Conversations with Friends

“Although I couldn’t specify why exactly, I felt certain that Melissa was less interested in our writing process now that she knew I wrote the material alone. I knew the subtlety of this change would be enough for Bobbi to deny it later, which irritated me as if it had already happened. I was starting to feel adrift from the whole setup, like the dynamic that had eventually revealed itself didn’t interest me, or even involve me. I could have tried harder to engage myself, but I probably resented having to make an effort to be noticed.”

Although Frances never voices this thought directly in her narration, one of the reasons she becomes interested in Nick seems to be that he pays attention to her while Melissa is focused only on Bobbi. Frances already conceives of Bobbi as more beautiful and interesting than herself, so having that opinion reinforced by people like Melissa is painful and irritating. Much like Bobbi did in high school, Nick sees her when she seems to be invisible to other people.

“I enjoyed playing this kind of character, the smiling girl who remembered things. Bobbi told me she thought I didn’t have a ‘real personality,’ but she said she meant it as a compliment. Mostly I agreed with her assessment. At any time I felt I could do or say anything at all, and only afterward think: oh, so that’s the kind of person I am.”

The kind of personality drift Frances describes here of feeling she does not know what her actual characteristics are is common in young adulthood. As the novel progresses, however, Frances gets many glimpses of the kind of person she is that trouble her. She hears from Bobbi, Nick, and Melissa that she can be cruel, avoidant, and judgmental. However, she also learns that she is dearly loved, despite all these faults. Accepting the latter assessment is as difficult to her as accepting the former. 

“My ego had always been an issue. I knew that intellectual attainment was morally neutral at best, but when bad things happened to me I made myself feel better by thinking about how smart I was.”

Frances’s narration is characterized by extraordinary moments of insight about herself and extraordinary moments of delusion about herself. She often admits something unflattering about herself easily and quickly, as if she has realized it a long time ago, as she does here. At the same time, however, she continuously thinks of herself as the victim of Nick’s casual cruelty while failing to understand how much her own pretense of emotional detachment affects him.

“The acclaim also felt like part of the performance itself, the best part, and the most pure expression of what I was trying to do, which was to make myself into this kind of person: someone worthy of praise, worthy of love.”

When Frances notices that Nick missed one of her spoken word poetry performances and shows up just as the crowd is applauding her, she appreciates this accident of timing. Despite her relentless performance as a person who does not feel anything deeply, she craves external validation just like anyone else. In a moment that emblematizes her entire relationship with Nick, she wants him to see her as a lovable person but miss the part where she reveals her actual, true self, in this case through her creative writing. 

“He hurled one of my school shoes at my face once after he tripped on it. It missed and went in the fireplace and I watched it smoldering like it was my own face smoldering. I learned not to display fear, it only provoked him, I was cold like a fish. Afterward my mother said: why didn’t you lift if out of the fire? Can’t you at least make an effort? I shrugged. I would have let my real face burn in the fire too.”

Though Frances does not make the connection explicit, this frightening anecdote from her childhood shows the seeds of her future adult personality. She learns to turn off emotionality as a strategy for dealing with a volatile and sometimes dangerous father. This strategy does not serve her well in other contexts, but few people can easily shed the behavioral patterns they learn in childhood even when presented with evidence of ineffectiveness.

“I didn’t belong in rich people’s houses. I was only ever invited to places like that because of Bobbi, who belonged everywhere and had a quality about her that made me invisible by comparison.”

Socioeconomic class affects the relationships between the novel’s four central characters subtly but pervasively. Readers learn that Nick and Bobbi both come from wealthy families, and while we do not learn this level of detail about Melissa’s past, we know she is financially comfortable at the time of the novel. Frances tells Nick at one point that she did not grow up in a poor family, but she does not have the same kind of background Nick and Bobbi had. As a result, she feels the confusing sense that she is the intellectual peer of everyone in the foursome, but that her different financial background is noticeable and palpable. 

“Bobbi was wrong about Nick. […] But I couldn’t explain that to her. I certainly couldn’t tell her what I found most endearing about him, which was that he was attracted to plain and emotionally cold women like me.”

Bobbi’s candor can be a virtue but can also make people feel judged. She seems unbothered by this and believes people should feel judged for engaging in behavior that does not meet her standards of acceptability. Here, it creates distance between herself and Frances when Frances feels unable to talk openly with Bobbi because she knows Bobbi will disapprove. This friendship is deep and loving in many ways, but both participants are guilty of sometimes making their love feel conditional. 

“me: maybe I’m actually really upset

Nick: are you

Nick: i never have any idea what you feel about anything

me: well it doesn’t really matter now, does it”

This instant message exchange is emblematic of Nick and Frances’s entire online relationship in that it is confusing and ultimately unresolved. Frances utterly fails to realize that it does matter to Nick if she is upset, that this information is the one thing that matters the most to Nick in this exchange. He only breaks up with her because it seems from her tone that she is not at all invested in the relationship, yet even afterward she cannot answer a direct question about her feelings.

“We can sleep together if you want, but you should know I’m only doing it ironically.”

When Frances makes this statement to Nick during her stay at Valerie’s villa in France, readers may feel as confused as Nick about her meaning. Is she being wry and self-aware, nodding to a realization of her own frustrating dependency on irony, or is she merely perpetuating that pattern with a remarkably un-self-aware statement? As is true in many places, Rooney does not have Frances comment on this statement in the narration, leaving readers to speculate about how she herself views her own words.

“I was reminded of her [Bobbi’s] wildness, her tendency to get inside things and break them open, and I felt fearful of her, not for the first time. She wanted to expose something private about how I felt, to turn it from a secret into something else, a joke or a game.”

What Frances perceives as a fearful quality in Bobbi could also be described as a cruelly immature quality. Something in her seems to delight in making other people uncomfortable. While there are occasions when people should be made to feel uncomfortable about bad behavior, Bobbi goes about making her own best friend uncomfortable in front of four other people, two of whom she and Frances only met days ago, an unnecessarily cruel way to discuss the topic of Frances’s and Nick’s feelings.

“I felt I’d lost control of everything. All I could decide was whether or not to have sex with Nick; I couldn’t decide how to feel about it, or what it meant. And although I could decide to fight with him, and what we would fight about, I couldn’t decide what he would say, or how much it would hurt me. Curled up in bed with my arms folded I thought bitterly: he has all the power and I have none. This wasn’t exactly true, but that night it was clear to me for the first time how badly I’d underestimated my vulnerability.”

Frances imagines herself particularly vulnerable in her relationship with Nick when in fact the vulnerability she describes is just the necessary vulnerability any two people share in an intimate relationship. No one in an intimate relationship can dictate the other person’s words or the amount that they will hurt. What she is experiencing is not unique vulnerability, but it is novel to her, as she is unused to putting herself in situations where she can be hurt.

“My mother favored some species of birds over others; the feeder was for the benefit of small and appealingly vulnerable ones. […] They’re all just birds, I pointed out. She said yes, but some birds can fend for themselves.”

Frances’s mother imagines Frances as a bird who can fend for herself. She later alludes to how much strength Frances has in comparison to her father, who takes refuge in alcohol. While Frances can be quite strong on the outside, she has an outsized investment in perpetuating that perception by keeping any signs of vulnerability private, relegated to the pages of her abstract poetry or fictional short stories.

“Was I kind to others? It was hard to nail down an answer. I worried that if I did turn out to have a personality, it would be one of the unkind ones. Did I only worry about this question because as a woman I felt required to put the needs of others before my own? Was ‘kindness’ just another term for submission in the face of conflict? These were the kind of things I wrote about in my diary as a teenager: as a feminist I have the right not to love anyone.”

As many young people do, Frances often carries her ideological beliefs to unhealthy or unrealistic extremes. She sometimes hides behind ideology to avoid confronting reality. Just as she can indefinitely put off figuring out how she will support herself by appealing to communism, so also can she indefinitely put off reckoning with hurt she has caused by appealing to feminism.

“That’s like foreplay for us. You say cryptic things I don’t understand, I give inadequate responses, you laugh at me, and then we have sex.”

Nick’s statement to Frances here could serve as an apt gloss on the entire book. The fact that he perfectly names their dynamic is indicative of the hyper-verbal, hyper-intellectual social circle in which they move, where dissection and evaluation are hallmarks of all conversation. Maddeningly, though, the two just move on from this statement to discussing other aspects of their relationship, as if the dynamic Nick has named is a sustainable one that they need not address further rather than a warning sign of inevitable trouble.

“When I saw Nick look over at us, I turned to Bobbi smiling, and moved her hair aside to whisper something in her ear. She looked at Nick and then suddenly grabbed my wrist, hard […] In a deathly calm voice, starting directly into my face, Bobbi said: don’t fucking use me.”

Throughout the novel, it becomes increasingly clear that Bobbi feels displaced by Nick. Not only are her feelings complicated romantically, as she herself used to date Frances, but also platonically as Frances spends more and more time with Nick and less and less with Bobbi. Here, those feelings boil over into an intense command when she notices that Frances is merely instrumentalizing her to make Nick jealous.

“Physically I felt almost nothing, just a mild discomfort. I let myself become rigid and silent, waiting for Rossa to notice my rigidity and stop what he was doing, but he didn’t. I considered asking him to stop, but the idea that he might ignore me felt more serious than the situation needed to be. Don’t get yourself into a big legal thing, I thought. I lay there and let him continue.”

Readers may have different opinions about whether Rossa’s actions constitute assault or just bad behavior given that Frances gives ample body language cues of her disinterest but does not verbally tell him to stop. The important thing for understanding her character, however, is how she chooses to react. She decides that she can avoid being raped by simply not establishing the conditions that would legally qualify Rossa’s actions as rape—by not objecting verbally, in other words. This scene’s briefness makes it even more chilling; Frances decides to not grant it any significance in her consciousness despite its frightening violence.

“Philip looked at me and said: I didn’t think you would let someone take advantage of you like that. He had a choked, embarrassed expression on his face while he pronounced these words, and I felt sorry for all of us, like we were just little children pretending to be adults.”

Prior to Philip’s comment, Frances does not have to be confronted with the way her relationship looks like a well-worn cliché to the outside world. When she suddenly does, it leaves her feeling more confused than ever. She does not adopt Philip’s opinion, but she does feel that Philip, Bobbi, and herself seem inadequate to the task of figuring out what her relationship with Nick means.

“I’m just a normal person, she [Bobbi] said. When you get to like someone, you make them feel like they’re different from everyone else. You’re doing it with Nick, you did it with me once.”

Because readers only see Bobbi from Frances’s perspective, they can easily make Frances’s mistake of viewing Bobbi in almost mythic proportions. Through Frances’s eyes, she comes across as ruthlessly intuitive, frighteningly confident and candid. In this passage, however, she both corrects Frances and signals to readers that they should approach Frances’s narration with caution and skepticism, even if much of it is accurate.

“It felt good to be wrong about everything.”

For a moment in Chapter 24, Frances realizes that she has been misinterpreting Nick and is flooded with relief. She thought she loved him much more than he loved her, but in reality, he loved her all along, so much that he was willing to tell Melissa about her. This lesson in reading things into his behavior that are not there does not last, however. In the fight that leads to their final breakup, she reverts to reading him through her own self-conscious lens.

“I could see I had entered a new social setting now, where severe mental illness no longer had unfashionable connotations. I was going through a second upbringing: learning a new set of assumptions, and feigning a greater level of understanding than I really possessed. By this logic Nick and Melissa were like my parents bringing me into the world, probably hating and loving me even more than my original parents did.”

Frances’s actual parents did nothing to help her understand mental illness, choosing not to speak to her candidly about her father’s tendency to bouts of depression. Her idea of Nick and Melissa as a second set of parents due to their different attitude toward mental illness brings to the forefront the age difference and possible power differential between herself and Nick that Frances generally spends little time thinking about. Readers could reasonably debate the question of who has more power in Nick and Frances’s relationship as Rooney shows different answers to this question in different moments, not defaulting to Nick as the more powerful person because of his age and wealth.

“I realized my life would be full of mundane physical suffering, and that there was nothing special about it. Suffering wouldn’t make me special, and pretending not to suffer wouldn’t make me special. Talking about it, or even writing about it, would not transform the suffering into something useful. Nothing would.”

Rooney alternates Frances’s moments of insecurity and immaturity with moments of profound insight, like this moment in which she realizes her suffering is no more important than anyone else’s. She even resists the desire to imagine herself a noble martyr for suffering silently. She stops short, however, of taking the next logical step and sharing the news of her endometriosis with somebody, missing the idea that even if her suffering is not unique, she is still deserving of empathy from her loved ones.

“What I seemed to want, though I didn’t like to believe this, was for him to renounce every other person and thing in his life and pledge himself to me exclusively.”

Frances’s commitment to communism and feminism, along with her self-identification as a bisexual woman, lead her to think of herself as someone who does not unthinkingly conform to social scripts about love. She does not, for instance, think that lifelong monogamy is necessarily the most desirable kind of relationship for every person. She finds these beliefs tested, however, when Nick struggles with loving both her and Melissa at the same time. 

“I thought about all the things I had never told Nick about myself, and I started to feel better then, as if my privacy extended all around me like a barrier protecting my body. I was a very autonomous and independent person with an inner life that nobody else had ever touched or perceived.”

When Nick and Frances break up for the final time, a new utility for Frances’s detachment emerges. She believes that by withholding her innermost self from Nick, she has saved herself from total rejection. He did not reject the real her because he never knew the real her. This idea may comfort her in the moment, but it offers no long-term comfort. Her refusal of vulnerability was never a successful way to build intimacy, and it is not, at the moment of her breakup, a successful way to avoid pain.