Conversations with Friends

Frances tends to believe people that she falls in love with are more powerful than her. Both Nick and Bobbi are conventionally attractive and wealthier than she is, which she conceives of as forms of power. This is not entirely inaccurate, but she errs in believing she has no power within these dynamics. The only way she can get some power back, in her mind, is to avoid vulnerability through emotional detachment. This is part of what lies behind Bobbi’s declaration that Frances has no “real personality.” Frances, of course, does have a personality, but she rarely lets people see it fully, and she comforts herself with the knowledge that she has an unrevealed secret self when she feels hurt. When she and Nick break up for the final time, she narrates, “I thought about all the things I had never told Nick about myself, and I started to feel better then, as if my privacy extended all around me like a barrier protecting my body” (275).

Withholding outright declarations of affection is her power; neither Nick nor Bobbi feel that they understand her inner life at all. When she and Nick are still together and he is trying to understand her feelings about the fact that he having sex again with Melissa, she accurately surmises that the best way to hurt him is to act as if she has no feelings about the news whatsoever. She thinks to herself, “People were always wanting me to show some weakness so they could reassure me. It made them feel worthy, I knew all about that” (262). Indeed, this is one of the reasons Bobbi is so angry when she reads Frances’s short story. The fact that Frances kept the story a secret is hurtful, but even more so is the fact that Frances kept all the feelings in the story secret, writing them down for public consumption rather than sharing them with Bobbi herself.

Adding another layer to the irony and detachedness with which Frances approaches any relationship in her life is the larger background of the political ideology to which the four main characters subscribe. All are highly educated people who enjoy debating weighty topics like the meaning of art, white privilege, and capitalism. Because they take these ideological concerns so seriously, they can sometimes feel absurd taking their own personal concerns, which seem to pale in comparison, with sincerity. For this reason, all four are guilty of some degree of relying on ironic detachedness, even if Frances is the only one who considers it a core strategy for navigating relationships.

The major flaw with Frances’s strategy of ironic detachment is that it may give her some of the power she craves, but it also destroys her relationships. Bobbi is so hurt to find that Frances wrote all her feelings in a story for strangers to read rather than saying them aloud that she temporarily cuts Frances out of her life. Similarly, Nick grows so convinced that he cannot please Frances because he never understands what she wants that the two break up. In the breakup scene, he says to her, “You seem so upset with me and I don’t know how I can make you happy” (274). Rather than save the relationship by finally explaining her feelings to him candidly, she suggests they break up on the spot. Because Frances does eventually write a meaningful apology to Bobbi that leads to a reconciliation, readers can hold out hope that she is learning the ineffectiveness of this strategy. Whether she ever manages to improve upon it with Nick is left for readers to speculate.