Reflections on Intermezzo

as a disabled Rooney fan

A brief precursor: this is a reflection on the themes of disability in Intermezzo. Though I will, largely, not be focused on the details of the plot, if you wish to avoid any/all spoilers, please bookmark this post to come back to at a later date. Additionally, I will be writing about Ivan as an autistic character, though he is not diagnosed on the page. This was recommended to me in my initial Instagram review of the novel, which referred to Ivan solely as ‘neurodivergent,’ used as an umbrella term. As the generous commenter pointed out, many people choose to avoid clear language and saying what they are implying, which contributes to increased stigma. This is what I did. With that said, this is solely my interpretation of the character. I also will be speaking of autism as a disability, but I want to recognize that some do not use this categorization. Disability and the language used to describe it are entirely based on personal preference, and these reflections are solely my interpretations.

Image Description: a photo taken from above of a white hand holding a copy of Intermezzo next to a latte in a dark blue mug on a green patio table. My crossed legs, in blue jeans and black hightop Converse sneakers, are visible.

The first time that someone gave me flowers, I was in the seventh grade. I had had my first seizure, and an undercurrent of anxiety flowed through my daily routines. During class, teachers’ voices faded into the background as I mentally scanned for the beginning signs of an impending low blood sugar. I catalogued each twitch of my hands and each pinprick of sweat. After school, the two block walk to the public library to wait for my parents to pick me up after work became daunting. Every foot of the sidewalk posed a threat, a hard place to land.

My best friend, a boy in my class, started walking my little brothers and me to the library each day. I can’t remember now if I asked, or if my parents did. I can’t remember if he made the decision himself, sensing the anxiety that now clouded my brain. The first day he made the walk with us after my seizure, he gave me a cluster of flowers. He likely picked them from the side of the road or an unsuspecting neighbor’s front lawn, but it made me feel less alone.

I don’t know when I stopped believing that the people who loved me could love me through the scariest moments of my body, but I am trying to relearn.

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In Sally Rooney’s latest novel, Intermezzo, she presents disability - a simultaneously mundane, all encompassing, intensely human experience - as a lens through which her characters find clarity and the beginnings of answers to their grief, desire, and pursuit of life’s meaning. Sylvia’s internalized ableism is a boulder to which she chains herself, letting it drag her into the depths of the fear that disability has made her unlovable. Peter’s guilt and self loathing are punishment for his refusal to recognize his brother’s autism and former lover’s chronic pain as anything other than the prickliest, scariest parts of them. Ivan’s autism emboldens him in the face of scrutiny and acts as a guiding light towards his desires. For each character, embracing disability - with all of its anguish, all of its mundanity, and all of its beauty - as a key thread in the fiber of one’s being empowers them to seek joy, love, and fulfillment.

It is a theme I recognized immediately, because it is one that I have lived.

Peter, an attorney struggling with substance use to self-treat his anxiety, is a character who, in his refusal to acknowledge disability in himself and the people he loves, sabotages his relationships. Despite dating a much younger woman, he remains attached to his ex-girlfriend, Sylvia, who ended their relationship when she became disabled due to chronic pain as the result of an accident. Their relationship is taut with dishonesty; neither shares their true feelings, their true hopes for their relationship. Peter is, at once, afraid of looking too closely and witnessing the pain that he might find and incapable of allowing someone he loves to suffer. It is a complicated purgatory to exist within. We all want to carry our loved ones’ burdens, yet we cannot change the material reality of their experiences. Though we may wish it, we cannot take someone else’s pain.

So, we must find ways to cope with that discomfort, that impossible desire. At one point, Peter says, “I forgot again or studiously suppressed the certain knowledge that you are often and presumably right now in excruciating pain. It’s just something I prefer not to contemplate.” It is an unfortunate but true fact that love - platonic, familial, romantic - is not often comfortable. Often, it is excruciating. It is in running from that discomfort that ableism, intentional or not, can find its home in a relationship.

At one point, Sylvia expresses that she wishes to be seen by Peter as she once was, when she was healthy. In response, he feels pity, then resents himself for feeling it. He sees her pain as “impassable territory between their bodies. Sees her receding behind its monumental heights.” Disability is intimidating. It is, often, frightening. Disability requires one to make peace with their lack of control and the uncertain future of their body. The intensity of this intimidation is heightened between Sylvia and Peter, because Sylvia was disabled by an accident, by something that could happen to anyone, at any point in time. It is easier to cower in response than to find ways to build a bridge. Labeling her pain impassable territory frees Peter from having to surround himself with it, to try to find a way to the other side, where she waits.

Disability and chronic pain are scary, and to some, they feel entirely unknowable, untouchable. In the face of his inability to cure her of her pain, Peter fights the urge to turn away entirely, wondering “Why open that part of his brain, why gaze with such dread down into the bottomless emptiness that is the suffering of another person, emptiness that he can never measure or touch.” This line of thinking is one many disabled people have felt more than heard, sensed more than seen. It is the silence on the other end of the phone when you tell someone how hard things have been. It is the cessation of invites after one too many cancelled plans. It is the slow, anticipated dwindling of friends as disability becomes no longer ignorable.

Once, I was told that it was easier to stop talking to me, to stop engaging with my discussions of disability, than to try to be my friend. There were too many rules, too many potential missteps. There was no way, I was told, to be a good friend to a disabled person like me, one who asked too much.

Empathy does not necessitate feeling the same pain that another feels, but it does require exercising some imagination. One thing that my former friend got right was that there is no way to love a disabled person without loving, too, their disability. By this I do not mean that my friends and family need to adore the pain that keeps me up at night. They do not need to fawn over the insulin injections piercing my side after every meal or the icepick pain of my migraines. They cannot, however, love me without loving the parts of me that are aching and irritable and wounded. They cannot pick and choose the good days and the bad, the strong muscles with the swollen joints. Love is, in this sense, all or nothing.

Anger and hatred are easier emotions to welcome than grief. It is okay to grieve someone’s health, and it is okay to wish that they had more good days than bad. Turning to these more accessible emotions rather than becoming acquainted with the discomfort that disability may come with, however, will never leave enough room for love.

Sometimes that room for love is barricaded from the inside, stacks of chairs and tables pushed in front of the door.

My own fear of the impact of disability on relationships was learned. When a middle school boy brought me flowers and walked with me to ease my fears of having a medical emergency alone, I never thought to stop him. I didn’t feel like a burden. I didn’t pretend that everything was perfect. I cherished the extra time it meant that we got to spend together, working on homework and whispering in the quiet library basement, sometimes stopping to get 49 cent ice cream cones from McDonald’s on the way. Our friendship was complicated by a lot of things - my family moving the following year because my dad needed a new teaching job, the confusing lines between platonic friendship and middle school crushes - but it was never complicated by disability, a word I lived but had never yet said.

As I aged, I acquired the shame of disability, like slipping on a too big, hand-me-down coat. It swallowed me, weighing down each step. It grew heavier and hotter with each failed relationship. You never come anyways, I thought you wouldn’t want to be invited. Why are you always sick? You don’t act like you’re in pain. It isn’t that bad. You just aren’t any fun. You’re too young to be this sick.

Shame is easier to wear if you pretend that it’s a choice. Throughout Intermezzo, Sylvia maintains a sense of control over her own shame and disappointment by withholding the truth. When she and Peter finally have a conversation about their continued love for each other, despite the complicated facts of her disability and the impact it has on her ability to have sex, she reveals that she hadn’t been honest with him or herself, saying that “I don’t think I really wanted you to go on with your life, without me. I always said that I wanted you to, but I didn’t.” Like so many other disabled people, she had tried to shield herself from hurt by pushing him away before he had the chance to disappoint her, the way that so many do, but in doing so, she denied them both a chance at strengthening their relationship. She denied them both happiness.

Internalized ableism forces us to make assumptions about other people, to throw ourselves onto the blades of our own swords so that we control what hurts us, who hurts us. I hate my body sometimes, so you must too. I wish I was still healthy, and I miss the person I used to be, so you must too. I wouldn’t love me, so why would you? By assuming what the person we care about feels and wants, we prevent them from showing their cards. Honesty empowers people to choose to show up and continue loving us in spite of whatever truths have been revealed, and this applies to disability too.

In the early years of being disabled, before I learned to repeatedly throw myself on my own sword before others had the chance to cut me with it, I didn’t know to put on a brave face. Those first years were filled with appointments and waiting rooms, with missed school and cautious explanations to friends. I hadn’t learned the language of disability, of smiling through pain and pretending to be okay. When it became clear that I was not going to get better, the lessons began. Doctors told me to learn pain management tools and praised me for my ability to speak clearly and coherently, regardless of pain levels. My mom passed down her own routines: the magic of never leaving the house without lipstick, the healing powers of refusing to call out sick and being a productive member of society.

It can feel, deceptively, easier to put on a brave face, to hide your pain, and to prevent anyone from having to share in your enduring, chronic discomfort. It is much harder to let someone into your mess, to take down the barricade and open the door to your pain. Disability does not require falling onto your own sword, pushing away the people who love you before giving them the chance to try. Wanting, desiring, and hoping - honestly if not shamelessly - are worthwhile endeavors in the face of internalized ableism and the incapability of imagining a life that holds both pain and joy, sometimes in equal measures.

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When Intermezzo is not focusing on the impacts of disability on relationships, it is underscoring the joy of disability in subtle but unmistakeable ways. One of several themes present in the book is the complicated dynamics of age gap relationships. Transparently, I was surprised by how easily Rooney opened my mind and heart to these relationships. For all the moments that made my inner alarm bells go off, the nuanced characterization eased many of my judgments.

In particular, I couldn’t help but be fond of Ivan’s relationship with Margaret. Ivan is 22 and fairly inexperienced in romance, Margaret 36 and divorced. They meet when Ivan plays chess at an event hosted by the arts center where Margaret works, and their relationship begins, tentatively. Living in a small town, where everyone around her seems to have opinions on her relationship with her ex-husband, Margaret is reluctant to allow herself to fall into the budding romance. She, understandably, fears others’ reactions to her dating a much younger man. Comparatively, Ivan is entirely unwavering in his pursuit, worried only about his abilities to give her pleasure.

After a disagreement with his brother about the relationship, Ivan thinks that “unlike his brother, he doesn’t assign an idiotically high, practically moral degree of value to the concept of normality, which phrased in another way means conformity with the dominant culture.” Ivan, whether due to being autistic, having a somewhat unusual career path as a chess star, or simply being young, is free of societal expectations for what he does with his life and who he loves. When discussing careers, he thinks only about productivity and contribution to society, not appearances. When discussing Margaret, he thinks only of the qualities that have drawn him to her - her warmth, her intelligence, her contributions to their conversations - not her age or what the town gossips may say.

Though I am not autistic and cannot speak to the accuracy of the representation - or if it is representation at all - I have found that being disabled provides unique perspective on society and relationships. Disability has, in every sense, upended my relationship with ‘normalcy.’ Every aspect of my life is touched by disability - my relationships, my career path, my time in academia. Living with chronic pain and illness has provided clarity.

Societal expectations for the ideal path a life should take rarely take disability into account. As a child, I crafted elaborate dream futures for myself until I fell asleep. I imagined being a lawyer or an oncologist or a bestselling author. I would have a whirlwind romance with a (male) professional athlete or movie star or scientist. I firmly believed that my timeline would be not just normal, but extraordinary. I knew what success should look like, and I craved it.

At every turn, becoming disabled changed those dreams. I was absent for long stretches of middle and high school. I missed AP exams that couldn’t be rescheduled, because I was hospitalized. I almost didn’t make it to my high school graduation. My sophomore year of college, a professor forced me out of school with his ableism, and I didn’t work up the courage to try again until just last year.

Though I am not as brave in the face of others’ opinions as Ivan, I did see a piece of myself in him; I, too, have learned that the pursuit of my own joy must take precedent over societal expectations, and I have learned it in large part due to existing in the world as a disabled person.

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To many readers, Intermezzo likely doesn’t read as a book centered around disability. To Sally Rooney herself, I don’t know if it was a book written with disability at the forefront. Either way, I saw so many bits and pieces of myself in these characters, as they fumbled through grief and pain and complicated relationships, desperate to find a soft place to land. I hope these reflections give you another angle to view the characters, if you’ve already read it. And if you haven’t, I hope you consider spending some time with them.