, I’m the best there is. And even if you beat me, I’m still the best”—a New York Times piece about Rooney bore the headline “Sally Rooney Thinks Career Growth Is Overrated.” In the interview, she is portrayed in what has become her signature posture: one of ambivalence toward her effort, fame, and success.

It is impossible to determine whether this framing and adaptation to elite norms is Rooney’s own doing or the industry’s presentation of her. In contrast, recall the example of actor Jeremy Strong, who was mocked for being openly ambitious — à la “Even if You Beat Me”-style —in a 2021 New Yorker interview, “On ‘Succession,’ Jeremy Strong Doesn’t Get the Joke.” Throughout the piece, the interviewer, a Yale graduate, implies that Strong’s hard work, seriousness, and ambition are uncool. Essentially, Strong is punished for violating the unspoken rule that true talent never tries too hard. 

But why is this so frequently the case in elite or creative spaces? Why must achievement often appear accidental or uncontrollable? You see this same treatment of achievement in Rooney’s first three novels, where her characters’ ambition and hard work are often muted or pushed to the margins of her stories. Many of her characters suffer from what I think of as latter-seasons Rory Gilmore Syndrome: things just come too damn easily for them. This is also true of her socially mobile characters, such as Connell from Normal People, the son of a house cleaner, who ascends to Trinity College Dublin and later, a prestigious M.F.A. program in New York. Rooney’s characters attend the best schools, write celebrated essays and books, win major scholarships, and maintain flawless physiques without breaking a sweat or counting calories. With few exceptions, they possess the right shibboleth, exert the right amount of effort, and easily forge connections with the right people: journalists, literary editors, film stars, scholarship committees, and graduate school admissions officers. There’s little trial and error amongst her successful, ambitious characters. Neither is there much aggression, jealousy, rage, or other neurotic behaviors associated with highly competitive people, except when concerning les affaires de cœur.

This is not the case for Rooney in her essay. At its start, she “suffers from intense nerves” yet submits to “the continual low-level humiliation of failure.” She admits to knowing “nothing about the outside world…when the war in Afghanistan had started, or what the Patriot Act was, or where exactly the Arab Spring was happening.” In fact, Rooney makes “disastrous attempts to fake [her] way through” her early debates until she finally “just starts to read the news.” Although this is a story about debate, not art, this kind of growth smells of a traditional Künstlerroman, a story of an artist’s development. Tellingly, when no longer a novice debater, Rooney learns “to hide [her] ambition behind concern.” Concern for what? For whatever topic of debate was on the table for the day.

Rooney explains that “competitive debating takes argument’s essential features and reimagines them as a game.” I read this now like a prophecy of our broader public discourse, where winning and losing can feel like everything, and the performance of conviction and concern often acts as a substitute for real action. In high school, I remember being drawn to Jaques’s famous monologue in As You Like It—“All the world’s a stage / And all the men and women merely players…” I wondered how many of us understood ourselves as performers. Did I understand myself as one? How did this relate to free will? 

It seems to me that one’s understanding of oneself as a performer is closely tied to one’s idea of oneself as part of a narrative or within a narrative arc, and the more we adhere to a narrative about ourselves, the more we cling to performance. In other words, the more we live narratively, the more our lives resemble performances. Or the more we live narratively, the more we assemble our lives like performances. 

It’s commonly accepted today that the Internet, and particularly social media, has intensified this performance culture by giving every person the means to narrativize their lives constantly. There’s no more waiting for the holiday card or high school reunion to make narrative sense of your life. The public jury is always there waiting to see if you are sticking to script. Here, Rooney’s reflection resonates: “Success doesn’t come from within; it’s given to you by other people, and other people can take it away.” 

For a long time, I considered “Even If You Beat Me” a singular text within Rooney’s oeuvre. Of all her characters, Rooney, as a character in the essay, was the most legible to me as a striver surrounded by other strivers. Then Rooney released Intermezzo last fall, and once again I found the striver voice with fraternal protagonists Ivan, a chess champion, and Peter, a former successful college debater. Both brothers, like Rooney herself in her essay, hustle, and they aren’t afraid to admit it. In one conversation, the brothers discuss achievement. Peter remarks, “Well, there just wasn’t anyone good enough to beat us,” and “Ivan considers this, then answers: I wanted my life to be like that. Me too, says Peter.” 

“Even if you Beat Me” highlights how desire, ethics, and merit intersect, while—to use a common expression from where I’m from—showing us how the sausage gets made, a typically messy business, especially if someone is hailing from the working class or other marginalized backgrounds. It’s not until Ivan that we really see this sausage-making process again in her work. Ivan might be described as handsome, but he also wears braces, studies chess moves, and attempts a professional comeback, all while wearing his heart on his sleeve and battling the grief of losing his father. Ivan describes the “trapped knight” inside himself; it’s both an allusion to Ivan’s knights in the game of chess, making the right moves, and to the medieval knights of legend, those possessing the noble ideals that Ivan himself wants to possess: sacrifice, courage, and loyalty. Rooney in “Even If You Beat Me” also ultimately wants something more virtuous than what the debate circuit has to offer. However, it’s not so easy for strivers to kill the competitive beast inside us. Peter, who struggles with performance more than his younger brother, exemplifies this. At one point, he admits that he doesn’t need his rich friends to be poor, or even for himself to be rich, but rather, “To be right, to be once and for all proven right.” 

“Even if you Beat Me,” with its messy, authentic examination of ambition, is still my favorite text by Rooney, only now Intermezzo is a close second. Success never appears effortless in Rooney’s latest novel, nor are the main characters detached observers of the world around them, like the debaters Rooney once envied—“I wanted to be aloof and cerebral like the speakers I most admired.” The setting where Ivan meets Margaret, his future love interest, is a local community arts center, is different than any other Rooney setting. It buzzes with potential. It’s there that we witness Ivan teaching a ten-year-old girl how to correct a flawed move and encouraging her to practice. It melts Margaret’s heart (and mine too), while calling to my mind a moment in “Even If You Beat Me” when Rooney admits that despite all her ambition and awards, “I haven’t contributed to anyone’s understanding of anything, except maybe my own, and that only partially.” But that’s not the case with Ivan, as this scene shows, and it doesn’t have to be the case for the rest of us either.