The novel Normal People, which was first published in 2018, is the second book of Irish author Sally Rooney. The Guardian referred to her as a “27-year-old novelist defining a generation.”

As soon as the book became available, it instantly gained popularity: it was longlisted for the 2018 Booker Prize and won the Best Novel category at the 2018 Costa Book Awards. It was also longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2019. A TV series based on the novel premiered on BBC Three and Hulu in 2020.

The protagonists of the novel, Marianne and Connell, are teenagers who attend the same secondary school in County Sligo, in northwestern Ireland, and later move to Dublin as students at Trinity College. The story is built around their complex, on-and-off relationship and its development through time.

Rooney describes them as “two people who, over the course of several years, apparently could not leave one another alone.”

How important is an unlived life? The life that we could have lived but chose or happened not to. How much does the longing, wonder, or even grief about such parallel lives affect our real lives? Is an unlived life even worth examining?

In his book “Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life” psychoanalyst Adam Phillips tries to answer all these questions. He states that “our unlived lives—the lives we live in fantasy, the wished-for lives—are often more important to us than our so-called lived lives.”

Celine Song, the director of the film Past Lives, raises similar questions, only in the context of immigration and subtle emotions: the complex feeling of belonging or not belonging to the country you were raised in, the nuanced experience of being loved in different cultures, and the importance of our native language.

How does it feel like to be a parent while having depression and suicidal tendencies? Does it exacerbate the guilt and shame of having a mental illness even further? How does having a parent with mental illness affect a child in the long run? These were the questions I was replaying in my mind and trying to answer as I was watching "Aftersun." Aftersun is a touching directorial debut by Charlotte Wells, set in the late 1990s. It follows 11-year-old Sophie and her 30-year-old father, Calum to a Turkish resort. Calum and Sophie's mother are divorced, and he does not live in his hometown Edinburgh anymore, so Calum rarely gets to see Sophie.