The problem of soft power

Or, what Sally Rooney illuminates about therapy culture

This is a cross post from Ask the Overthinker, by Eleanor Cummins—friend of the bookstore, friend of mine, and a writer I have always admired. Our interests on Substack collided this week, so she graciously allowed me to repost her piece. Go subscribe to Ask the Overthinker here!

Hi! I’m The Overthinker and this week I’m exploring the problem of love and power in the novels of Sally Rooney.

For the last few years, I have maintained a Google Doc with extensive notes for a nascent thesis: That Sally Rooney, the Irish novelist and self-identified Marxist, really was writing romance novels with political and philosophical heft. Once upon a time, it was quite popular to say such a thing was impossible, or that at the very least Rooney specifically was not succeeding at this task. (Something about the fact that novels are bought and sold undermining the whole premise? I can’t recall.) But I was convinced that Rooney was doing exactly what she had set out to do — it was just easy to miss, because the "goods” exchanged in her novels were emotions themselves and, in particular, the feeling of power.