girl ON girl
Why are female friendships written so hot and bothered, yet male friendships = bromance? This month’s ELLE Book Club read is one of the novels exploring the terrain
When it comes to debut novels, few have been as buzzy as Emma Cline’s The Girls. With the book selling for a rumoured seven-figure deal at auction, there was much anticipation around Cline’s story of a Manson-like character and his impressionable followers, catapulting the Californian author to the front page of the internet and easily capturing our attention – not least because it panders to our current fascination with Manson-esque storylines thanks to the You Must Remember This podcast. But the cloyingly sweet tale of adolescent friendship set amid a sinister landscape isn’t the only book to get us talking this month. Another new release, Girls On Fire ($32.99, Hachette Australia), shares more with
The Girls than just similar names. Here, we explore their portrayals of the intensity of female friendship.
“Girl meets girl. Girl loves girl, maybe,” Robin Wasserman writes in her latest novel, Girls On Fire. “Girls link fingers on a dark night and whisper their secret selves, girls swear a blood oath of loyalty and silence.” Two of the year’s most hotly anticipated releases – The
Girls (Oscar-winning producer Scott Rudin has already acquired the film rights) and Girls On Fire (in development at Warner Bros for TV) – push young female friendships to bloody extremes.
Girls On Fire follows the alternating viewpoints of quiet Hannah and manipulative Lacey, who grow close in the months following their highschool classmate’s mysterious suicide. The Girls is heavily influenced by the Manson Family killings and centres on the fictional relationship between the narrator, Evie, and the older, teenage cult member Suzanne, who she befriends. In both pairings, the girls are drawn together by the secrets, mundane and otherwise, they share with each other; for Hannah and Evie, the friendships become all-consuming. In both books, unspeakable violence is committed, both physical and emotional.
Intense friendship between girls and women is well-charted territory in both literature and film – from Toni Morrison’s Sula (1973) to Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels (20112014). The ’90s alone were a mother lode for the genre on the big screen: Thelma & Louise, Single White Female, Heavenly Creatures and Girl, Interrupted. So here’s an observation: while many renditions of feminine friendship are fraught with sexual tension or violence or both, most contemporary male friendships are portrayed as buddy comedies. Bromances: love with nary a deviant tinge.
That noted, both of the “Girls” novels have an undeniably dark, voyeuristic appeal: we get to watch universal emotions manifest with extreme outward ferocity. Whether we