Conversations with Friends

In Chapter 3, Frances recalls that Bobbi once told Frances she doesn’t have a “real personality” (18). This comment, of course, does not match the Frances the reader gets to know throughout the novel, but few personalities rival the force of Bobbi’s. Bobbi is a brash, outspoken, principled person who seems to have achieved the rare feat of genuinely not caring what people think about her. She holds people to very high standards, casually dismissing ideas she disagrees with, such as a classmate’s interpretation of theorist Gilles Deleuze or versions of feminism she considers retrograde. When Frances claims to be “anti-love” because love in a capitalist society cannot exist separately from capital’s nefarious influence, Bobbi tells her, “That’s vapid, Frances. You have to do more than say you’re anti things” (174).

While Bobbi is a dynamic and self-assured presence, the reader only gets to know her through Frances’s perspective. Because Frances both lionizes Bobbi and distances from her during the affair with Nick, this perspective is not a particularly thorough or accurate picture of Bobbi. For instance, her lack of curiosity about the details of Frances and Nick’s affair seems affected, as if she is deliberately stopping herself from appearing too interested. We can only speculate about the reason, however. Is she jealous of the relationship because she still loves Frances? Disappointed that Frances has feelings for Nick, who Bobbi considers boring? Conflicted at the thought of now being complicit in lying to Melissa? This is just one of many topics on which the reader cannot know what Frances does not know or investigate.

As the novel progresses, the reader and Frances gradually realize Bobbi is not as indestructible or mythical as she seems. Her career ambition is to be a college professor, a surprisingly conventional job for the abrasive iconoclast. The stress of her parents’ divorce, which she rarely talks about, leads her to snap at a friend. Her feelings are deeply hurt when Frances withholds the secret of the short story. While the novel centralizes Frances’s journey of realizing that Bobbi is a normal person and not a supernatural force, Bobbi, too, is learning, carving out unconventional relationships that suit her desires and her principles.

At multiple points in the novel, both Bobbi and Melissa refer to Nick as a fundamentally passive person. They describe him as someone who is not just non-confrontational or bad at making decisions, but who uses passivity as a strategy, a way of avoiding blame when things go wrong. This assessment of Nick’s character may be ungenerous, but there is evidence that it is at least somewhat accurate. He waits for Frances to kiss him first so that he is not the initiator of the affair. He sometimes presses her to say what she wants directly, but he himself does not often lead by example and tell her what he wants directly. Through such choices, he can maintain the compliant status of a person who is not driving the relationship.

However, as the novel progresses, both the reader and Frances learn that elements of Nick’s history beyond his control likely influenced this habit. He experienced severe depression for over a year before Frances met him. The depression impacted his ability to do normal tasks so pervasively that his loved ones had him committed to the psychiatric ward of a hospital. As if this event was not destabilizing enough, he discovered when he got out of the hospital that Melissa was having an affair with his best friend and wanted a divorce. Considering these events, Nick’s passivity makes more sense and feels more like a natural response to a series of years that must have felt out of control to him.

Narratively, Nick helps Frances understand she cannot control other people’s feelings about her and would be better off giving up the attempt, though she is still midway through absorbing this lesson at the novel’s end. As a person whose mental illness made him feel like a burden to his wife and family, Nick has personal knowledge of this unavoidable fact. By eventually being vulnerable with Frances, he shows her that vulnerability can make a relationship stronger and is not a sign of weakness or a surrender of power. Despite being 11 years Frances’s elder, Nick ends the book with the same questions she does about whether it is possible to love two people equally at the same time, and, if so, what that means about his own opinion of his wife’s former affairs.