46 pages • 1 hour read
Conversations with Friends
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BetaPart 2, Chapters 18-21Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2, Chapters 18-19 Summary
As Bobbi and Frances fly back to Dublin, Bobbi asks only minimal questions about Frances’s relationship with Nick and reacts casually to the answers. When they arrive, Frances goes straight to Ballina to see her parents. At her mother’s house, she suddenly begins feeling seriously ill. At first, she thinks she just has bad period cramps, but then realizes she is bleeding a frightening amount.
Her mother takes her to a hospital, where the doctor’s first theory is that she has had a miscarriage. In a daze from the pain and confusion, she calls Nick, but he is still at the villa, and when he answers, he scolds her for calling him as anyone could have seen her name pop up on his screen. Rather than explaining, she just hangs up.
The pregnancy tests show she was never pregnant and has no infections. After a pelvic exam that also yields no concrete results, the gynecologist says she will need to return for an ultrasound, though the next available appointment is months away.
Nick sends an apology email for his terseness on the phone, but Frances does not answer. Over the phone, she apologizes to Bobbi for keeping the affair with Nick a secret and tells her about the hospital. Bobbi forgives her and expresses appropriate concern for her health. She theorizes that Nick often acts passive in relationships to avoid having to take blame when things go wrong.
The next day, Frances goes to visit her father, but when she enters his apartment, he is not there, and the apartment is a disaster. Bugs are crawling over the unwashed dishes and old containers of rotting food, while maggots collect near the overflowing trash bin. She backs out of the door and leaves.
Part 2, Chapters 20-21 Summary
Still at the French villa, Nick calls Frances one night and the two make up, though she still does not tell him about her hospital visit. As the fall semester nears, Bobbi needs new housing, so Frances gets permission from her father (whose brother owns her apartment) to rent the second bedroom out to Bobbi. Shortly after, Melissa’s complimentary profile of Bobbi and Frances is finally published. Nick and Melissa return from France in September, and Nick begins coming over to Frances’s apartment regularly while Bobbi is in class.
As the affair continues, Frances and Nick begin having deeper discussions than they have had in the past. She tells him about her father, which she likes doing because he is always unconditionally on her side about things, whereas Bobbi holds her to inflexible principles. She also admits to insecurity about having less money than him, but they both agree it would feel peculiar if he gave her money. On another occasion, he tells her that she can be hard on him sometimes, but she explains that she is only like this because he seems invulnerable to it.
At a reading that Bobbi, Frances, Nick, and Melissa all attend, Nick pays little special attention to Frances, so she tries to provoke his jealousy by flirting with Bobbi, but Bobbi sternly takes her wrist mid-touch and tells her, “Don’t use me” (197). The two make up again over email, but Bobbi says she feels that Frances is disappearing lately.
Frances joins a dating app, matches with someone, and goes to meet him. When they start having sex, she dislikes how abrupt he is, nothing like Nick, so she tries laying completely still to signal that she is uninterested. He disregards the hint, however, so she decides to let him go on rather than resist so she will not have to “get into a big legal thing” (210).
Part 2, Chapters 18-21 Analysis
From the novel’s very first chapter, Rooney makes clear that Bobbi carries an outsized weight in Frances’s life. Frances imagines Bobbi as a larger-than-life figure, a person who attracts some people and repels others, but toward whom no one could feel indifferent. The reader only ever sees Bobbi through Frances’s perspective, so much about Bobbi can only be speculated. Why does she try to humiliate Nick about his feelings for Frances in front of everyone at the villa, for instance? What drew her to Frances when the two met in secondary school? What insecurities does she have that are invisible to Frances, who sees her as supremely confident?
The reader can only guess at these answers, but one thing is clear from Frances’s narration: Bobbi is more hurt by the effects of Frances’s affair with Nick than Frances realizes. The affair creates a level of distance between the friends that Frances is not fully aware of because she is so focused on Nick. To some extent, this distance can happen in any friendship in which one friend begins a new relationship and enters a period of excitement and infatuation with the novelty of the partner. But in Frances and Bobbi’s case, the distance is exacerbated by Frances’s secrecy. Even after Bobbi herself volunteers the information that she kissed Melissa, Frances still withholds her own story. Despite several opportunities, Frances does not talk about her relationship with Bobbi until she is forced to when Bobbi discovers it independently. Even then, Bobbi respectfully does not pry with a barrage of questions and does not judge Frances, but still seems to wish that Frances would be more forthcoming of her own accord.
Making the dynamic even more complicated, Bobbi and Frances are not just friends, but ex-girlfriends. When Bobbi kisses Frances outside the villa in the rain, the reader sees evidence that she may have been experiencing a revival of her attraction to Frances shortly before finding out about the affair. Yet Frances, wrapped up in her own feelings, shows no signs of recognizing this dynamic. Like Nick, she imagines Bobbi as an invulnerable person, a person so much more powerful and self-assured than she is that she could not possibly hurt Bobbi. In Frances’s mind, strong people cannot get hurt, but the novel thematically explores how this is not true. It is a lesson Frances eventually learns the hard way.
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