If you have ever been so terrified of losing the upper hand that you sabotaged your own happiness, you will feel that "okay" in your bones. While the Nick/Frances dynamic drives the plot, the soul of the book is Frances and Bobbi.
Frances is the "cool girl" archetype deconstructed. She watches her ex-girlfriend (and current best friend) Bobbi flirt with a glamorous older photographer named Melissa. She watches Melissa’s husband, Nick, suffer from depression and a failing acting career. She watches, analyzes, and files everything away.
4.5/5 Recommended if you like: Greta Gerwig’s Frances Ha , crying in the bathtub, and emails that feel like love letters. Have you read Conversations with Friends ? Do you think Frances deserves Nick? Or do you think Bobbi was right all along? Let me know in the comments below. Conversations with Friends
But the genius of the novel is that Frances is also watching us watching her. The novel is told in the first person, past tense. Frances is recounting a period of her life where she lost control, yet she does so with a clinical detachment that feels like a defense mechanism.
This stylistic choice mimics the experience of anxiety. The line between what is real (spoken) and what is internal (thought) blurs. Frances lives so much in her head that she sometimes forgets to actually live in the room. Conversations with Friends is not a comfortable read. Frances is prickly, self-destructive, and often unfair to the people who love her. Nick is frustratingly passive. The ending is ambiguous. If you have ever been so terrified of
If you picked up Sally Rooney’s debut novel, Conversations with Friends , expecting a lighthearted romp through Dublin’s literary scene, you probably found yourself putting it down to stare at the wall for twenty minutes. You aren’t alone.
They used to date. Now they are just best friends who finish each other’s sentences and perform spoken word poetry together. They are a unit. When Frances spirals into the affair, Bobbi is the one who gets hurt. The jealousy, the codependency, and the unspoken "what if" between the two women is far more complex than the heterosexual drama. She watches her ex-girlfriend (and current best friend)
In one of the most devastating scenes, Nick tells Frances he loves her. Frances’ internal reaction is violent and emotional, but her external response is a flat: "Okay."