At the Clinic

"As is the case with many novels, Sally Rooney’s Normal People began its life as a short story. In “At the Clinic,” Connell and Marianne are 23, Marianne needs to have a tooth removed, and they each have very different memories of what happened after Marianne had to stop giving him head that one time—among other things. Of course they do. The story was first published in 2016 in The White Review, a very good UK-based journal known for its experimental writing, but Rooney, it turned out, wasn’t quite done with it. “I kept wanting to write about these characters who were in their early twenties,” she told the New Statesman, “and their relationship had this texture to it because of their history. Eventually, I thought, what if I just went back and just told their story from the beginning, chronologically.” Well, it worked."-- Provided by Lit Hub