Conversations with Friends

by Sally Rooney

been telling me that he still loved his wife and that I meant nothing to him.

He did not say the second part!!

It could totally happen. He’s a failed actor and his marriage is dead, those are the perfect ingredients.

Well, apparently he was expected to get famous and then he didn’t, and now he’s too old or something. Having an affair with a younger woman would probably be good for his self-esteem.

Anyway he seems like he’s embarrassed to be alive.

You can love more than one person, she said.

He lets himself get overwhelmed by these things.

My anguish on his behalf seemed to be unrelated to anything he might personally feel, a phenomenon I had experienced before.

I can’t remember if I thought about this at the beginning. How it was doomed to end unhappily.

I just thought it would be worth it.

It was okay to cry because nobody could see me, and I would never tell anyone about it.

Sounds like Nick

ps everyone tells me that i’ve been in a bad mood since you left. also evelyn thinks i’m “pining” for you, which is awkward.

This irritation was directed toward me, but it was also a symptom of her disappointment that my father had failed to earn the respect she wanted me to give him.

Was I kind to others? It was hard to nail down an answer. I worried that if I did turn out to have a personality, it would be one of the unkind ones. Did I only worry about this question because as a woman I felt required to put the needs of others before my own? Was “kindness” just another term for submission in the face of conflict? These were the kind of things I wrote about in my diary as a teenager: as a feminist I have the right not to love anyone.

I wanted to explain that I didn’t know how much I was allowed to feel about it, or how much of what I felt at the time I was still allowed to feel in retrospect.

pregnant. It was impossible, maybe even offensive, to grieve a pregnancy that had never happened, even though the emotions I’d felt had still been real at the time that I felt them.

Maybe he just likes to act passive so he doesn’t have to take the blame for anything.

when our relationship was like a Word document that we were writing and editing together, or a long private joke that nobody else could understand.

I love you, Nick. It wasn’t a bad feeling, specifically; it was slightly amusing and crazy, like when you stand up from your chair and suddenly realize how drunk you are.

not just infatuated but deeply personally attached to him in a way that would have lasting consequences for my happiness,

You’re twenty-one, said Melissa. You should be disastrously unhappy.

It was the first story I ever wrote.

I wonder if this is slightly autobiographical

It sounded like he was worried that I’d developed feelings for him and he was trying to say that he wasn’t interested in anything other than sex.

It does not sound like that at all, she is crazy

I felt that I was a damaged person who deserved nothing.

Nick’s strange mood.

HIS STRANGE MOOD!?

But I think if you’re honest with yourself, you’re actually glad I’m married, because it means you can act out and I have to take the blame for everything.

Even though I had known Nick didn’t love me, I had continued to let him have sex with me whenever he wanted, out of desperation and a naive hope that he didn’t understand what he was inflicting on me.

out the black window until I tasted blood.

She is spirling so hard

It felt good to be wrong about everything.

Since I met you, I would think. If I wanted to be very philosophical about it, I’d say I loved you before then.

I don’t trust Nick to be straight with you about it. He has a weak personality & compulsively tells people what they want to hear.

This is not the Nick that Frances knows or we know at all

You will not be able to draw a sustainable sense of self-respect from this relationship you’re in.

Why is she married to him then?!

& then several years later while Nick was in psychiatric hospital began an affair with his best friend, which continued even after I knew Nick had found out about it, my feelings don’t count.

um… yeah! It kind of works like that!

He says he still loves me, but if he doesn’t do what I say any more, then how can I believe him?

She is seriously crazy

For Nick you’re probably indistinguishable from happiness.

He told me he thought helplessness was often a way of exercising power.

Everyone’s always going through something, aren’t they? That’s life, basically. It’s just more and more things to go through.

I don’t want to live with you any more.

that’s dramatic

but maybe i was enormously naive about that and what you actually wanted was for it not to happen.

of course she didn’t want that to happen dummy

I was like an empty cup, which Nick had emptied out, and now I had to look at what had spilled out of me: all my delusional beliefs about my own value and my pretensions to being a kind of person I wasn’t. While 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 thought you’d forgotten all about me. The idea of forgetting anything about you is kind of horrifying to me.

If two people make each other happy then it’s working.

I still have that impulse to be available to you.

You live through certain things before you understand them. You can’t always take the analytical position. Come and get me, I said.