Conversations with Friends: draining

so it goes… frances is a twenty-one year old english major, who performs poetry with her best friend, ex-girlfriend, and only friend, bobbi, who studies history and politics. bobbi is exuberant and she speaks with such precision, wit, and style, while frances feels like she fades into the background like wallpaper. they meet melissa, a woman writing a piece about their performances, and then frances encounters nick, melissa’s thirty-three-year-old husband, a not-bad-looking actor. affair begins.

this book is honestly so depressing in an affectless and detached way, twice removed from debilitating pain, in what i’d imagine depersonalization-derealization disorder would feel like. the storyline and writing are very mundane, mimicking the gestures we go through in daily life, with detached passion and dry prose.

it’s cruel, witty, painful, and cold. like burnt unbuttered toast served cold. or like jugs of luke-warm instant coffee at midnight. there is a romantic starving-artist vibe, but mostly heapings of distraughtness and pain.

i realized my life would be full of mundane physical suffering, and that there was nothing special about it. suffering wouldn’t m ake 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.

interjection: bobbi is a post-modernist smart mouth, albeit compassionate at the core. as illustrated by the quote that comes out of her mouth here.

bobbi: who even gets married? it’s sinister. who wants state apparatuses sustaining their relationship?

frances: i don’t know. what is ours sustained by?

bobbi: that’s it! that’s exactly what i mean. nothing. do i call myself your girlfriend? no. calling myself your girlfriend would be imposing some prefabricated cultural dynamic on us that’s outside of our control. you know?

bobbi thought the fetishization of “untouched nature” was intrinsically patriarchal and nationalistic.

the story revolves around this set of affairs. the characters throw conversations around and flirt through email. endearing.

what makes this book even sadder is that frances isn’t truly an unreliable narrator, like esther greenwood is in The Bell Jar. frances doesn’t dramatize or play up the truth with affectation, but she is detached and sad in a way that is difficult for people around her to understand. perhaps some parts of her narration is unreliable because she isn’t really thriving in regards to her mental health, but she is still honest, and direct, even when her feelings lose meaning.

text conversation with bobbi and frances:

bobbi: well you don’t really talk about your feelings

frances: you’re committed to this view of me

frances: as having some kind of undisclosed emotional life

frances: i’m just not very emotional

frances: i don’t talk about it because there’s nothing to talk about

bobbi: i don’ think “unemotional” is a quality someone can have

bobbi: that’s like claiming not to have thoughts

frances: you live an emotionally intense life so you think everyone else does

frances: and if they’re not talking about it then they’re hiding something

bobbi: well, ok

bobbi: we differ on that

if frances is eventually diagnosed as clinically depressed, i can entirely understand the predicament that brings her there. maybe she is without emotion as she claims, and maybe she analyzes the status quo to a neurotic level. she is naive and capable of love, but she is also a moulded figure who takes up the gaps of space the society leaves for her to exist.

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? as a feminist i have the right not to love anyone.

a college girl having an affair with a depressed and high-status and forgiving married man more than a decade older than her, a charming actor who is “pathologically submissive”.

high infidelity.

and so, this book is about all of these terms and hierarchies and power dynamics and privileges, but with a backdrop of mundanity and feelings stringing it together into a capacity that we as readers can relate to.

i closed my eyes. things and people moved around me, taking positions in obsucre hierarchies, participating in systems i didn’t know about and never would. a complex network of objects and concepts. you live through certain things before you understand them. you can’t always take the analytical position.