I was 21 that summer and would that fall be 22 and thought of myself as on the old side for a first trip to Europe and to the abandon I thought necessary for being a certain kind of young I had skipped over by marrying at 19.

 

“Normal People” is one long sequence of falling in love between a boy and a girl, who want each other equally and have the same amount to gain from the relationship. They lose each other only because it is a TV show and the script demands suspense in order to sustain 12 episodes. Their young bodies are beautiful as is their sex inflected with love and a desire to leave themselves on the doormat to enter the other.

 

In Ireland it was always raining either a fine mist or a splashing downpour, and I got used to walking on lonely roads with a towel wrapped around my head and one of those American raincoats cinched tight around my waist. I was wearing the worn jeans of the boy I had met in London and who had sent me on this adventure so I would see more of the world than him. Everything was shaded by the fact I was being unfaithful to the man I was married to and was a liar. The lovers in “Normal People” do not lie much to each other or themselves, and while I watched the show I liked imagining that kind of love.

 

Sometimes when I was afraid on the road alone, I thought there was something soft about me for feeling this way. I didn’t have that much of a bourgeois life to slough off. In temperament, I was closer to the wily peasants and gonifs of my forebears than to the well-appointed girls I’d gone to school with at Woodmere Academy and Barnard. Still, I had something to escape, as does everyone, and that is where you find the fun of life.