46 pages • 1 hour read
Conversations with Friends
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Character Analysis
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
BetaPart 1, Chapters 6-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1, Chapter 6 Summary
Frances and Nick spend the next several months having only brief conversations when they run into each other in person, but they maintain regular communication over email. Their written correspondence has a flirtatious tone but is also full of irony and mutual teasing.
At the end of June, Frances goes to Ballina to visit each of her parents. As a girl, she and her mother tiptoed around her father’s moods, which were colored by depression and alcoholism. He sometimes stole money from Frances’s savings bank, and one time threw a shoe at her head. When her parents divorced, she visited him every other weekend, but the visits gradually lessened in frequency as she got older and realized being near him made her tense and unhappy.
At her mother’s house, she talks about Nick and Melissa more than she means to, which her mother notices and finds odd given that Frances has never been particularly interested in wealthy people before. When Frances goes to her father’s apartment, she finds it filthy and unkempt and spends the visit cleaning up after him while he eats.
Part 1, Chapters 7-8 Summary
Melissa invites Bobbi and Frances to her birthday party. When they get there, Frances wanders off to get a drink and finds Nick in a utility room with some of his friends. When the friends leave, Nick and Frances begin flirting and eventually kiss. She leaves the room abruptly and does not see him again for the rest of the party.
The next day, Nick emails Frances an apology, saying that he should have known better as a 32-year-old married man. She responds warmly, however, and the two continue to email back and forth flirtatiously. Sensing that Bobbi will not affirm the idea that Nick has serious feelings for her, Frances does not tell Bobbi about the kiss. Meanwhile, Bobbi is too interested in trying to figure out whether Melissa is attracted to her to notice anything odd. Though Bobbi and Frances run into Nick and Melissa at a book launch days later, Frances and Nick merely exchange pleasantries and act like nothing has happened.
Part 1, Chapter 9 Summary
The next week, Melissa goes to London for work, so Frances emails Nick to ask if she can come over so they can discuss what happened, but she packs her toothbrush, hoping their conversation will lead to more. It does, and the two have sex. She enjoys it and finds Nick notably kind and considerate as a sexual partner.
Back at home later that week, Bobbi is visiting and sees a message from Nick pop up on Frances’s laptop, but Frances intercepts it before Bobbi can read it. When Bobbi begins teasing her, Frances responds peevishly, asking if Bobbi is jealous, to which Bobbi takes offense.
Frances returns to Nick’s house several times that week while Melissa is away, and one day he tells her that Melissa has had numerous affairs in the past. Frances tries to bring up the question of whether Nick has serious feelings for her, or if he thinks of their relationship as purely physical, but the conversation devolves into each of them trying to predict what the other wants to hear. Neither of them leaves the encounter with any sense of what the other wants.
Part 1, Chapters 6-9 Analysis
From canonical Irish writers like James Joyce and Samuel Beckett to more contemporary writers like Roddy Doyle and John McGahern, Irish fiction has a long history of portraying dominating patriarchal figures, many of whom enact violence. Frances, however, chooses to push the patriarchal figure in her life to the sidelines. Her father’s “moods” rule her household and threaten her financial well-being as a girl, but as an adult she sets firm boundaries in her relationship with him. She visits him less, rejecting her mother’s assertion that family members are inherently owed a debt of love. Later in the novel, the reader sees that Frances’s feelings toward her father are complicated. She loves him, but she is not tormented by the shadow he casts over her life, instead devoting her time and energy to more fruitful relationships.
Meanwhile, Bobbi and Frances continue to grow more distant as they pursue Melissa and Nick, respectively. Bobbi, however, is open with Frances about her pursuit of Melissa, while Frances keeps her relationship with Nick a secret. Exacerbating the distance between Bobbi and Frances is the fact that neither can understand the other’s attraction. To Frances, Melissa is vain, pretentious, attention-seeking, and insulated from regular life by her wealth. To Bobbi, Nick is a boring, aloof trophy husband of only average talent.
Although Frances’s narration downplays her level of instigation in the affair with Nick, careful readers can still see the extent to which she is the driving force. She kisses Nick first, and afterward he offers her the chance to back out with his apology email. Rather than taking that chance, she waits for Melissa to travel out of town and then packs a toothbrush when she goes to his house, a telling detail that implicitly communicates Frances’s premeditation. In many cases, the things Frances does not say in her narration clarify the extent to which she does not want to look her own behavior in the face and instead wants to see herself as the victim of the seemingly more powerful member of the relationship, Nick.
Unlock all 46 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 8,800+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features:
Related Titles
By Sally Rooney
