Conversations with Friends

Frances tends to believe people that she falls in love with are more powerful than her. Both Nick and Bobbi are conventionally attractive and wealthier than she is, which she conceives of as forms of power. This is not entirely inaccurate, but she errs in believing she has no power within these dynamics. The only way she can get some power back, in her mind, is to avoid vulnerability through emotional detachment. This is part of what lies behind Bobbi’s declaration that Frances has no “real personality.” Frances, of course, does have a personality, but she rarely lets people see it fully, and she comforts herself with the knowledge that she has an unrevealed secret self when she feels hurt. When she and Nick break up for the final time, she narrates, “I thought about all the things I had never told Nick about myself, and I started to feel better then, as if my privacy extended all around me like a barrier protecting my body” (275).

Withholding outright declarations of affection is her power; neither Nick nor Bobbi feel that they understand her inner life at all. When she and Nick are still together and he is trying to understand her feelings about the fact that he having sex again with