46 pages • 1 hour read
Conversations with Friends
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BetaPart 2, Chapters 26-28Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2, Chapter 26 Summary
On a date one evening, Nick and Frances have a long conversation about their families and pasts. In the year before the two met, Nick suffered a collapsed lung while on set in California. He grew lonely and depressed in the American hospital, a state which only deepened when he returned to Ireland and learned that Melissa no longer wanted children. Melissa eventually realized the extent of his depression but could not convince him to see a therapist. Eventually, he was admitted to the psychiatric unit of a Dublin hospital. During that time, Melissa had an affair with his best friend, and when Nick found out, they decided to get divorced.
They agreed, however, to keep living together until they could figure out another arrangement, and as time passed, her affair ended, and his mental health improved. They decided to stay married after all, though they no longer had sex. At the time he met Frances, he was feeling like a burden to everyone around him, and sure that he must be mistaken when it seemed like Frances was flirting with him. The two leave their meal happy with this new level of intimacy, planning a weekend vacation together.
When Frances gets back to her apartment, Bobbi is reading Frances’s story about her, clearly furious. She compliments the quality of the writing but is angry that Frances kept it a secret and angry that she learned so much more about Frances’s feelings from the story than from Frances’s direct communication. She says she wants to move out.
Part 2, Chapter 27 Summary
At Frances’s ultrasound appointment in November, a specialist tells her she most likely has endometriosis, a chronic condition that means her pain episodes will probably continue and can only be treated, not cured. Further, she is at increased risk of infertility. She tells no one, not even her mother on the car ride home.
Part 2, Chapter 28 Summary
Frances spends most of her free time the following week applying for jobs, wanting to repay Nick the €200 loan. She avoids communication with him, even when he expresses concern in an email. She also begins tracking her symptoms almost obsessively in a journal, trying to understand her diagnosis more fully. Nick and Frances begin to make up when she attends his thirty-third birthday party, but then she grows overwhelmed upon meeting and holding his baby niece, causing her to leave abruptly.
Her father calls her that night and apologizes for not putting her allowance in her account, though she pretends to act like she doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He begins talking very morosely in a way that sounds vaguely suicidal, saying she’d probably be better off without him.
The next day, Nick comes over, and though things are still awkward between the couple, they start having sex. He stops midway through, which she is sure must be because he finds her undesirable now. When he says that he doesn’t know how to make her less upset with him, she suggests maybe they should break up, to which he agrees. Alone in her apartment afterward, she cuts a small hole on the inside of her thigh with her nail scissors but finds that it does not distract her from the emotional pain.
Part 2, Chapters 26-28 Analysis
Through Frances’s handling of her endometriosis diagnosis, the reader sees how thoroughly she avoids processing feelings in order to cultivate an aura of security. She has a fierce desire to control the way people see her and to be perceived as unquestionably strong, independent, and capable. She almost never expresses the depth of her feeling for Nick to him and feigns invulnerability to anything potentially hurtful he does. Her insistence that Nick’s return to sleeping with Melissa is not a source of anxiety for her is plainly false. Similarly, she puts off telling anyone about the endometriosis diagnosis lest they start thinking of her as a sick person.
Frances’s urgent desire to repay Nick his €200 is another manifestation of the desire to appear invulnerable. The money represents a rare slip-up in her usual strong presentation. She allowed Nick to see a need—her reliance on an unreliable parental figure for financial stability. In the aftermath of learning that he is turning back toward Melissa, she regrets having let him see that weakness, and therefore views repaying the money as a means of erasing that moment of vulnerability.
The timing of Nick’s revelation that he has started sleeping with Melissa again, which leads to the breakup with Frances, is particularly damaging to Frances’s sense of safety in relationships. Shortly before he tells her this, the pair reaches new levels of intimacy with his long story about battling depression. Just as Frances is beginning to believe that she and Nick can reveal their true selves to each other, he wounds her. She feels that he relegates her to the role of “other woman,” inferior to his true love, Melissa. She hesitates to believe Nick could love both her and Melissa, even though she herself loves both Nick and Bobbi.
Throughout each stage of her affair with Nick, she is forced to evaluate her own opinions on love and relationships. Does she want a traditional, long-term monogamous relationship despite the iconoclastic views she cultivates in conversation with Bobbi? Does she believe it is possible to love more than one person at the same time? She discovers that while opinions on these topics can be formed in the abstract, they can only be tested in the crucible of life experiences, often much more messily than she would like.
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