Friends Like These
On stories of female friendship
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I have just finished watching the fourth and final season of the Netflix series Valeria, a Spanish show featuring four female friends living and working in Madrid. I initially started watching the first season a couple of years ago as the central character, the ‘Valeria’ of the title, is a writer attempting to write her first novel.
The show, based on the book series En los zapatos de Valeria (In Valeria’s Shoes) by Elísabet Benavent, has the permanently sunny backdrop of the cosmopolitan Madrid, where the women live and work. Valeria is the writer; Carmen is an advertising executive; Nerea is a lawyer but wants to be an events organiser; and Lola is a translator. They all have various relationship difficulties and passionate love affairs, and they all wear fabulous outfits. In short: it is perfect escapist television at its best.
It reminds me of another series I’ve mentioned before, The Bold Type, which also features a young female writer, this time an American journalist. Again, the stories centre around three friends who work at the same magazine.
What I love and what draws me to these entertaining shows—other than that they feature women who are writers—is that they portray female friendship at its very best.
The women in Valeria support her ambition to become a successful novelist absolutely: when she is offered a boring job in a museum, they understand why she needs to turn it down; when her parents and husband reject her lofty ideas of writing, they are there to cheer her on. I love the solidarity of the women; their encouragement to follow dreams, mess up, make mistakes, date the wrong men, all of it.
I was thinking about these lovely, supportive fictional friendships last week as I listened to an episode of Penny Wincer’s podcast Not Too Busy To Write. Her guest was a former editor and literary agent-turned-debut-novelist, Abigail Bergstrom. Bergstrom’s novel What A Shame is a darkly funny novel about grief, friendship and dabbling in the occult. But her take on the friendships her central character makes as she goes through a difficult period in her life interested me.
Quoting successful series’ such as Sex and the City, The Golden Girls, Lena Dunham’s Girls, and The Bold Type, Bergstrom says:
“As a woman, I feel tired and frustrated by the way that female friendship is projected back at us.”
Bergstrom goes on to say that such shows portray:
“Three or four very close ride-or-die friends that are there for you all the time, no matter what, every day,” pointing out that for so many women, that’s not our experience of female friendship.
Finding such portrayals as unrealistic, in her own novel, she wanted to instead portray what she refers to as ‘transient friendships’ - essentially, the friends who come into your life when you most need them, or due to circumstance, and then drift away again.
This put me in mind of the female friends you often make as a young mother when your children start school, arranging play dates and becoming friends through the circumstance of your kids being in the same class or becoming friends themselves. Whilst these can sometimes lead to longer term friendships, they can also often be transient and fade away when children become adolescents, or leave for university. For a period of time, you see more of them than you probably do most other people you know, especially if you don’t also work full-time.
I mentioned this to my daughter (who is twenty-five, and so far closer to these fictional women’s ages than I am) as I found Bergstrom’s ideas so interesting. This is what she said (she gave me permission to quote her!):
“It’s so true, shows like The Bold Type kind of make me feel like I’m doing my twenties wrong, but then everyone I know doesn’t have a “group” of friends but individual friendships from different areas of life, and that’s OK!”
Eleanor Jones (aka: my daughter)
All this got me thinking of the books I’ve enjoyed that have interesting portrayals of female friendship. The most obvious that came to mind are Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series, beginning with the aptly titled My Brilliant Friend. The novel opens in a poor but vibrant neighbourhood in 1950’s Naples and follows the friendship of ten-year-old Elena, (Lenù), the narrator of the book, and Raffaella (Lila). Opening in 2010, Elena, now in her sixties, is learning of the disappearance of Lila, prompting her to begin writing their shared history from childhood.
This first book follows the girls’ friendship from age six to sixteen, exploring their rivalries and the social dynamics of their neighbourhood, as well as their diverging paths. Elena continues her education, whilst Lila, despite also being intelligent, is forced to leave formal schooling and work in the family shoe repair shop. Limitations of social class and gender are explored through Ferrante’s novels.
The series goes on to move through the girls’ childhoods, through to their maturity as young women, wives, mothers and leaders. But their friendship is often complex and conflicted, as they move in and out of one another’s lives. Perhaps this is why Ferrante’s novels are so compelling: they show a less idealised and thus more realistic portrayal of the lives of women, growing together and apart from their beginnings as children.
Dolly Alderton’s exploration of female friendship through her 2018 nonfiction title Everything I Know About Love is another interesting take on the friendship trope. Her book portrays the real-life friendships that have sustained her as well as the crushing disappointment when friends grow up and move on.
Centred around Alderton’s twenties, the book shows the changing perspectives of love as she navigates from her teenage years to her twenties. One of the underpinning relationships is that of her friendship with her childhood best friend, Farly. Alderton shows in her book the changing relationship as Farly becomes engaged in a stable romantic relationship, whilst Alderton continues to engage in more unhealthy behaviours.
Fictionalised in the BBC series of the same name, where Dolly is portrayed as ‘Maggie’, living in her first home in Camden after university with her best friend from childhood, (now named ‘Birdy’). There are also two other housemates, teacher Nell and corporate Amara, who secretly dreams of becoming a dancer. Maggie’s increasingly wild behaviour threatens to push Birdy away as she desperately tries to cling on to the relationship, wanting things to remain as they always have.
While Alderton attempts to show that female friendships can be just as important to us as romantic ones, Maggie in the show comes across as slightly unhinged in her desperation to maintain the status quo.
The series also interestingly explores the inherent lack of awareness and privilege in the lives of young women like Maggie through the character of Amara, who struggles with fetishisation as a young Black woman on dating apps, as well as rejections from dance auditions, whilst Maggie lands on her feet with her dream job in television.
A book about friendship I loved was Judy Blume’s Summer Sisters, which I read many summers ago when I was pregnant with my daughter.
Although one of Blume’s few novels for adults, in Summer Sisters, Blume uses her trademark gift for writing about adolescence to create a picture of Victoria (Vix) and Caitlin, who become lifelong friends when the wealthy new girl Caitlin invites Vix to holiday with her family at Martha’s Vineyard.
A typical coming-of-age novel, it begins in 1977, when the girls are aged twelve, right through to 1995 as they celebrate their thirtieth birthdays. They are total opposites: Caitlin is from a divorced but privileged family, pretty and confident and popular, whilst Vix is shy and intellectual, from a poorer family. Her mother Tawny is controlling and she has to help care for her three younger siblings, including a disabled brother whom Vix adores. When the popular Caitlin invites her to Martha’s Vineyard, it opens up a whole new world for her.
“From then on, whenever Vix heard “Dancing Queen” she was back in sixth grade on a sunny afternoon in June. The afternoon some fairy godmother waved her magic wand over Vix’s head and changed her life forever.”
Vix continues to accompany her friend every summer, meeting her annoying older brother Sharkey, his best friend, Gus, and father, known as Lamb. Vix becomes almost an adopted second daughter within Caitlin’s family.
As the summers see the two girls grow into women, they have many shared experiences as they move through the complexities of puberty into womanhood. Their friendship is strained as they grow older, eventually leading to a betrayal. There's a love story at the centre of the book, and similar to Alderton’s memoir, the story of a friendship that is more intense and longer lasting than many love affairs.
As I considered these different portrayals of female friendship, I saw a pattern begin to emerge which I see much less of in the recent contemporary series’ I have been enjoying.
In books such as Ferrante’s and Blume’s, we see the conflicted rivalry and diverging paths of female friends. Then there is the kind of all-encompassing friendship seen in Alderton’s work, where romantic relationships, ambition and adulthood threaten to drive friends apart as much as keep them close.
Within these newer portrayals in shows like Valeria, however, we see the support these women give to one another with regards to careers, lifestyle, sexuality and relationships. It could just be a figment of a script writer’s imagination, of course, as suggested by Bergstrom in her call for a more realistic portrayal of transient female friendship. However, I also want to offer a more positive note here. I have seen a real shift in culture within the younger generation now. Friendship and loyalty seem of real importance.
Growing up in the 1980s and early ‘90s, I remember there being a feeling of scarcity amongst young women leaving education and attempting to ‘make it’ in the world of work. As women fought to be taken more seriously in the corporate world, for example, I often witnessed women who did manage to climb to the top, kicking down the ladder to prevent other women from following. The idea that more women at the top might destabilise their precarious positions, perhaps.
This might be wishful thinking, but I’m choosing to see these on-screen portrayals of women supporting other women as positive role models, and a real step forward in the success of women generally.
Plus, they are so much fun to watch 😀
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So much to think about here. After reading this post and perusing your other posts, I’m happy to have found your Substack. Female friendship is a subject that’s always interested me I think because I’ve wondered, from time to time, why I’ve had so many come and go. Especially when I see women who have a decades-old group of friends. I’ve wondered if something is “wrong” with me that made others leave. I know intellectually it’s not true but it is something I’ve though a lot about. Thank you for this and the series and book recs. Look8ng forward to more from you!
Your notion of "transient friendships" rings very true, Kate. We connect deeply with others for a reason. As we and they change and grow, the symbiosis is often disrupted. We may move away from those special friends, but we hold them forever in the amber of nostalgia.