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In Sally Rooney’s Smart Novel, Conversations With Friends, the Narrator Strives to Matter

The first novel by the 26-year-old Irish writer Sally Rooney, Conversations With Friends , wears its influences on its sleeve. The narrator and her friends are fans of Twitter poet laureate Patricia Lockwood. They watch Greta Gerwig movies, and like Gerwig’s most famous character , the narrator is named Frances. The novel’s blurbs and marketing materials invite comparisons to Bret Easton Ellis and J. D. Salinger, but those signals indicate little more than that you’re opening a novel about young people written by a young person. Frances and her friends, at age 21, are a little too old to be precocious in the manner of a Salinger character, nor are any of them desperate cases like Seymour Glass. They aren’t transgressive like Ellis’s pretty monsters. None of their struggles are out of the ordinary. Rooney has the gift of imbuing everyday life with a sense of high stakes, and it’s hard to imagine Conversations With Friends appearing without Elena Ferrante’s “Neapolitan Tetralogy” and Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle series as immediate antecedents.

Like Ferrante, Rooney puts her narrator in awe of a brilliant friend: Bobbi, Frances’s classmate from convent school, first love, and now spoken-word-performance partner. At a high-school dance, Bobbi “was radiantly attractive, which meant everyone had to work hard not to pay her any attention.” Like Ferrante’s women, the pair are of the left, but their communism, however firmly professed, is mostly gestural. When Bobbi acts too cool for school, as when the pair are smoking outside Dublin bars with male poets, Frances does the talking. “This meant a lot of smiling and remembering details about their work,” she explains. “I enjoyed playing this kind of character, the smiling girl who remembered things. Bobbi told me she thought I didn’t have a ‘real personality,’ but she said she meant it as a compliment. Mostly I agreed with her assessment. At any time I felt I could do or say anything at all, and only afterward think: oh, so that’s the kind of person I am.” There’s a useful plasticity to Frances’s persona, but of course a narrator can’t just smile and remember things. She’s the one who shapes the story.

The central question of Conversations With Friends is how much of an actor Frances is in her own story, whether it’s her struggle or the case of a passive onlooker being jostled by stronger personalities. Frances and Bobbi meet an older couple, Melissa and Nick, and rectangular romantic tensions soon become obvious. Nick is a 32-year-old actor and Frances soon enough finds herself checking out shirtless photos of him online, and they begin an affair. Frances rationalizes her part in it by figuring his marriage has gone cold, that as an older man he’s the one in control, that she’s helpless before his good looks, and that he doesn’t really love her anyway. The little flirtations and many emails that lead to this muddle are presented in great, near diaristic detail, and it’s here that Rooney bears a resemblance to Knausgaard. As with Karl Ove in My Struggle: Book 2 , Frances is given to episodes of self-harm when things don’t go her way in her affair with Nick. At one point she punctures her thigh — as bloody if not quite as dramatic as Karl Ove’s face cutting after being rejected by his future wife. But whereas Knausgaard always portrays his alter ego as a frustrated hero on a romantic quest, Rooney’s heroine finds herself tangled in a web not of her own weaving.

Like Karl Ove, Frances is a child of divorce with an alcoholic father. Karl Ove’s late father was a violent menace, more given to bouts of rage before he took to drink than after. Frances remembers her father throwing a shoe at her when she was little, but it’s his later dissipation that brings her shame. Any of her infrequent visits to his house involve some tidying up on her part, washing dishes piled in the sink, binning left-out trash, some of it rotting. He calls at all hours of the night, slurring his words and incoherent. He soon flakes in providing Frances’s monthly allowance, and for the first time she has to take a job, pouring coffee. It’s a little hard to feel sorry for Frances when it comes to her money troubles, even as she takes note of how much richer everyone else in the novel seems to be. She lives rent-free in a flat owned by her uncle, and 21 is a fairly late stage to start earning a wage. A tossed-off short story she shows to one of Melissa’s friends ends up in the hands of a lit-mag editor who offers her €800 to print it.

The story is about her best subject, Bobbi, and when Bobbi finds out about it, she’s incensed, but as with most of the conflicts in Conversations With Friends, the feud is short-lived and the pair even return to each other’s arms. Somehow the entire novel manages to remain within the neutral territory of its title. Rooney can make the stakes seem high even when they’re obviously low, and she does so without resorting to Ferrante’s melodramatic swoops or Knausgaard’s existential freakouts. Partly this is a by-product of Rooney’s control of tone and her disciplined use of plain language even when she’s getting off her most charming lines. A larger reason for the novel’s appeal is simply Frances’s youth and naïveté, her natural role as an object of sympathy (especially during a couple of scenes at the hospital), as well as the sense that we’re witnessing exactly what it feels like to be naïve in 2017. But a few times the spell is broken, and it’s usually because Rooney’s characters’ extreme politeness and eminent reasonability leap off the page, as glaring as a typo. Frances learns who she is by listening to her friends tell her about herself (usually stating judgments the reader has already made), but occasionally these chats devolve into soothing coos of mutual reassurance. “Okay … thanks for telling me that,” says Frances to Nick. “It’s okay, it doesn’t make you a bad person,” says Nick to Frances. Conversations With Friends is a novel of delicious frictions delivered at a low heat.

*This article appears in the July 24, 2017, issue of  New York  Magazine.

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Book Review: “Conversations with Friends” By Sally Rooney

It is easy to compare author Sally Rooney’s 2017 novel “Conversations with Friends” to Rooney’s very popular “Normal People.” A lot of her fanbase joined after reading the latter with high expectations (myself included). “Conversations with Friends” did not disappoint. It premiered with a series of the same name in May of 2022 on Hulu starring Alison Oliver and Joe Alwyn.

The main setting is Dublin, Ireland in the early 2010s. The story centers around Frances, a 21-year-old bisexual college student who has a close relationship with writing. She and her ex-girlfriend turned best friend Bobbi do slam poetry together on the weekends. Her world completely changes upon meeting famous photographer Melissa and her husband Nick. Frances is captivated by Nick and his life with Melissa and upon spending more time with them, she begins to form feelings toward Nick that she does not know what to do with.

Frances is a complex character that is written beautifully. As the book is written in first-person point of view, readers really get to see inside her head and understand the motivations behind her actions. She goes in-depth on her views and relationships with Bobbi and Nick. She is quite blunt and cynical as well and can be really hard on herself.

As a reader, you are rooting for her and only wish for the best but she tends to self-sabotage situations with school and her relationships. Her passion for writing stays but she faces writer’s block at many different points in the book as she goes through personal struggles.

She has problems with her father and her health. Her father had been distant since she was a child and pulled away from her several times. Throughout the novel, Frances tries to reconcile with her father and grapples with the fact that it is harder to connect with him than it seems.

About halfway through the novel, Frances suffers a reproductive health problem that hinders her life experiences as well. She has to deal with the physical pain and also the implications that this illness might have in the future. She fears she will be viewed as a “sick person” meaning she would be treated differently from her peers. As a result, she avoids telling people about her condition.

Despite this book being called “Conversations with Friends” there are many themes of love. Can one person love more than one person at a time? Frances struggles with her love for Bobbi and Nick at the same time. All three of them handle love differently and go about it in their own way. Bobbi doesn’t believe in relationships and yet finds herself still drawn to Frances. Frances, being in the middle, seems to be hyper-aware of both of them at the same time. She never fully pulls away from Bobbi even when she is invested in her relationship with Nick (while he is simultaneously married to Melissa.)

While this book has many themes and discussions of love I wouldn’t describe it as a romance. Her relationship with Nick is not only questionable but messy. Other than it being an affair, Nick is much older and Frances loses sight of herself trying to make the relationship work.

The main aspect of this book that bothered me was the ending. Frances chooses something that goes against her character development. Yet again. Rooney is known for unresolved endings because that’s exactly how life is.

I previously wrote a review of Rooney’s “Normal People” for The Montclarion. What I stated still stands for the fantastic aspects of this book. The writing style is refreshing, the character work is great and very genuine as well. The plot had good pacing and kept me engaged during this story.

Like Rooney’s other works, there are no quotation marks included in the dialogue of this book. Some readers feel as though this makes it more challenging to read but I disagree. I feel it is quite easy to catch on to and follow.

I’d recommend this book to college students as well as people who feel lost. This book has a lot of really fun moments and memorable conversations between characters. But it can also get very serious and it deals a lot with Frances’s personal struggles. She is a character who is lost and needs to find her own way in time, a feeling that a lot of college students can relate to.

Rebecca Bienskie Jackson

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Escape Through The Pages

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Book Review: Conversations with Friends

Author: Sally Rooney

Genre: contemporary, fiction, LGBT

Rating: 5/5

*slight spoilers ahead*

Conversations with Friends is a novel that focuses on the lives of students Bobbi and Frances and their relationship with married couple Nick and Melissa. Bobbi and Frances are ex-girlfriends turned best friends, who perform spoken poetry when they meet 36 year old Melissa. A photographer and writer, she is taken by their performance and decides to write a piece on them. This leads to both girls meeting her husband Nick, with whom Frances becomes quite enamoured.

If you’ve already read Normal People , then you will quickly draw several parallels with that novel. The story is internalised, with a lot of the narrative occurring in the heads of characters (mainly Frances) rather than in real life. Like Marianne and Connell our main characters are intelligent, observant and flawed. They also live in the vibrant city of Dublin, which is once again brought to life in this narrative.

Frances acts and thinks of herself as an enigma. Her passivity is interwoven throughout the novel, right down to the structure. Her disengagement is particularly emphasised by Rooney’s use of indirect speech. Even when involved she does not treat herself as directly engaging in a conversation, instead she is reporting it. The sex scenes also show a level of detachment. The atmosphere of these moments is not intimate and the pleasure seems muted. Frances either describes sexual intercourse in a methodical way or glosses over the act. No stereotypical romance is included in these scenes.

My favourite part of this novel would have to be the breakdown of performativity and self. With Frances as the narrator, we are receiving an endless stream of thought as she observes and analyses the world around her. Her mind is lively and active, yet when you look closely you realise that the activity of her mind does not always get vocalised. In fact, very little of what Frances thinks gets spoken. She holds back and often gives course, blunt responses. This earns her mixed responses of admiration and frustration. Typically her responses adapt to the person she is engaged with, often seeming to reflect her counterparts ideas and thoughts, removing any sincerity from what she says or does. Presenting the ultimate ‘cool girl’ front, through her eyes we see Bobbi as the ‘coolest girl’ and Nick as ‘cool boy’. Both depictions are incredibly flawed.

You quickly come to realise that Frances idolises those she truly loves. In her mind those she admires are extraordinary. This leads to her misunderstanding them and even isolating herself from them. Rather than playing the role of the distant cool boy, Nick is clinically depressed. Bobbi is not the allusive rich girl ready to conquer the world. With her parents divorcing and her future uncertain, she’s inherently shown to be a regular person. Under the gaze of Frances, however, these two are elevated above all others. If you’ve read The Great Gatsby, you know that warped, romanticised views of people can have consequences.

Frances’ enigmatic poise is so strong, that I think a lot of her personality is hidden even from herself. She is so used to reflecting others that she struggles to recognise her own sense of self. Her own pain, her own pleasure, is mute. During the novel we witness Frances’ trauma; her fragile relationship with both parents, her recognition of her father’s alcoholism. We see her go through a false pregnancy and miscarriage in a matter of pages, only to find out she has a debilitating disease that could make her infertile. She endures a lot in this novel, and yet her reaction is pretty understated each time. Her mind seems to be on autopilot, the default being to appease. It’s a default many of us have, one that should be addressed.

The story explores polygamy, but not successfully. Or at least, not positively. The relationships Nick has with both Melissa and Frances are fraught with secrecy and miscommunication. This leads to a lot of jealousy and strain. Rather than being a topic of openness, sex seems to be used as a tool of conquest, upsetting all 3 characters at different points of the book. Whilst the novel doesn’t seem to be against polyamorous relationships, in fact that novel’s ending suggests a sense of hopefulness it could succeed, it doesn’t portray them in the best light. Nick’s relationship with Frances seems to be used as a way of keeping his marriage to Melissa intact.

This is the first novel I’ve read where a protagonist has endometriosis; a condition where tissue similar to the lining of your womb can be found elsewhere. A painful diagnosis, it is one that is very common in women, yet not well recognised in the public eye. In the narrative we gain in depth understanding of what it can be like to live with the illness and how scary the symptoms can be pre-diagnosis; at one point it is assumed Frances is miscarrying the pain is so extreme. This educational insight could serve to help bring more awareness to a condition that affects 1 in 10 women.

I loved this book, the complexity of the characters and the exploration of self-expression and public identity. The novel leaves you with a lot to think about, a lot to talk about. I think it provides a number of topical points to discuss and I look forward to seeing how the TV adaptation turns out.  

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Conversations with Friends

Sally rooney.

304 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 25, 2017

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“You underestimate your own power so you don't have to blame yourself for treating other people badly.”

“The acclaim also felt like part of the performance itself, the best part, and the most pure expression of what I was trying to do, which was to make myself into this kind of person: someone worthy of praise, worthy of love.”

“I had the sense that something in my life had ended, my image of myself as a whole or normal person maybe.”

‘ The acclaim also felt like part of the performance itself, the best part, and the most pure expression of what I was trying to do, which was to make myself into this kind of person: someone worthy of praise, worthy of love. ’

’ I was like an empty cup, which Nick has emptied out, and now I had to look at what has spilled out of me: all my delusional beliefs about my own value and pretensions to being a kind of person I wasn’t. When I was full of these things I couldn’t see them. Now that I was nothing, only an empty glass, I could see everything about myself. ’

’ I now view some of my “empowering” experiences as violating, exploitative, and manipulative. I noticed that “gray” and “complicated” were words I used to stop questioning whatever had happened, rather than to understand it…and that, again, prioritizes men’s identities over their actions. ’

Bobbi, I said. Does my face look shiny? Bobbi glanced back and scrunched up her eyes to inspect me. Yeah, a little bit, she said. I let the air out of my lungs quietly. There wasn’t anything I could do now anyway since I was on the stairs already. I wished I hadn’t asked. Not in a bad way, she said. You look cute, why?

“suffering wouldn’t make me special, and pretending not to suffer wouldn’t make me special.”

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‘Conversations with Friends’ Review: Hulu’s Second Sally Rooney Adaptation Stretches the Boundaries of Love

Ben travers.

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“ Conversations with Friends ” opens with a riddle. Frances (newcomer Alison Oliver) sits with her friend, stage partner, and ex-girlfriend Bobbi (Sasha Lane), rehearsing a draft for their next spoken word poetry event. “I am inherently worthless, but highly prized,” they say, alternating lines. “I will empty out your bank account. I’m all about love, but I have a heart of stone and have been known to prefer to be owned.”

Without revealing the answer (revealed later in the premiere), these three eloquent sentences cleanly encapsulate a knotty romance bursting with ideas. Hulu ‘s 12-episode limited series examines the values assigned to things and people against the values set by society and, at times, experience. “Conversations with Friends” is at once a thorough character study (of at least two of its four leads) and a thought experiment about young artists struggling to live within a capitalistic system they resent. Scenes are filled with shared opinions and high-minded ideas, just as quieter moments illustrate how difficult it can be to actually practice those theoretical standards. Human instinct, desire, and the our capacity for love clash with academic refutations of senseless practices. This is, after all, a Sally Rooney adaptation.

Based on the Irish author’s debut novel, “Conversations with Friends” initially appears markedly similar to her second book and first Hulu limited series, “Normal People,” which earned four Emmy nominations and made Paul Mescal 2020’s enduring heartthrob. They’re both set in and around Dublin; they both center on secret affairs; they both follow brooding, damaged men who have trouble speaking at length, and withdrawn, overlooked leading ladies who elicit steady banter nonetheless. But Hulu’s latest — made by many of the same names behind “Normal People,” including director and executive producer Lenny Abrahamson , writer Alice Birch, and EPs Emma Norton, Ed Guiney, and Andrew Lowe — is a messier, broader, more ambitious tale. Viewers coaxed into the familiar trappings of a swooning, hopeless love story may be put off by the middle episodes’ twists and turns (and confounded by the purposefully jarring final beat). But “Conversations with Friends” makes for an admirable, if bumpier, follow-up: well-suited to its creators, exhibiting a whipsmart emotional I.Q.,  and distinct in its assessment of love’s many forms.

Later that night, after rehearsing their riddle, Frances and Bobbi step up to the mike in a small Dublin club filled with amateur performers and one professional writer. There, in the audience, is Melissa (Jemima Kirke), a respected author who approaches the duo at the bar to offer her thanks and admiration for the poem. They exchange pleasantries, and Melissa invites them for dinner and a swim at her seaside home just outside the city. Bobbi, an outspoken American who’s already as cool and confident as her new semi-famous friend, is immediately smitten with Melissa. But while they’re flirting, smoking, and bathing in the glow of shared harmony, Frances’ attention drifts to Melissa’s husband, Nick (Joe Alwyn). An actor currently leading a stage production of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” Nick is nevertheless reserved. He shrinks from the spotlight rather than seeking it out, and later tells Frances he likes being an actor because the words he’s meant to say are already written for him.

As they did in “Normal People,” Abrahamson and Birch thrive at eliciting maximum awareness from minimal activity. At dinner, Nick and Frances sit next to each other, facing forward, straining to make any kind of conversation at all. He talks about the play, she responds in kind. Awkward silences are punctuated by Melissa and Bobbi’s giddy laughter from the other room. But Nick and Frances still muster up a few relatively bold statements, distinguished by the actors’ active listening and the camera’s attention to it. The soon-to-be lovers’ quick chemistry (and the spark it gives these early episodes) can be credited as much to the acutely candid performances as the chosen and highlighted details. (Many lines from Rooney’s novel make the cut, though plenty is adjusted to better suit TV.) Numbers are exchanged. Plans are made. The seeds of a relationship are set.

To say Frances embarks on an affair with Nick isn’t a spoiler, so much as the catalyst for a romance involving far more than two people. Nick, of course, is married to Melissa. Bobbi, in turn, is openly attracted to Melissa, and Melissa has, it turns out, carried out at least one affair already. But Frances and Bobbi still have unresolved relationship issues of their own. The two friends are thick as thieves, yet their unexamined breakup lingers. Blurred lines in their past and present play a significant part in how Frances and Nick’s dalliance evolves into something more. Even as love blooms in secret, it always feels like their are four parts to this couple.

That’s very much the point, even if the 12 half-hour episodes never equate to a true ensemble piece. Frances is the lead, embodied with age-appropriate naïveté and reticent passion by Oliver. The Irish actor, cast here in her first professional role out of Dublin’s Lir Academy, precisely crafts Frances’ natural, reserved nature. By letting her guard down with ease, she establishes a rich, intimate history with Bobbi, while proving just as compelling in getting a wobbly relationship on its feet with Nick. Lived in and raw, Oliver’s turn is a standout.

To readers, Alwyn may seem a bit young to play a “trophy husband.” After all, in the book, he’s an established star not famous enough to have his personal details on Wikipedia (ironic, given the rabid fanbase surrounding the actor’s real-life relationship) but prominent enough to be nominated for a major award. Those qualities go unmentioned in the series, which reconfigures Nick with a mix of attributes enviable to Frances. He’s not a father figure, but he offers fiscal security and devout attention in a way her own wayward dad does not. Meanwhile, he’s still young enough to identify with her struggles (as an artist, mainly), troubled enough to commiserate with her melancholy, and objectively handsome — thus, a convincing outlet for latent desire. Nick is living a phase of life Frances wants to skip ahead and join, but even as she sees beyond its shiny facade (including an absolutely magnificent house), she’s just as infatuated with the man offering her a leg up.

Alwyn’s sheepish deflections and pained confessions ring true, even when his devotion to Frances repeatedly relies on an that ineffable attraction oft-cited in sweeping romances. “Conversations with Friends” is as eager to embrace these kind of genre conventions as it is delighted to upend them. For the most part, it pulls off both. The dense text still provides plenty of simple pleasures, be it the efficiency of 30-minute episodes or the notable inclusion of another music cue from “The O.C.” There’s a wry wit to much of the courtship, and the filmmakers maintain their uncanny ability to capture lots of texting in an artful, informative, and compelling manner. While the six hours can get bumpy in plotting (and frustrating when the story’s perceptiveness clashes with its lead’s innocence), “Conversations with Friends” paints a sophisticated psychological portrait of when youthful ambitions and adult realities come to a head. The ideas we strive for and the ideas we have of ourselves can’t always gel with what the world demands of us or how others interpret our actions. And when such disparities involve matters of the heart, well, sometimes the riddle requires more than one answer.

“Conversations with Friends” premieres all 12 episodes Sunday, May 15 on Hulu.

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Conversations With Friends Review: Hulu’s Infidelity Tale From Normal People Team Sizzles, Then Fizzles

Dave nemetz, west coast bureau chief.

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Rooney specializes in crafting relatable characters and natural dialogue in her books, and Conversations has the same grounded feel Normal People had, albeit slightly heightened and juicier this time. The conversations are brimming with subtext, punctuated by lots of longing looks and significant glances. Plus, the sex scenes have genuine heat to them, as Normal People ‘s did; they feel real and intimate in a way we rarely see, leaving the participants sweaty and flushed and not entirely photogenic.

It’s also a tall order for the actors to equal the stunning work done by Normal People stars Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar-Jones. Oliver has a huge load to carry here in her first major role — the camera spends a lot of time on her face — and she carries it well, lending Frances a captivating vulnerability. Frances can be hard to read, though, which makes it harder for us to connect with her, and with the show’s narrow focus on her, it all starts to feel a bit claustrophobic. (Frances’ home life is dreary, with an unreliable alcoholic dad and a mysterious health issue.)

THE TVLINE BOTTOM LINE: Hulu’s intriguing but frustrating book adaptation Conversations With Friends can’t quite match the heights of Normal People .

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Did anyone else think that first photo was Chad Michael Murray and Elise Meyers? 😹

Not sure how closely they are going to stick to the book, however I didn’t think this book was that good. I forced myself to finish it but it was quite boring in the end. Not a patch on Normal People, which can happen with authors I guess. However not every book needs to be made into a series.

Praying the pacing is better than the book. If you want to have a boring affair, have a boring affair. Don’t make me read about it for hundreds of pages. There was absolutely no sizzle to the book.

I enjoyed this show more than I did the book. The Normal People comparisons are a bit harsh, the books are very different.

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Conversations with Friends review — earnest Sally Rooney adaptation is no Normal People

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How Hulu’s Conversations With Friends Got Sally Rooney So Wrong

The novel is darkly observant of Millennial malaise. The TV adaptation is a different story.

Early in Sally Rooney’s debut novel, Conversations With Friends , the heroine has a nightmare. Frances, a college student, dreams that a tooth has come loose in her mouth, leaving a hole that pumps out so much blood, she can’t speak. “The blood tasted thick, clotted and salty,” she recounts. “I could feel it, vividly, running back down my throat.”

The dream provides a dramatic metaphor for how the reserved Frances has been feeling voiceless next to her gregarious ex-girlfriend turned best friend, Bobbi. Then again, the subconscious tends to be unsubtle—especially the subconscious of Rooney’s characters across her three books, including Normal People . Her protagonists are often aloof, even unreadable, in person. But they exhibit a cerebral interiority that has led to Rooney being hailed as “ the first great millennial novelist .” Through them, she captures the way her generation strives to be cool and insightful while being laden with the anxiety of awareness.

Hulu’s adaptation of Conversations With Friends was made by some of the creatives behind the streamer’s hit take on Normal People , and thus feels much like that first venture. The limited series is atmospheric, evoking the melancholia of the not-quite-adult space in which Rooney’s characters usually exist. Sensual, realistically choreographed sex scenes abound, as do heavy silences and meaningful looks. But though that naturalistic formula allowed for a rich examination of intimacy in Normal People , it sanitizes Conversations , perhaps the trickiest entry in Rooney’s oeuvre. It misses how Conversations marks Rooney at her most darkly observant when it comes to her own age group. To read Rooney is to read Millennial malaise as interpreted by Europe’s former university-level debate champion . To watch Conversations is to watch her acerbic words detailing the agony of the Millennial experience—so performative! so insecure!—get watered down until they argue nothing at all.

Read: Sally Rooney addresses her critics

As an autopsy of a ménage-à-quatre, Conversations the novel is uneasy from the first page. Frances and Bobbi meet a sophisticated married couple, Nick and Melissa, and their entanglements drive the plot. Bobbi’s flirtation with Melissa threatens Frances and Bobbi’s unresolved breakup, and Frances’s affair with Nick is a lopsided exercise in power dynamics. She’s dazzled by the older man, whose taciturn personality validates her own unsociable nature, but she has little say in their relationship. She becomes a portrait of her tech-savvy generation’s angst, hypersensitive to his every tonal shift in their digital exchanges.

Love is therefore a powerful currency and a self-inflicted wound in Conversations , a source of psychological torment that Rooney continually associates with physical pain. Frances’s period cramps worsen as the affair grows serious, leading to fainting spells. When Nick doesn’t say he loves her back, she chews the inside of her mouth until she tastes blood. “I wanted him to be cruel now, because I deserved it,” she thinks after an argument. “I wanted him to say the most vicious things he could think of, or shake me until I couldn’t breathe.” Such masochistic, piercing lines are absent from Hulu’s adaptation. The 12 half-hour episodes shrink away from ever tapping into Rooney’s grisly side, turning a biting novel into a standard melodrama that’s handsomely shot and finely acted but frustratingly sterile.

Perhaps the intense thought process of Rooney’s Millennial protagonist proved too much to handle. Frances is a chronic overthinker who struggles to express herself in person. As magnetic as the newcomer Alison Oliver is in the role, the script softens her character’s edges, making Frances’s outward iciness the result of her simply being shy, rather than of the fact that she grew up communicating on cold digital interfaces. In the book, Rooney emphasizes Frances’s dependency on instant messaging; when she feels poorly about her relationship with Bobbi (played by Sasha Lane), for instance, she rereads their old conversations, a habit that comforts and upsets her. She recognizes that she’s the product of a generation built on an insufficient form of communication and can even identify the practice as toxic, but she continues doing it all the same. The show skates past that unsettling context; it treats digital connection and distance simply as today’s reality, rather than probing how that system informs Frances’s self-doubt.

Indeed, the show recoils from examining any discomfort outside of the anxiety caused by Frances’s illicit romance with Nick (Joe Alwyn), rendering Frances’s story a more familiar tale of forbidden love than a singular dissection of the dangers of youth. Rooney carefully tracked how Frances deluded herself into justifying a difficult relationship because she didn’t know what to do about it; eventually, Frances gives up on trying to figure out the romance, getting upset over and over until she feels empty. That attitude also manifests as a pattern of self-harm in the book: When Frances grows envious of Nick and Melissa’s public display of affection, she digs her thumbnail into the side of her finger until it stings. After she goes on a Tinder date to get back at Nick, she scratches her arm until it bleeds. The show ignores all of this until a scene late in the series where Frances cuts open her thigh after a confrontation with Bobbi. By then, the act is jarring, inserted near the climax as if for shock value rather than as a demonstration of a history of intense self-loathing and confusion.

Read: The small rebellions of Sally Rooney’s Normal People

Yet even as the series shies away from the violence of Rooney’s writing, it also misses her sense of humor, a crucial element to her portrayal of the Millennial experience. Her characters are bemused by their own behavior; they know they intellectualize every interaction, and they’re burned out by it. During a scene missing from the adaptation, Frances wanders into a church and has an epiphany: “Do I sometimes hurt and harm myself, do I abuse the unearned cultural privilege of whiteness, do I take the labor of others for granted, have I sometimes exploited a reductive iteration of gender theory to avoid serious moral engagement, do I have a troubled relationship with my body, yes,” she thinks. “Do I want to be free of pain and therefore demand that others also live free of pain, the pain that is mine and therefore also theirs, yes, yes.” Immediately after having those thoughts, she faints, and when she wakes up, she buys herself instant noodles and chocolate cake. The scene is alarming, but also wryly funny. Being a Millennial, Rooney posits, is being annoyingly aware of too much—of gender, of class, of dynamics that previous generations didn’t have the vocabulary to discuss—and then being unable to deal with it. In other words, Frances just can’t even .

Hulu’s adaptation of Conversations dulls the author’s wit, depicting Frances as merely detached, not tortured by her ideas. She’s a wide-eyed ingenue, not the result of an era that trained a generation to know too much and too little at once. With its intimate close-ups, dreamlike lighting, and pleasurable pace, Conversations looks as beautiful as Normal People does. But Rooney’s debut novel—her most challenging, most brutal look at being young today—didn’t need such polished treatment. It needed to draw blood.

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Review | Sally Rooney’s Conversations With Friends

 An unforgettable novel about the possibility of love.

So says the blurb on the back of Sally Rooney’s debut novel, Conversations with Friends. Unforgettable, it is. This is a story of convergence and collision between two pairs of intimate friends and lovers: the young and confident Frances and Bobbi; and the older married couple, Nick and Melissa. Rooney has entered the literary ring with force, demonstrating mastery over the subtle means with which we use our words to make meaning of others and ourselves. As for the possibilities of love that are presented, the prevailing suggestion of love’s indiscriminate cruelty makes this read more as love on trial than love on a pedestal.

Clearly aware of her strengths as a writer, the actual conversations that are had in Conversations with Friends are so uncannily like our own that the nuance and mystery from which we yearn for order to emerge register as unconsciously as daily life itself. As is too often the case in reality, however, the depth of sociality explored by Rooney only entangles her primary cast of four in a mire of confusion and deceit. Lies and dishonesty beget mistrust between characters whose love and friendship are forever at stake in a genuinely moving eulogy to the loss of lives we envisage for ourselves. Although the lack of a plot in the traditional sense might disconcert readers unused to the almost non-fictional hyperreality on display, Rooney’s tonal delicacy constructs dynamic scenarios of shifting targets and interpersonal power struggles. Throughout the novel is a clarity of language that gives one the impression of watching a high-quality television drama. Every hesitation and side-eye is included alongside monosyllabic evasions and clumsy expressions of passion. Rooney has at her disposal a vast array of social semantics with which she deepens the meaning of the eponymous conversations. The dialogue becomes embroiled with a paranoiac energy through barely perceptible transgressions.

[perfectpullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”#3535DB” class=”” size=”18″] Rooney’s handling of social media is by no means tacky or out of place; instead, the online sphere is interwoven so seamlessly into Frances’s life as to reflect the duality of selves which we maintain in modern communications.[/perfectpullquote]

While the admirable editorial powers of the author are exploited by unlimited access to each subtlety of communication, Rooney’s weakness is perhaps in spending too much time legitimating the world through her protagonist’s internal life. Deprived of environmental descriptors, the novel moves hastily at times from place to place, which is especially disorienting when the characters and their motives remain generally fixed. That’s not to say that it is bereft of the comforts of well-placed adjectives, but the stark space of Frances’s mind can be at times unwelcoming. Our relationship with the protagonist is certainly challenged in this way, yet deftly so. This occasional disorientation perhaps speaks also to the dissolution of social boundaries in cyberspace. A moment’s lapse in concentration might disarm the reader by sudden clashes between Frances and Bobbi online. Rooney’s handling of social media is by no means tacky or out of place; instead, the online sphere is interwoven so seamlessly into Frances’s life as to reflect the duality of selves which we maintain in modern communications.

Although the physical environs of the novel are at times indistinct, Rooney makes eager use of material assets as signifiers of social wealth. Thus, Frances straddles an uneasy space between the aspirant cosmopolitanism of Dublin City and the degrading filth in which her father lives in Mayo. A sojourn in France gives insight into the vacuous decadence of Nick and Melissa, yet despite the abyss of material wealth in which Frances struggles at times to survive, we are no clearer than she as to her rightful place either side of the wealth spectrum.

In this way, Conversations with Friends speaks to the profoundly disaffected attitude of an entire generation of youth, whose assurances of prosperity from the generation above have been decimated by the harrowing socio-political farce of contemporary Western society. Rooney gives us what has been sadly lacking in much of our cultural conscience: an unabashed Communist. The politics of Conversations with Friends will surely resonate with any student who has known the brutal reality of minimum-waged labour, where contract violations by employers are commonplace, and social respect is minimal. The events of this novel will give cold comfort to the legions of talented youth being waylaid by competitive unpaid internships and a total lack of meaningful employment. From semi-starvation to crippling endometriosis, Frances is redeemed repeatedly by her sheer resilience in adversity. It is a relief to read a book set in Ireland which is not obsessed with its own Irishness, while at the same time does not shy away from the realities of being Irish. Particularly from the female perspective, the image of Ireland returned by this book is austere. Yet, in those places where the tempting crutch of Irishness is shirked, Rooney takes a pan-European approach to her writing. This story would lose very little of its universal appeal in the hands of a skilled translator.

[perfectpullquote align=”left” cite=”” link=”” color=”#3535DB” class=”” size=”20″]There are no heroes, only people doing as they wish and wishing that others would do so too.[/perfectpullquote]

Conversations with Friends is a deceptively ordinary novel. The laconic voice of the narrator would not be misplaced in the timeless bildungsroman of Salinger or Françoise Sagan. Yet, instead of upholding these old models of personal change and assimilation into society, Rooney co-opts this form as a means of portraying resistance to the normalising process of change. Beneath a shallow exterior in which people speak directly and without fear lies a novel that is innovative and extremely relevant to its time. There are no heroes, only people doing as they wish and wishing that others would do so too.

Overall, this is a finely crafted novel, and is ideally suited to anybody looking to get back into the habit of reading. Given a few years, this will undoubtedly become a common favourite amongst audiences young and old, whether casual readers or seasoned bookworms. Conversations with Friends is a promising start to a career worth watching. Sally Rooney is a competent author who has earned her place in Irish and European text culture.

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Mark has a BA in Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies with English from NUIG. Follow him on Twitter @MarkFrithlaocha

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In April of 2020, when we were first becoming acquainted with a new way of life, Hulu and the BBC’s Normal People was the emotional rollercoaster that united everyone together to stop crying about the pandemic and instead, cry about two horny Irish teenagers. The television phenomenon undoubtedly deserved all the praise it got, but unfortunately, the same can't be said for its successor, Conversations With Friends .

The show is again based on a novel from Sally Rooney , who has been deemed the voice of a generation, painting poignant accounts of sexuality, mental health, intimacy, and relationships in a nuanced and primal way. Conversations follows Frances ( Alison Oliver ), a shy, timid, and intellectual literature student, and her best friend Bobbi ( Sasha Lane ) in current-day Dublin. The pair is chalk and cheese: Bobbi is confident, irreverent, and confrontational, whereas Frances hides on the sidelines as much as she can but still notices everything. Frances and Bobbi dated in school but are now only friends, albeit in a highly co-dependent and intense platonic relationship.

We meet the pair just at the beginning of the summer before their final year at Trinity College Dublin. They perform spoken word poetry (only Frances writes it, though) and at one performance, they meet Melissa ( Jemima Kirke ), a famous and revered English writer. Bobbi is immediately besotted by Melissa, who invites them to her house for dinner where they meet Nick ( Joe Alwyn ), Melissa's subdued Irish actor husband. The married couple is as beautiful as they are disconnected from each other, but Frances and Nick seem to bond based on their positions as the quieter ones in their respective dynamics and so, in classic Rooney fashion, they embark on an affair of intense sex, extreme stares across rooms, and certitude that no one is going to end up happy. With Bobbi’s infatuation with Melissa added, it extends the classic love triangle to a love square — and as far as plot goes, that’s about it.

RELATED: 'Conversations With Friends' Trailer Reveals the Complications of Falling in Love

To look at what went wrong, it has to be said that Conversations With Friends was never a book ripe for the TV treatment. Anyone who has read both books can see that the characters, dialogue and story arcs of Normal People are a lot more palpable and ready for an adaptation. In Conversations , Rooney leaves a lot of things unsaid on the page that can’t be picked up by a screenwriter. What we get as a result is a stale, uninspired and cold series, without any of the charm or soul of Normal People . The book is ransacked for material to work with. It probably could have made for a decent 90-minute film, but a 12-episode series is far beyond what the source material was able to offer.

It's easy for a show that relies heavily on characters basically doing nothing except existing to lose itself in banality. However, when done right, the story can resonate with a wider audience and draw out the more universal truths of what it is to be human. Conversations lacks such connection with the audience. The characters are meant to feel isolated from each other, but they should never feel isolated from the audience. They are kept at arm's length which prevents any real immersion in the story, making it difficult to care about what happens to them. Conventionality, when used well, can be more poignant than a show that is a grand spectacle, but it can easily lose its way and fail to conjure up any real emotional stakes, and this is exactly the case with Conversations with Friends . It feels like at the end of the show, we’ve tried to invest ourselves into this world, but with nothing to show for it.

For a story that puts so much focus on the characters, casting was always going to need to be immaculate. Lane as Bobbi seemed like the perfect choice given that she's played lost souls and party animals to great effect, particularly in Andrea Arnold ’s American Honey . Lane plays the young experience with all the fleeting emotion but still, a grounded substantially, asking you to take her more seriously. She uses this in Bobbi, always reminding Frances (and us) that we don't really know her because we already think we have her figured out. Lane is noticeably stiff and overacting in the first few episodes, but by the end, she seems more comfortable in the role and is one of the better performances in the show. Overall, it's a decent attempt, but with Lane’s prior acting experience, more was expected.

Alwyn, everyone’s favorite boyfriend, is one of those actors that you might not take immediate notice of, but have definitely seen at least a couple of his films ( The Favourite, Boy Erased ). He’s never demanding your attention but always offering a sensibility even when playing horrific characters. His performance as Nick is informed, emotional without being too expressive — which is another way to sum up Rooney’s writing. The scene when he’s visiting Frances while she's sick is a notable standout, portraying shock, heartbreak, guilt, and sympathy all in one look. Alwyn excels at being the listener, able to stay still without much dialogue and still radiate a presence, much like his minor but memorable role in The Souvenir Part II . If it wasn’t all accompanied by a South Dublin accent that sounds like it hails from Buckingham Palace, then it’d be near-perfect. Fellow Irish viewers: prepare your ears.

Frances is a difficult character to decipher or empathize with, so actually having to become her was surely no easy feat, and newcomer Oliver had a lot of work to do. It pains me to criticize emerging Irish stars, but it has to be said that Oliver’s performance is plagued by a lack of understanding of the character. She’s unfeeling at times when Frances should be melting away her exterior. When Frances is meant to be nervous or giddy, she more so resembles Mr. Bean than someone falling in love. It’s a shame as Frances is the main carrier of the story, and if Oliver was able to find her grounding in the character, the show might have gained a little more structure. Oliver is sure to have more opportunities to demonstrate her acting chops in the future, but Rooney’s characters have to be inhibited rather than acted because they’re so inconspicuous, making it easy for them to disappear — and unfortunately, Oliver lets Frances slip away from her. There are so many layers to Frances; that's the whole point of her character. She only lets select people see her core, but the Frances we get in the series is ultimately one-dimensional, and as a result, we lose all sight of the character she is meant to be.

The strongest performance comes in the shape of Kirke. Amongst a sea of broody, wallowing poets, Kirke’s Melissa is the show’s dose of reality it so desperately needs. It's unexpected, as we all know Kirke best for playing the droll and laconic Jessa in Girls . But next to the somber Nick and uncomfortable Frances, Melissa is the character we can empathize most with, and it's because of Kirke's vibrant presence. She cuts through the awkward grey matter to give us moments of rage, joy, generosity, and fallibility, making the show somewhat human. Her incisive and intuitive performance lifts the show off the ground and brings her fellow characters down to earth.

Conversations with Friends is ultimately a show that puts style over substance. Director Lenny Abrahamson ’s directing is unsurprisingly sensitive; doing his best to bring the mediocre dialogue to some level of poignancy. It seems slightly reductive and cliché to refer to these stories as "pretentious," as that's the whole point, but there's no irony within these characters or their motivations that makes them totally empathetic. They're ultimately alien to us, and this results in a story completely devoid of any real heart or soul. I would say it's disappointing but there just never seemed to be any potential for a book so vacant of any real narrative to beget a 12-episode series. With a directionless script, an uninspired central performance, and frustrating pacing, Conversations with Friends fails to earn the Sally Rooney-verse another victory.

Conversations With Friends premieres with all 12 episodes on May 15, exclusively on Hulu.

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Hulu’s Conversations with Friends is, unfortunately, the new Normal People

The latest Sally Rooney TV adaptation doesn’t say anything at all

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by Fran Hoepfner

In the last episode of Succession ’s second season, Shiv Roy — in the midst of an argument with her husband Tom — is clutching a copy of Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends , which she brought with her to read out on the coast of the Adriatic Sea. Indeed, for a show set in approximately 2018 or 2019, this would be the book to have on the beach. Rooney’s first novel, which was released in the spring of 2017, was a sensation . I once saw someone at a nightclub holding it.

That a book can and should be enjoyed at the beach has often been code for an object of derision: The novel is too casual, too feminine, too chatty, too simple. Upon rereading Rooney’s debut, I found Conversations with Friends to be anything but. The dialogue is engaging and smart, the characters talking of Slavoj Žižek and Patricia Lockwood, their words often hiding underlying power struggles and emotional tensions between them.

It’s a shame, then, that the BBC and Hulu adaptation of Conversations with Friends has been woefully dumbed down and ironed out, full of awkward silences and unearned longing. The story is that of two couples: Frances and Bobbi, college-aged ex-girlfriends who perform spoken-word poetry together, and Nick and Melissa, a somewhat notable C-list actor and writer, both in their mid-30s, both more of a name in Dublin than anywhere else in the world. Over the course of the show, Frances and Nick start and end and start and end and start and end an affair. In the novel, the reason for the affair is multifold: It’s an examination of perceived power and sexual curiosity (on the part of Frances, who has only previously been with women) as well as biting portrayal of the selfishness of young people.

The thrill of the novel was the betrayal of two passive characters, selfishly acting out against their active and unpredictable other halves. But Hulu’s version, sadly, has been stripped of dialogue and reasoning, of conversation and intellect, reduced to a blurry fog of moody and graphic sex scenes and passive-aggressive texting.

Starring newcomer Alison Oliver as Frances, Conversations with Friends follows her every doe-eyed move as she upends a long-term relationship. Oliver is unassuming, and sometimes funny, but an otherwise passive performer, purely reactive to those around her. And as Nick, Joe Alwyn takes the bait, sadly, as he trudges around gloomily. Why are these two so attracted to each other? In the book, it’s a series of flirtations, quick and direct, a sense of danger and escape from both of their all-too-normal lives. Here? Boredom, maybe, and conventional television attractiveness. There’s not even enough chemistry to sustain them through the affair’s first go-round.

Sasha Lane and Jemima Kirke, two of the last decade’s most unexpected and magnetic talents, play Bobbi and Melissa, the two significantly more dynamic characters. Lane — so surprising in American Honey — plays Bobbi bitter and biting, with none of the unpredictable spark she carries in the novel. And Kirke for the most part is altogether brushed aside as “the wife.” You don’t bring Jemima Kirke in to be the wife!

The point of adaptation is not direct transposition, of course. There’s no fun in that. Any fan of a story-to-screen adaptation who delves back into the text will find themselves disappointed in one way or another. The purpose, in turn, of adaptation is to change and morph the form or the structure, or realign the characters: to take something once two-dimensional and make it three-dimensional. A good example of this, perhaps, would be Lenny Abramson’s adaptation of Rooney’s novel Normal People . Hulu and Abramson’s version was much more empathetic and funny, removing some of the soap opera dramatics and injecting both a sense of irony and pathos throughout. Dublin, too, was a beautiful, lived-in setting, a place where it really felt like the characters lived . That this team has again adapted Rooney’s work feels like an initially good decision, but unfortunately, it falls flat. Perhaps because of COVID-19 shooting protocols, whatever they were, we don’t see much of these characters interacting together or really living in their world. The show is isolated, lonely, its Dublin sparse with Frances’ apartment, a bookstore, and the stage where occasionally the two girls perform.

The characters in Conversations with Friends , as initially written, are tropes, certainly, but ones that mash up well against each other: Frances as the wayward artsy college student, Bobbi the chaotic lesbian, Melissa the hotshot successful writer, and Nick the wimpy but handsome Ken doll. Thrust into dozens of scenes together in the book, these characters discuss politics and capitalism and foreign films and poetry and the Bible. The show, however, stops short of any of these conversations going anywhere or saying anything. Here, they sit around tables awkwardly, dialogue stilted, struggling to reach a point of conclusion before they can be released back in the wild to mope. Frances and Bobbi, both young and self-centered, love to make bold proclamations in the way that young people do, regardless of how foolish they come off. But no one questions them — they don’t even question each other, and moments of tension are often diffused by moving on to a new scene entirely. It’s as if the whole adaptation is operating in a passive-aggressive way toward them, as if none of these characters are worth seeing through.

At one point in the text conversation between Frances and Bobbi, Frances highlights the word “feelings.” She doesn’t tap through; rather she simply analyzes it, as if selecting it will provide some insight. In the book, however, she searches through their years of text conversations to dig up a back and forth in which they discuss Frances’ lack of emotionality, that Bobbi believes a person can’t just be “unemotional” as Frances claims, that that’s like being “without thought.” There’s also the question of money and status: Nick and Melissa are far more well off than Frances (though Bobbi comes from a moneyed family, she feigns a poor-student existence perhaps to better blend in socially). A conversation in the book between Frances and Nick about his clothing — worth more than she feels comfortable spending — is streamlined here to Nick’s handsomeness privilege, that he must not feel vulnerability because of how handsome he is. That’s probably true — literally look at Joe Alwyn — but the power imbalance between that of a 20-year-old woman and a 30-something man gets reduced to “He’s hotter.” There ought to be much more danger and complexity here, rather than noticing it and moving on.

What’s perhaps so frustrating about the show is that no one is really talking about anything at all. This adaptation mostly mimics the tone of Normal People and its torrid and frustrating affair between two lifelong friends. Normal People and Conversations with Friends are different novels, and it does Rooney’s writing and storytelling a disservice to treat them so similarly. Her work, often discounted for its apparent casualness, is much more in line with the works of Jane Austen and E.M. Forster, who wrote genuinely funny and class-conscious books. These were not simply marriage plots but philosophically challenging novels, ones that asked why we love who we love. Rooney’s work, too, should be considered in that vein, the ironic hypocrisies we come up against in our pursuit to love and be loved.

It is hard to judge something by the merit of what you wish it was versus what it is, but Conversations with Friends has been so stripped of anything that made it challenging and smart and frustrating and, frankly, enjoyable. What’s left is a story of a relationship with nothing at stake. Nick and Melissa not only lack chemistry but literal scenes together; Frances and Bobbi have little comfort or ease or familiarity with one another. The show wants you to read into that faux meaning, through its glum scoring and gray cinematography. But nothing can save it from its own emptiness. At 12 episodes, the limited series feels stretched thin as an unrepentant slog with little to say and less to show, like opening up a too-long text from someone you don’t know very well — worth a skim, maybe, but then back to your afternoon at the beach.

All 12 episodes of Conversations with Friends are now streaming on Hulu.

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Here Are All the Books in FRIENDS — And its Best Bookish Moments

From Rachel and Joey trading favorites to Chandler's rare first edition, I dug up every identifiable book in FRIENDS, seasons 1–10.

Leah Rachel von Essen

Leah Rachel von Essen reviews genre-bending fiction for Booklist , and writes regularly as a senior contributor at Book Riot. Her blog While Reading and Walking has over 10,000 dedicated followers over several social media outlets, including Instagram . She writes passionately about books in translation, chronic illness and bias in healthcare, queer books, twisty SFF, and magical realism and folklore. She was one of a select few bookstagrammers named to NewCity’s Chicago Lit50 in 2022. She is an avid traveler, a passionate fan of women’s basketball and soccer, and a lifelong learner. Twitter: @reading_while

View All posts by Leah Rachel von Essen

Phoebe rarely reads, which might be why she decides to take a New School lit course at one point. Joey doesn’t read often, but when he does, it’s usually part of the plot. He also brings a bunch of children’s books into the equation. While Chandler is often glancing through books, most of them are nameless art books in the coffeehouse. Rachel might actually read the most of any character. Monica reads on and off. And — shocker — Ross favors newspapers, but when he is reading, his choices are very on theme for a slightly pretentious academic: nonfiction and classics.

It’s not a huge surprise considering the show’s general reputation for BIPOC representation, but the books included and shown on the show are not diverse. Out of the 37 books listed below, women are fairly represented, as slightly fewer than half of the books are written or cowritten by women. But only three books are written or cowritten by authors of color.

There were a couple surprises. There are zero books in season 2 of Friends , but it’s followed by what’s definitively the most bookish season of the show: season 3 is full of hints, jokes, and even has the most bookish episode of the series. In seasons 9 and 10, the books fall off steeply (maybe corresponding to the level of popularity the show had achieved). If you want to see the most book-focused episodes, check out season 3, episode 13, or season 5, episode 9. If you just want to browse, enjoy this list: all the books on Friends, assembled for you!

Episode 9: Yertle the Turtle by Dr. Seuss Yes, the first-ever identifiable book in the tv show is this book! Susan has been reading it to the baby in Carol’s stomach — which is what convinces Ross that he should be talking to the baby too.

Plus: Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom: Creating Physical and Emotional Health and Healing by Christiane Northrup As Ross talks to the baby, this book sits by Carol’s feet. It’s not surprising that the two iconic lesbian mothers are committed to such healing.

Episode 12: The Baby Book: Everything You Need to Know About Your Baby—from Birth to Age Two by William Sears & Martha Sears This won’t be the last baby book we see, but it’s the first! Out of a pile of baby books, Joey reads from it to Ross.

Episode 24: Oh, The Places You’ll Go! by Dr. Seuss Joey gifts this book to Rachel for her birthday. It’s no crystal duck or priceless brooch like Ross would have given, but as Joey says, that book has gotten him through some hard times.

Season 2: No books!

Episode 1: Trout: An Illustrated History by James Prosek This is such a wild choice. Chandler is reading this art book in this episode, one of the few identifiable ones. Maybe the awkward choice is because it comes shortly before he and Ross discover that women share everything, including sex stuff, and decide to try to do the same…resulting in an awkward situation indeed.

Episode 3: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez Chandler is reading this one as Joey dislocates his shoulder in the background of the episode. It’s possibly the first “real” book any of the Friends are reading. This might be a quiet reference to Monica’s deep depression after her breakup with Richard: her fears that the years will add up too fast, and if she waits for another man, she’ll ultimately be unable to have a kid. Chandler will still be reading this one in season 3, episode 5 when Joey almost drills through his head.

Episode 12: Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire Monica dates a fellow waiter at her themed diner, a “romantic” who writes poetry and says he thought the Baudelaire would be good, but that the translation was “no good.’ At first, Julio seems almost comically romantic (“I could write an epic poem about this lip”), but the friends are appalled when he stops having sex with her to write a poem that’s called “The Empty Vase”, and it more or less implies Monica is shallow (“now that I’ve touched you, you’re emptier still”). Luckily, when she calls him out on it, he clarifies — it’s about all women. Well. All American women. Super. Maybe the flowers of evil could go in the vase!

Episode 13: The Shining by Stephen King & Little Women by Louisa May Alcott This is the single greatest bookish episode of Friends . After Rachel finds The Shin ing in the freezer, Joey tells her that it’s his favorite book — he reads it again and again — but that when he gets scared, he puts it in the freezer. Rachel says that the only book she’s read more than once is Little Women , so they decide to trade favorite books. (“These little women. How little are they? I mean, are they like, scary little?”)

Joey enjoys Little Women , although he’s confused about the details (Ross and Chandler have to break it to him that Jo is a girl, and Laurie a guy.) “No wonder Rachel had to read this so many times,” he grumbles. But when Joey spoils the “best part” of The Shining (despite his best attempts to “talk in code”), Rachel responds by spoiling Little Women — which is emotionally devastating. “Is that true?” Joey asks in tears. “Joey’s asking if you’ve just ruined the only book he’s ever loved that didn’t star Jack Nicholson,” Ross says, urging Rachel to take it back (which he does).

Rachel’s so jumpy reading The Shining that she threatens Monica with a potato masher. But it’s nothing compares to what Joey goes to. At the end of the episode, when he starts approaching… that part, he and Rachel make a tough decision: it’s time to put Little Women in the freezer.

Plus: Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession by Studs Terkel Ross is hitting the books and showing his interest in current events with a 1992 new release and bestseller that he’s reading in the coffee shop. Particularly interesting since Friends wasn’t exactly the most diverse of shows!

Episode 13: What to Expect When You’re Expecting by Heidi Murkoff Phoebe is preparing for triplets! In a later episode, when the friends are leaving for London, she asks Chandler to give her a hug goodbye — only to reveal it’s a trick to get him to bring her stuff before he goes, including this book.

Episode 14: The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky This one is genius. Ross is reading this book in bed when he chooses to bring up Mark, Rachel’s coworker, in bed. “I just thought of something funny I heard today,” he says, before admitting it’s that she’s hanging out with Mark, her friend, even though they aren’t working together anymore. She then says she likes having friends to enjoy the fashion industry with her. Ross insists on going instead of Mark only to fall asleep and snore, embarrassing her. I fully believe they chose this one just for the title.

Episode 22: How Stella Got Her Groove Back by Terry McMillan Rachel is reading this book about a woman trying to get her life back after a bad break-up when she finds out that her still-freshly-ex-boyfriend Ross is bringing a date to Joey’s play, and decides she’ll need to find one too.

Plus: The Bear Went Over the Mountain by William Kotzwinkle This book (by the author of E.T.: The Extraterrestrial ) is an adult, comic story about a black bear who stumbles on a manuscript in the forest and decides to seek his fortune in Manhattan.

Episode 25: The Last Thing He Wanted by Joan Didion Rachel is reading a book about a woman uncovering a deep, dark conspiracy when Bonnie walks up and complains about sand in her hair — and Rachel plants the seed that she should shave her head again, the small act that pushes her and Ross back together (however briefly).

Episode 5: Anthem by Ayn Rand Rachel is reading this gigantic white hardcover (the book is just 105 pages, so why it’s this big I’ll never know) in the coffee shop while Ross brags about a girl’s phone number he got on a napkin. When she ignores him to pretend to read, he “drops it” casually onto her. At which point Phoebe sneezes into it. This book takes her a while to finish, and she’ll be reading it in episode 11 as well.

Episode 6: The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams Chandler gets a very, very special early edition for Joey’s girlfriend, Kathy, who he definitely is not-in-love-with. And what a present — the cheapest one I could find right now is $300.

Episode 15: Like a Hole in the Head by Jen Banbury I have questions about this one! Here it’s clearly a joke about holes, as Monica is reading it after her obsessive quest to find the use for a light switch in their apartment, and has punched dozens of holes in the walls. She’s back reading it again in episode 17 when Phoebe comes in to pitch her knife business to help support Frank and Alice’s triplets.

Episode 21: Access London by Richard Saul Wurman Chandler is reading this, which is ironic since he spends future episodes mocking Joey for being such a tourist in London.

Episode 24: Like a Hole in the Head by Jen Banbury Remember, from before? It’s now in the hands of the passenger who Rachel keeps bothering with her story, at least until Hugh Laurie cuts in to tell her off. Someone from the show definitely knew this author, as she’s also named the fictional “renowned playwright” who wrote the wild play that Joey stars in throughout season 3.

Episode 7: Practical Intuition in Love: Let Your Intuition Guide You to the Love of Your Life by Laura Day Just before Rachel starts over-analyzing the behavior of the attractive neighbor Danny, Monica is reading this in the coffeehouse.

Episode 9: Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë & Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë Rachel agrees to take a course at the New School with Phoebe. But it doesn’t go to plan. Rachel doesn’t bother to read the book and then steals Phoebe’s analysis. So when she doesn’t read Jane Eyre either, Phoebe takes her revenge by feeding her false information. “The book is so ahead of its time,” Rachel says confidently to the professor. “Feminism, yes, but also, the robots.”

Episode 17: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee Monica is reading it in the apartment as Phoebe says goodbye to her cop boyfriend…the cop boyfriend who will later shoot a singing bird in their apartment window, ending their relationship in seconds.

Episode 22: The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho Ross is reading this classic about interconnectedness and destiny, and famously about manifesting, as Joey wonders if his new movie will be his big break or not.

Episode 2: Like a Hole in the Head by Jen Banbury It’s back! Rachel is reading this on the couch before Monica tells her that Chandler and her moving in together will mean Rachel has to move out.

Episode 12: Blue Dog Man by George Rodrigue and Tom Brokaw Chandler is reading this just before they find out that Joey is working at Central Perk, while one of the amazing artworks by Rodrigue hangs behind him. His paintings, and this book, appear many more times throughout the series.

Episode 13: The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living by the Dalai Lama and Howard C. Cutler Rachel reads this book of wisdom about how every motion of our life is toward happiness just before Jill, her sister, comes in to talk to her about whether she can go on a date with Ross. Was she choosing happiness when she sabotaged Jill and Ross? Quite possibly.

Plus: Rebuilding the Indian: A Memoir by Fed Haefele In this memoir, an expectant dad restores a motorcycle, seeking the meaning of life — meanwhile, Chandler reads it while fending off the advances of sick Monica, who is determined to seduce him to prove she isn’t sick.

Episode 14: Chicken Soup for the Soul: 101 Stories To Open the Heart and Rekindle the Spirit edited by Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen After the friends discover that Chandler doesn’t cry at sad movie endings, old childhood photos, or anything else (seemingly), they declare him “dead inside.” Monica catches Chandler reading Chicken Soup for the Soul, and he tries to hide it (by sliding it under the couch, but it slides right out the other side). Bonus: it definitely has a vintage Border’s sticker on the back.

Episode 25: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers Richard is reading this right before Monica shows up after Chandler’s bungled fake-out. Such a shocker that he’s a contemporary fiction reader — I bet he reads through all the New York Times best books of the year. I wonder if he used it to help get him through his grief when she rejected him for the final time?

Episode 15: Beethoven’s Hair: An Extraordinary Historical Odyssey and a Scientific Mystery Solved by Russell Martin Ross is reading this in the coffeehouse when Monica and Chandler tell him that he can not, in fact, play his bagpipes at their wedding. Because they hate them. Classic Ross to start trying to get back into music by diving into some intense musical history nonfiction…

Episode 16: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee Rachel reads this before Ross comes in to confront her about Ben’s practical jokes. Maybe not a coincidence that in this episode, Rachel accidentally teaches Ben the annoying game where you repeat everything the other person’s saying. And that later in the episode, she has to try and figure out how to get him to stop!

Episode 5: What to Expect When You’re Expecting by Heidi Murkoff Rachel is reading this when Joey comes in and tells her that Cash is cute — and interested. Unfortunately, this book didn’t warn Rachel that some guys aren’t down to date a pregnant woman — or that it would make Ross hella jealous.

Episode 7: The Girlfriend’s Guide to Pregnancy: Or Everything Your Doctor Won’t Tell You by Vicki Iovine In this episode, Rachel’s reading it when Joey asks her to keep living with him when the baby comes. I’m sure the tone of the book appealed to her — including the section about how to “stay stylish” while pregnant.

Episode 7: The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho This classic makes a return when Phoebe tries to date her twin sister’s ex-fiancé, and they quickly discover it’s too weird.

Episode 8: The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Bringing Up Baby by Kevin Osborn and Signe Larson Rachel’s slow spiral into more and more “conversational” baby books is so enjoyable! She reads it as her dad rants on the phone, furious at her pregnancy and the fact that she and Ross aren’t getting married. She leaves the book with the phone to go to a movie with Phoebe.

Episode 9: What to Expect When You’re Expecting by Heidi Murkoff To start the episode, Joey’s sitting in a chair reading it as Rachel gets ready. He says to Rachel: “Did you know that during pregnancy, your fingers swell up to twice their size, and never go back?” When Rachel panics and grabs the book from him, he laughs. “You fall for it every time!”

Episode 11: Will the Circle be Unbroken? Reflections on Death, Rebirth and Hunger for a Faith by Studs Terkel Ross loves him some Studs Turkel. As a professor of paleontology, maybe Turkel gives him the kind of present-day analysis he wants. He’s reading it as Mona comes in and suggests they send out a holiday card.

Episode 2: 365 Things Every New Mom Should Know by Linda Danis & The New Mom’s Manual: Over 800 Tips and Advice from Hundreds of Moms for Baby’s First Year by Mary Jeanne Menna Phoebe tells Rachel it is absolutely not a good idea to wake up a sleeping baby Emma. If only she’d listened! As Emma screams, Monica and Phoebe flip furiously through these two very real baby books trying to find an easy solution (if only) to make an infant stop crying.

Episode 4: Love You Forever by Robert Munsch When Joey doesn’t have a present for Emma’s 1st birthday, he decides in a panic to do a dramatic reading. His improvised reading of Love You Forever brings everyone at the party to tears, and it’s the only sighting of a real-life, identifiable book in season 10!

Plus: Notable Fake Books

In season 2, episode 19, the girls become obsessed with spirtual-feminist book Be Your Own Windkeeper, an empowering book that turns them all first against men, and then against each other.

In season 7, episode 12, Chandler can’t fall asleep. He tries to read Monica’s “boring book” to fall asleep, the one with “the two women who are ice skating and wearing those hats with the flowers on it.” But then the book got interesting (“Damn you, Oprah!”). They go to talk about the book and he immediately spoils it for her (“How bummed were you when the second sister died?”), and while he tries to get out of it by claiming that was in his book, Monica quickly calls his bluff (“The second sister dies in Archie & Jughead double digest?”) I searched and searched for this ice skating women book, but came to the conclusion it doesn’t exist (if you know what it is, please let me know immediately).

Don’t forget Ross’s dissertation, which reportedly is mind-numbingly boring, and is so hidden in the back shelves of the library that students like to meet up and have sex in the stacks. But he hasn’t always been a bore! His comic book Science Boy that he wrote as a teen makes an appearance in season 9, episode 15. He lost it when a big thug (who turns out to have been teen Phoebe) mugged him. Luckily, Phoebe saved it all these years, and restores it to its author.

In season 7, episode 2, Joey finds a romance paperback under Rachel’s pillow, in which Zelda gets spicy with the chimney sweep. And we can’t forget Euphoria Unbound by Chandler’s mother, iconic romance author Nora Tyler Bing (she shows off the cover of it on late-night tv, season 1, episode 11) — or the absolutely terrible attempt at a romance novel Rachel tries to write that’s riddled with typos.

Go out and enjoy some reading — or some Friends ! I promise that the books will always, always be there for you.

Want to dive into more book references from your favorite TV shows? Check out this fire analysis of all the books in Ted Lasso season 1 and season 2 , dive into the official Rory Gilmore reading list , or explore the reading life of April Ludgate .

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This is genius: A new graphic novel imagines conversations between Einstein and Kafka

It’s April 1, 1911, and 32-year-old Albert Einstein — former bureaucrat at the Swiss Patent Office, with a half-decade old doctorate in physics from the University of Zurich — sits in a train car with his two sons and his wife, fellow physicist and mathematician Mileva Marić. They are travelling from Zurich to Prague, where Einstein has landed a job as a full professor in theoretical physics, teaching in the German section of what is now Charles University. He has a few things on his mind, including money troubles, but most critical is his unfinished theory of relativity. When they leave the city 15 months later, Einstein will have cracked the code.

What happens over the course of this long, mysterious year in Prague is the question driving Ken Krimstein’s new graphic novel Einstein in Kafkaland . Part biography, part historical fiction, Krimstein playfully explores the possibilities, building, with footnotes, on a thorough archive of letters, diaries, and other research. The result, a thought-provoking work made up of comics suffused in a gentle mix of aquamarine watercolors, is equal parts joyful and ruminative. (Think: Alice in Wonderland meets The Lives of the Poets meets Krazy Kat. ) The full subtitle to the book — How Albert Fell Down the Rabbit Hole and Came Up with the Universe — signals the lavish whimsy that goes a long way towards making this such a delightful, inspiring read.

Throughout, cartoon-Einstein sports his characteristic pipe alongside a signature frizzy head of hair. But it’s his obsessive ruminations that perhaps most effectively signal what has become Einstein-the-character, a culmination of all the gossip, public appearances, private words, and first-hand accounts of one of the best-known scientists to have ever lived. Krimstein pairs Einstein’s story with that of Franz Kafka, who was 28, virtually unpublished, and living with his parents in a house in Prague when Einstein arrived for his short but impactful stay. What binds the two together, in addition to an alleged one-time meeting at a weekly salon, is a complementary preoccupation with getting at the truth — “the true truth” — against all odds, and against many other people’s better judgements. For both, a journey to find this truth, whether in science or literature, is one that will sometimes alienate as painfully as it may ultimately bind them to others.

During Einstein’s time in Prague, a time in which he works out his theory of relativity, Kafka will have his own breakthrough. In one long feverish night he will pen the short story, most often known in English as “The Judgment,” which will launch an unparalleled writing career forever transforming art and literature. Like Einstein’s completed theory of relativity, Kafka, too, will offer the world a new way of thinking. It’s a way of thinking that, our narrator assures us, “we’re all still struggling to catch up to.”

Despite his title, Krimstein centers his book unevenly, focusing mainly on Einstein, and taking us step by step through the meditations that lead to his discovery. Nonetheless, along the way he also provides readers with glimpses into the life of the perpetually melancholic insomniac insurance clerk, Kafka. We witness, for example, an early morning swimming routine with his best bud — and future literary executor — Max Brod. But what Kafka’s presence in the narrative most crucially enables are imagined conversations between him and Einstein. In these, the two puzzle, and sometimes commiserate, over what it means to see the world differently from everyone else. What happens when you believe so confidently in your own hard-won perceptions that you risk killing the heroes that brought you there?

Krimstein, a well-published cartoonist whose previous work includes another delightful graphic biography, The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt , luxuriates in intellectual history shoulder to shoulder with juicy biographical details. He depicts Einstein debating with his foe, Max Abraham; taking fantastical trips into a four-dimensional world with Euclid; and walking and talking with Austrian physicist, and dear friend, Paul Ehrenfest. And he exposes, too, scenes of the future Nobel Prize winner in the bath, trying to kill off bedbugs; or engaging with his young children, and wife, in Gedankenexperiments (thought experiments), to help him think through the problems that continually occupy him.

At its heart, Einstein in Kafkaland is the story of ordinary genius. It unwraps the ways in which genius so often arises out of ordinary circumstances. Perhaps even more compellingly, the book tracks how unimaginable discoveries develop following exchanges with others — friends and family, colleagues and nemeses, neighbors and role models. Aberrations aside, works of genius most wholly emerge in dialogue.

Tahneer Oksman is a writer, teacher, and scholar specializing in memoir as well as graphic novels and comics. She lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.

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