The best novels that feature complex female friendships

Before reaching middle school, I pretty much believed that my friends—who they were and how many I had—determined my value. But my circle could be fickle; girls were ostracized for minor infractions (you bought the same coat as me!) I lived with daily fear of being dropped.

So Cat’s Eye captivated me with its lack of sentimentality in depicting (some) girls’ friendships. Elaine, a middle-aged artist, returns alone to Toronto, the city where she grew up,  for a retrospective of her work. The trip gives Elaine space to reflect on her life in that city, and Cordelia, her childhood “friend”, is central to her memories.

Cordelia tormented and humiliated Elaine, even putting her life in danger, yet Elaine remained loyal to her for years. It felt very real to me that this toxic relationship would continue to preoccupy Elaine into her functional adulthood. Girlhood friendships are often fraught, and Atwood is honest about the trauma and how it shapes us. All in clean, brisk, witty prose. 

If you’ve ever had a significantly eccentric or doctrinaire friend, you know that there are risks and rewards. I love the way this novel acknowledges the jagged edges of certain friendships, which can be deep friendships all the same.

The novel begins at Barnard College when George, who grew up poor in upstate New York, meets Ann, her righteous and intense roommate. Ann is doing her best to renounce her privileged background, and although George finds her flagrant acts of idealism strange and embarrassing at first, the two women develop a strong bond.

Told in first-person, we get George’s very unfiltered take on Ann: all the ugly thoughts and frustrations, as well as her deep admiration. That George is not always a cheerleader for Ann is not disloyalty; it’s a normal response to a very challenging person, and that’s refreshing.

I held out on Ferrante for a while, put off by the complicated neighborhood tree at the beginning of the book. When I finally dug in, I was so riveted by Elena and Lila that I stopped caring about all those other characters.

This book really nails the loyalty that can build out of rivalry in a friendship. Elena and Lila meet as schoolgirls in a violent, working-class neighborhood in post-war Naples. They are both smart, but Lila, the more fiery and precocious of the two, is forced to drop out of school to work. Elena, with a kind of survivor’s guilt, carries on with her education.

As tension bubbles in their friendship, so does an enduring respect and interdependence. The smartest girls in the room need each other, especially in this hard-scrabbling neighborhood where two heads are better than one.

Of all the fascinating things about this book’s unnamed character whose goal is to mix prescription drugs in order to sleep through the year, what interested me most was her relationship with her college friend, Reva. What do we call a “friendship” that persists just because it’s our only one?

I’ve seen toxic attachments explored in sexual relationships and families before, but not friendships, which we tend to think of as less complicated, easier to break off. The main character almost never leaves her apartment, but she is relentlessly visited by the needy Reva, who she barely tolerates. Reva is going through hard things and needs support, but the main character has almost nothing to say about her destructive love affair, eating disorder, or even her grief when her mother dies.

These two are clearly holding each other back, and yet, they can’t quite cut each other off. Although it’s an extreme case, it’s interesting to see this dreary friendship situation—which totally exists!— tackled at all.

Friendship takes work. These ongoing, necessary maintenance efforts are not the dramatic material of most friendship novels, but this book is all the more admirable for examining its realities.

This book tells the story of May, an independent, not unhappy but somewhat lonely woman on the brink of 40, who hasn’t made much effort with her far-flung friends—or any friends—in years. Presented with a 30-day leave from her job as a gardener at a university, she makes plans to visit four old friends for a few days each.

May is warmly welcomed, though the reunions are often stilted, sometimes awkward, and that’s what makes them honest: you can’t skip the hard parts when you’re learning a new rhythm, even with an old friend. Post-pandemic, this is an especially good book for people trying to find their way back to IRL friendships.