At first, I was worried that Conversations with Friends<\/i> was going to be the kind of novel where a) cheating is a plot point but b) no one ever considers the possibility of non-monogamy. I’m happy to report that it is not that kind of novel, and also happy to report that it’s really really good. This book was a delight to read from the start, even with my initial misgivings about cheating-as-plot-point. It’s narrated in the first person by Frances, a 21-year-old university student in Dublin, and it’s about her best friend Bobbi (who’s also her ex-girlfriend), their new mutual friend Melissa (a writer and photographer who sees them perform spoken-word poetry together and says she wants to do a profile of them), and Melissa’s husband, Nick, an actor who’s been having a tough time with himself\/in his marriage. Melissa and Nick are a bit older than Frances and Bobbi (Melissa is 37; Nick is 32), and their moneyed\/married life is something that both attracts and repels Frances (whom Bobbi describes as a communist, and who talks about not wanting to work for money). Frances’s voice is a lot of what carries the book, but it’s not just her voice: I like the way that the narrative includes IM conversations or texts and emails, the way that it’s full of the exchanges of Frances’s daily life, in whatever format, as well as her thoughts and feelings. I like the book’s sense of humor, too, and the way that it captures things people do\u2014looking at Facebook videos, looking for more information about new friends\/acquaintances, looking back at past conversations. (About Melissa, shortly after meeting her and Nick, Frances thinks this: “I didn’t know how long she had been married to Nick. Neither of them was famous enough for that kind of information to be online” (12).)<\/p>\n
A lot of the book ends up being about Frances’s feelings for\/relationship with Nick, though it’s also about her friendship\/relationship with Bobbi, and her identity as a writer, and her family, and families\/relationships\/friendships in general, and being young and not knowing what to do and figuring things out as you go along. Frances is difficult\/prickly\/endearing: she’s smart and independent and uncomfortable with emotion and vulnerability, and I love her voice\/the tone of the narration, the way there are lyrical moments that are beautiful without being too ostentatious. I love sentences like this: “A bumblebee flew through the open window and cast a comma of a shadow on the wallpaper before flying out again” (98). Or this: “We were driving along by the harbor, where the ships implied themselves as concepts behind the fog” (132). Or this: “I loved when he was available to me like this, when our relationship was like a Word document that we were writing and editing together, or a long private joke that nobody else could understand” (178). Or this: “Lights sparkled on the river and buses ran past like boxes of light, carrying faces in the windows” (252). <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
At first, I was worried that Conversations with Friends was going to be the kind of novel where a) cheating is a plot point but b) no one ever considers the possibility of non-monogamy. I’m happy to report that it is not that kind of novel, and also happy to report that it’s really really […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10249","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10249","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10249"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10249\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10249"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10249"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10249"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}