Conversations with Friends

The reader first encounters Bobbi and Frances doing an activity that rigorously rejects the logic of the capitalist marketplace: spoken word poetry. Contemporary poets find it virtually impossible to make a living through their craft. Bobbi and Frances could not care less about the potential marketability of their chosen art form, however. Both are still in college, and Bobbi has a wealthy family to fall back on if all else fails. Frances does not, but for the time being her needs are provided for; her parents give her an allowance and she lives cheaply in an apartment her uncle owns. She plans to live a modest life when she graduates but has no concept yet of struggling to make ends meet and will find throughout the novel that money has a way of getting bound up with relationships despite one’s efforts to the contrary.

Another important character note that surfaces in the opening chapters is Nick and Frances’s initial bond. Even though Frances is often more well-liked by men than Bobbi because she is less abrasive, she still considers Bobbi the obviously more magnetic member of the friendship, and therefore is not surprised by Melissa’s interest in her. It allows her to see an ally in Nick, who has a similar way of fading into the background. They both move alongside a more dominant person with a sense of themselves as unremarkable.

Though Frances excels at reading people’s motivations, she does not do so as flawlessly as she thinks. She correctly realizes, for example, that when Bobbi mentions Melissa’s plans for the magazine profile, Bobbi is subtly signaling that she has the upper hand in relation to Melissa, that she talks to Melissa separately from when the two friends interact with Melissa together. Frances is correct but her talent for insight will fail her later when it gives way to false assumptions about Nick’s feelings that she convinces herself are the truth.