Conversations with Friends
I looked out the window at the stations. I had the sense that something in my life had ended, my image of myself as a whole or normal person maybe. I realized my life would be full of mundane physical suffering, and that there was nothing special about it. Suffering wouldn’t make 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.
I read her Normal People before I read this novel. She does appear to have a very distinct, similar style across her novels. So while I do like her style a lot, the fact that it is extremely similar across novels has meant that I’ve rated the first novel I read as 4 stars but this one will have to be content with 3 stars. In general, I recommend reading her - start with any of her novels, but note that after the first one you read, the rest will seem just a bit too familiar and may thus be not as enjoyable.
Though I knew that I would eventually have to enter full-time employment, I certainly never fantasized about a radiant future where I was paid to perform an economic role. Sometimes this felt like a failure to take an interest in my own life, which depressed me. On the other hand, I felt that my disinterest in wealth was ideologically healthy.
My ego had always been an issue. I knew that intellectual attainment was morally neutral at best, but when bad things happened to me I made myself feel better by thinking about how smart I was. When I couldn’t make friends as a child, I fantasized that I was smarter than all my teachers, smarter than any other student who had been in school before, a genius hidden among normal people. It made me feel like a spy.
I certainly couldn’t tell her what I found most endearing about him, which was that he was attracted to plain and emotionally cold women like me.
My mother reached suddenly and grabbed my hand. The car was stopped in traffic. Her grip was tighter than I expected, almost hard. Mum, I said. Then she let me go. She tidied her hair back with her fingers and then settled her hands on the steerling wheel.
You’re a wild woman, she said.
I learned from the best.
She laughed. Oh, I’m afraid I’m no match for you, Frances. You’ll have to figure things out all on your own.
Nick didn’t call me that evening, or that night. He didn’t call me the next day, or the day after that. Nobody did. Gradually the waiting began to feel less like waiting and more like this was simply what life was: the distracting tasks undertaken while the thing you are waiting for continues to not happen.
Some of it is really cringe though. For example:
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. I liked to feel that he was my collaborator.
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