5/5 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
#andreeareviews
✍🏻This book made me want to read everything that Rooney writes and places Roony in my top 10 favourite writers.
📖The book follows Frances’ pov, a 22-year-old college student and aspiring writer. While she performs her poetry with her ex-girlfriend (current best friend), Bobbi, they are discovered by Melissa, a known journalist in Dublin. Melissa interviews them for a piece in a magazine and brings them into her world. Introverted Frances is initially intimidated by the gorgeous Melissa, her perfect husband, Nick (a relatively known actor), and their seemingly perfect life of soirees, art events, and riches.
🧑🏻❤️💋🧑🏼While their relationship deepens, complex connections form: Bobbi and Melissa have a peculiar attraction; Frances and Nick have an affair; Frances and Bobbi have a non-defined relationship; Nick and Melissa’s marriage has its own complications. We thus have a couple of love triangles, while the centrepiece is Frances and her way of relating to the people in her life.
🌼Frances has an inability to be vulnerable and create intimacy with the people she cares for. She wants to be loved and lovable. Still, she seems incapable of allowing others to really know her. Thus, the book's central conflict is within Frances, her creating walls impossible to climb while wishing for others to do so.
What makes Rooney brilliant is that her characters feel REAL, sharing small moments of humanity. I want to be friends with all of them! Also, there is intimacy and vulnerability in Rooney’s writing. Reading her feels like having a conversation with friends.
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Popular Highlights in this book
Gradually the waiting began to feel less like waiting and more like this was simply what life was: the distracting tasks undertaken while the thing you are waiting for continues not to happen.Highlighted by 4,198 Kindle readers- You live through certain things before you understand them. You can’t always take the analytical position.Highlighted by 4,144 Kindle readers
- 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.Highlighted by 2,520 Kindle readers
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Reviews with images
Recommended by Sarah Jessica Parker
And immediately to Amazon I went. "Buy now with 1-cick" and 2-3 business days later, I am three chapters in and can't stop reading.Immediately, I was enraptured by the main character Frances. She and her ex-girlfriend Bobbie have a relationship that grabbed my attention. Are they together, or are they not? If they were once lovers, how can they be such close friends now? They perform spoken word poetry at various clubs around Dublin. I could picture them: Bobbie, bold and confident, reciting the words that quiet, observant Frances wrote herself. When they are approached by a writer who wants to feature them in a magazine article, they quickly say yes and go to the writer's house for dinner.That dinner changes everything. There is a dramatic shift in the characters after that dinner, where Bobbie and Frances meet the writer, Melissa, and her husband, Nick. Frances is immediately curious about Nick and keeps a close eye on him. Eventually, they start emailing each other, attending each other's performances around the city. (He's an actor).What follows is part love story, part tragedy, as Frances and Nick play a cat and mouse game with high stakes. She is risking her sanity and her emotions. He is risking his marriage. They are both dealing with situations the other has no idea about, so when one is acting despondent and doubtful, the other assumes it's towards them. It's this combination of passion and the unknown that creates a riveting relationship that neither knows how to control. I was reminded over and over of Jay Gatsby and Daisy. The parties, the conversations and the palpable tension drew me in, but also made me want to turn away at times, out of sadness or disappointment in the characters decisions, I wasn't sure.What's compelling about Conversations with Friends is that though they sit at tables together and take photos of each other and ask each other intimate questions about love, politics, philosophy and everything in between, nobody actually knows what's going on behind the eyes on the person seated next to them.Besides the relationship between Nick and Frances, her relationship with Bobbie also fascinated to me. The theme of friendship in this book has an undercurrent that you can't ignore. How well do you know your friends and what will you do (or not do) to keep them close and to be loyal to them?I highly recommend.
Top reviews from other countries
Ohayon Ornella
Most beautiful novel of the decade
Reviewed in France on January 9, 2023bianca furii
Crossover of friends and adolescent drama
Reviewed in Italy on September 23, 2022