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Status record

Sally Rooney Writer

SENDS UNSENT MESSAGES BY TWO SMALL FLAGS

Novelist now rendering Normal People in semaphore, one flag position per unsent message

Existence confidence provisional
A generated photo of an anonymous stranger. It is not the person named.
Sally Rooney waits in for a parcel at a community garden, composing a very long message in her head and sending nothing.
Location
Roof of a multi-storey car park in Frankfurt, level 6, beside the ticket machine
Currently
Translating Normal People into semaphore, chapter nine
Last confirmed sighting
Level 6, Frankfurt, signalling a chapter break to a pigeon
Observations
Can leave a pause so long that the wind apologises first.

Sally Rooney has been on level 6 of a Frankfurt multi-storey car park since Tuesday, translating her novels into semaphore with two plain flags. She began with Conversations with Friends and has so far signalled the word 'fine' four hundred times. Attendant Gerda says the pace is steady and the silences are exact.

Drivers on level 6 now park facing the wall and wait for the end of each sentence before reversing. The ticket machine has stopped making conversation. Three commuters have started answering her, badly, with umbrellas, and she has not corrected them.

Experts disagree on whether a lack of quotation marks can be signalled at all. One school holds that it needs a flag held very still, while another argues it requires no flag whatsoever. Both sides accept that the long emails in Beautiful World, Where Are You will take until spring.

Guidance for the public

Do not interrupt a sentence in progress; wait for the flags to lower.

Actual status (not satire) No death recorded as of 22 October 2026. Born 20 February 1991. Source: Wikidata

E&OE. The Registry accepts no liability for misclassification, temporal displacement or loss of personhood arising from this record. Photographs are computer-generated approximations and almost guaranteed to show a different person entirely.