Female bonding
Over the last couple of years, I’ve come to intimately understand that the friendships women develop with each other in their late twenties and early thirties are some of the most complex and deeply felt. These kinds of relationships are not commonly depicted in literature, yet I’ve certainly experienced how worthy, meaningful and fraught they can be, been blessed with a small group of women who have navigated me through the first taste of some of life’s most difficult realities — failure, disappointment, heartache, illness, and death. This is, of course, my personal experience, but it would seem that author Emily Gould agrees with me, her debut novel Friendship a difficult and at times unpleasant look at the intense bonds women form during this tenuous period of life.
Former Gawker co-editor and current co-owner of the ebookstore Emily Books, 32-year-old Emily Gould has been an ongoing target for controversy and abuse for close to a decade now. Gould made a name for herself by means of the perceived “over-sharing” nature of her blog Emily Magazine, becoming a sort of “Queen of The Confessional,” and ushering in a new style of online memoir predating Marie Calloway, Thought Catalogue and the rise of me-journalism. She is a polarizing figure, with constant debates about her validity, and constant vitriol slung her way, but I’ve always viewed her as much more admirable literary entrepreneur than egregious upstart. Gould found success during a period of publishing upheaval, and wisely used the Internet to her advantage, climbing to the top of the pile not only because of her talent, but also because of her tenacity and drive. These observations aren’t in any way derisive, but it would seem some old school literary types find this brand of honesty and ambition — especially in a woman — particularly distasteful.
Last month, literary blogger Ed Champion famously wrote an 11,000-word (arguably misogynistic) screed about how much he loathes Gould and all she represents to the changing face of literature. In the rant, he categorizes Gould as an entitled “middling millennial,” calling her a “young ambitious type,” a “dim bulb,” and a “callous sociopath.” The piece, which the online hordes rightly tore apart, is more axe-grinding bitterness than healthy analysis of how Gould’s approach to her career and writing has shifted the way many others play the game.
Is a woman talking about herself — or, as is the case in Friendship, to each other — inherently off-putting, or even dangerous? A recent Sam Sacks Wall Street Journal book review paints Gould’s success as nothing more than the product of cheating via returned favours and cliquey backscratching. He tosses around phrases like “selfexposure” and “diaristic, blogger style,” accuses her of an insular narcissism that fails to get out of Brooklyn, and yet only barely talks about the book itself. It would appear that there are men who greatly dislike it when a woman talks about or promotes herself and her experiences, so much so that her actual literary contribution means very little. Gould is, in her small way, reinventing the way things are done and what stories are told, and for some reason this reads as either hazardous or dismissible for those comfortable with the status quo.
After years of telling what some have believed to be too much truth, Gould has shifted away from confession to fiction with Friendship, though the story still feels very much pulled from what Gould knows best. It is a slim novel about the close relationship between coworkers turned “life partners,” Bev Tunney and Amy Schein, two women struggling through the trials of an unforgiving New York publishing scene. Bev is still bleeding from a relationship gone terribly wrong, a nowtemping MFA dropout who ends up pregnant as the result of an ill-advised one-night stand. Amy is her successful, supportive yet wildly self-involved best friend, a “little Joanie Didion” wannabe. Their relationship is penned with the same care and attention writers usually reserve for romantic love, the two bonded together with as much codependence as compassion.
Friendship is rife with the anxieties that exist on the precipice of female adulthood, with the pair popping klonopins, downing cocktails and vomiting in public, wondering where the careers and the men that they were promised are as they navigate the myriad messes they’ve found themselves in. Bev’s decision to continue her pregnancy drives a wedge through the pair’s affections for each other, and Amy’s marked jealousy spirals out of control along with her life. In one particularly painful scene she grotesquely accuses, “You’re choosing the baby over me, and it’s not even born yet.” Friendship is an uneasy book, especially for those of us who see our own defects in Gould’s all-tooreal characters. Much of their behaviour is as abhorrent as it is familiar, leaving the reader with the awkward feeling that Gould has created something true in all its ugliness.
It is Ed Champion who accuses Gould of having “little imagination or insight” because she’d plucked the story from her life, but he fails to acknowledge this kind of love story rarely gets told. The narrative focus is entirely on these two flawed women and the shifting dynamic between them — men becoming mere accessories to their dramas and desires, often proving themselves selfishly incapable of handling life’s responsibilities and promptly fading out of view. Building realistic and robust female characters of this age bracket is a rarity, and in reading Friendship one is struck by how (sadly) innovative this simple story is. And despite how insufferable these women can be — with their lavish lunches, yoga classes, manhattans, petty squabbles, sense of entitlement and continued complaints — you grow to be glad they’ve been put to the page, if only because it feels like they’ve never been allowed to be there before.
Bev and Amy’s circumstances certainly won’t ring true for everyone (their privilege and entitlement being especially offputting), and they may be easy to hate, but intensity of their platonic love feels like universal yet curiously unexamined terrain. We so often believe that our romantic partners should and are the most important figures in our lives, but the older I become the more I realize how “best friendships” are actually the most vital, needing just as much care, attention and maintenance as any marriage. They also suffer from similar jealousies, betrayals, heartaches and grievances, and perhaps endure even more abuse in the long term.
Fittingly, Gould continues her tradition of inexplicably scaring the establishment with a book that’s honest yet actually not all that threatening. If she is doing anything to upset long established literary circles, it’s her audacity to not play by their arbitrary rules, both in how she promotes herself, builds her career and how she tells a story. One would hope the success of Friendship and its author will usher in more compelling books on an often overlooked bond, and make it easier for women to tell their stories without the scorn Gould has endured.