Banned Book: Normal People

This piece is a available for free thanks to the Center for Educator Wellness and Learning. Click here to access CEWL’s full version of the article.

Connell wished he knew how other people lived their private lives, so he could copy by example.

-Normal People, Sally Rooney

…the Subject Material is not Age and Developmentally Appropriate as defined by S.C. Code Reg. 43-170 and must be removed entirely from all public schools in South Carolina.

-South Carolina Instructional Materials Review Committee

Marianne thinks cruelty does not only hurt the victim, but the perpetrator also, and maybe more deeply and more permanently. You learn nothing very profound about yourself simply by being bullied; but by bullying someone else you learn something you can never forget.

-Normal People, Sally Rooney

It’s not clear why Sally Rooney’s Normal People was one of the ten books initially chosen by South Carolina’s Instructional Materials Review Committee as a kind of test case for the state’s new book ban regulation. One thing every book on the initial list had in common was that, unlike the majority of book challenges which have been made in South Carolina in recent years, they focused mainly on white, heterosexual characters, which some advocates have suggested is because the committee was trying to preempt criticism that it was intentionally trying to attack diversity of representation and ideas in literature.

Committee Chair Christian Hanley has explicitly said the committee chose books that had come up a lot during public hearings on the regulation, which seems to confirm that he, at least, was acknowledging a desire to preempt such criticism. (This effort at public relations has been somewhat undermined by the fact that every novel included in the next two rounds of challenges, each set brought by individual parents who had previously failed to get the books removed at the district level, has focused on characters who are nonwhite and/ or members of the LGBTQ+ community.)

Normal People isn’t especially racy by the standards set by the committee in its other choices— most of which do contain mentions or even descriptions of sex, but which few serious people would classify as “pornographic,” none of which would likely violate the state law cited in the regulation, and which were only available, if at all, to older readers in high school libraries. And while the committee claims in its official report that the book’s content is “clearly violative,” they also declined to ban 1984, which contains sexual content that is arguably as graphic as that portrayed (briefly) in Normal People.

Click here to access CEWL’s full version of the article.