Normal People

By the final stretch of the novel, Connell and Marianne have cycled through years of on-and-off intimacy, other partners, and long stretches of silence, always finding their way back to each other. After Connell's depression deepens following the suicide of a school friend, Marianne becomes one of the people who helps him through it, and their friendship shifts back into a sexual and emotional relationship over the summer. During this period Marianne, still carrying the effects of her family's emotional abuse, asks Connell to hit her during sex; he refuses and is disturbed by the request, and she leaves upset. Around the same time, her brother Alan becomes violent with her at home, and Connell intervenes, physically confronting Alan and removing Marianne from the house to keep her safe.

After this crisis, Connell and Marianne return to Dublin and Trinity, and this time they move in together, settling into a steadier, more openly committed version of their relationship than they have had before. Their bond finally feels stable rather than something they are hiding or sabotaging.

The novel closes as Connell receives an unexpected acceptance into a creative writing MFA program in New York City. Aware that Marianne would prefer to stay in Dublin and that going would mean leaving her behind, he tells her he could turn the offer down. Marianne refuses to let him do that. She tells him he should go, encouraging him to pursue the opportunity, and reassures him that whatever happens, she will always be there for him. The book ends without a definitive resolution of where their relationship will go physically, on the note of her quiet, generous certainty about the endurance of their connection even as he prepares to leave.

Rooney's last page and the series' last scene are the same scene. Connell is offered a place on a year-long writing programme in New York; Marianne, who would be staying in Dublin, is the one who tells him to take it.

The novel gives her the line the whole book has been building toward: Connell offers to turn the place down, and she tells him to go, because he knows she will always be there. The series lets her be simply content — with her own life, and with what she and Connell are to each other.

Between school and that scene the series dramatises what the novel summarises. Marianne's year in Sweden becomes a relationship with a photographer, Lukas, which she ends when he starts tying her up during a shoot. And the debs humiliation gets a coda: at the dance, Connell's friend Eric tells him they had all known about Marianne and would not have cared, and Connell goes home and cries.