In the early days of lockdown, when I thought I was about to be ordained a priest, I read Sally Rooney’s Normal People. I’ve heard it described as a book about, among other things, how Millennials have sex. Though I’m not sure the book is about sex, it does foreground the topic, and the discussion is of the sort that made someone about to sign his life away to the church wonder again about how Christians might speak the gospel into this fraught arena of human experience.

The award-winning 2018 novel, whose plot is now even better known thanks to its being filmed as a BBC miniseries and streamed on Hulu earlier this year, follows an on-again, off-again couple named Connell and Marianne from their final year of high school in small-town Ireland to their university days in Dublin. He is a working-class boy who devours books and knows how to write, possessing that most alluring combination of brilliance and genuine self-forgetfulness that verges on timidity. She is the daughter of a wealthy and forbidding mother and unliked at school, where she is considered weird, snobbish, and cold. She finds unexpected refuge in Connell. His gentleness is the opposite of what she expects (and wonders if she deserves) to receive. He, in turn, finds that he trusts her to see him without mockery or pretense.

From the beginning, their sex has a graced quality. Connell’s previous sexual encounters had been immediately followed by his partners’ describing the experience to the entire school, complete with unflattering exaggerations. “With Marianne it was different, because everything was between them only, even awkward or difficult things.” Later, thinking back on those early days of sex, Marianne tells Connell: “I didn’t need to play any games with you…. It was real.”