The best stories about complicated relationships between fascinating women

I know I have those lost friendships I still wonder about—we worked together, lived together, traveled to beach towns together, drank tequila together! We went to very bad bars and made very bad decisions together! How’d we lose touch?—and thank God these brilliant writers do too.

Schappell and Offill gather a cocktail party’s worth of lost platonic loves, reminding me that I’m not alone and giving meaningful thought to the monumental importance of friendship and the pain of losing it.

I’m a little obsessed with the sheer ferocity with which Elisa Albert writes the world, and when I this short, sharp novel the phrase that stuck in my head was, “This is all teeth.” And boy, do I mean that in a good way.

Ari Walker is still trying to get her footing after the birth of her baby when Mina, a former cult musician, moves to town and the two bond hard. I still think about Albert’s description of Mina, her round cheeks and her messy hair and the jarring realization that this woman is not affecting carelessness with standard beauty norms, but truly does not give a good goddamn. It’s about those people who are both alien and intimate and who make you more yourself. 

This was the first novel I encountered that captured the long half-life of an adolescent friendship that never leaves you, a first love that was both toxic and transformative.

Atwood allows the ripple effect of Elaine’s friendship with Cordelia to echo throughout her adulthood, her painting career, her marriage. Maybe it stuck with me because I hadn’t realized you could write about the good and the bad in one character and both could be so gripping, or because of the way Atwood captures the moment when another girl’s entire existence is so intoxicating—her family and her home and her clothing and attitude—that you want to consume it whole.

And how devastating it is to see that girl’s power wane.

What’s more fraught and intimate than friends? Sisters.   

Munro’s title story is about a relationship of extremes: sisters Char and Et can laugh over the darkest shit imaginable, and yet they also have certain psychic rooms they’ll never let the other into. Is this love or hostility? More happens in here than I can say, except that Char is the beautiful sister and Et the sharp-tongued, practical one, and an old flame returns and wreaks havoc.

It’s Munro, so there is sex, death, and betrayal, but delivered so obliquely you aren’t always sure what the characters deliberately did. Maybe that’s why this story enraptures me: it’s about the things you’ll never get to know, and I always think I'll figure it out this time.

Is there no end to my obsession with adolescent friendship? Apparently not.

Adolescence is the moment when everything blossoms, collides, and explodes: Sils and Berie were inseparable and insufferable teenagers together (it’s okay, we all were) and Berie is looking back on the summer they were fifteen from her own flawed marriage years later.

They were just girls: smoking and drinking, leaving each other cottage cheese sandwiches after school, strumming guitars, cracking on Sils’s besotted, lunkhead boyfriend. Then why does it feel like such a lost paradise to Berie and to us? Because this is the moment you feel adult powers awaken, before you grasp the consequences of your power. Because no one is running the frog hospital. Because it’ll never be that vivid again.