46 pages • 1 hour read
Conversations with Friends
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BetaPart 1, Chapters 10-14Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1, Chapter 10 Summary
Bobbi and Frances make up from Frances’s hurtful accusation of jealousy, but Bobbi remains bewildered that Frances likes Nick. When Nick leaves for an acting job in Scotland, Frances’s communication with him breaks down. They primarily talk over email and instant message platforms, but they both have such ironic, insincere tones in these messages that each thinks the other is pulling away.
When Nick invites her and Bobbi to stay at a villa in France with him and Melissa later that summer, she responds by bluntly asking if she and he are “still having an affair” (86). Confused, he admits that he does not know what she wants and thinks it will be hard to carry on an affair behind Melissa’s back. She sees this as a breakup, and though she is very hurt, she pretends to act unfazed. When he asks if she is seriously upset, she ends the conversation and logs off.
Part 1, Chapters 11-12 Summary
Melissa invites Bobbi and Frances to the French villa. Bobbi wants to go, and Frances agrees despite the potential awkwardness of seeing Nick again. The friends fly to France and Melissa picks them up, explaining on the drive that the villa is owned by a mentor of hers in the publishing industry, Valerie, who lives there only part of the year. A couple, Evelyn and Derek, friends of Nick and Melissa, are also staying at the villa. Frances notices that Nick looks sickly and thin and hears someone say he is recovering from pneumonia.
Part 1, Chapter 13 Summary
The next day, Melissa must run errands in town, so she asks Nick to entertain Bobbi and Frances by taking them somewhere. The trio goes to a nearby lake with no other visitors in sight. Bobbi decides to skinny dip, but Nick and Frances stay on shore. He apologizes, adding that if he misinterpreted her tone, he wants to fix that by getting to know her better.
When everyone goes to bed that night, she creeps upstairs to the kitchen from her shared basement room with Bobbi. She finds Nick there, and when they start kissing, she says, “We can sleep together if you want, but you should know I’m only doing it ironically” (110). Frances knows from an earlier disclosure that Nick and Melissa no longer sleep in the same room, either in France or at home in Dublin. She and Nick sleep together in his room and reignite their affair.
Part 1, Chapter 14 Summary
On another beach trip the next day, Frances gets a call from her father, who sounds drunk and does not remember she is in France. Back in Nick’s room that night, he asks her about the call, which leads to one of the most personal talks the two have had yet in their relationship. When she tells him about her father, he responds by confessing he has had depressive episodes in the past and that he was having one in Scotland, which, combined with the pneumonia, put him in a very low mental state.
When they start having sex, she brings up that he rarely seems enthusiastic about it and she wishes he would be. He says the problem is with him, not her. As they proceed, Frances asks him to hurt her, but he declines. By the time the sex ends, she is not sure if that was what she wanted and feels as if she does not understand what happened.
Part 1, Chapters 10-14 Analysis
Much of Nick and Frances’s communication throughout the book takes place over email or instant message platforms. Even under the best of circumstances, with two people who know each other thoroughly, written communication can cause confusion as tone can be difficult to read without vocal inflection and body language. For Nick and Frances, this problem is impossible to navigate as neither can ever tell if the other is serious or joking, sincere or ironic, and therefore both are unwilling to be openly vulnerable. In this way, Rooney explores the pitfalls of both modern communication and performativity.
When Nick brings up the possibility of Bobbi and Frances coming to the villa in France, Frances wonders if he still thinks of the two of them in an active relationship, and if so, what that will mean for a vacation that puts her under the same roof as Melissa. Rather than just engaging in a good faith discussion about these feelings, however, she bluntly asks if the two of them are still in an affair. The question comes off as hostile to Nick (understandably, given the deliberately flippant way she asks) so he retreats and eventually proposes a breakup, all the while thinking he is following her lead. Neither is willing to vulnerably lay out their feelings in clear language, but Nick comes closer than Frances. He honestly expresses that carrying on an affair without Melissa finding out will be difficult, and he candidly tells her he doesn’t know what she’s feeling. In moments like these, readers can feel that he is 32 while she is 21; while she treats relationships like a game where the winner is whoever shows the least vulnerability, he at least occasionally tries to make gentle inroads into honest discussions—though he is, ironically, also the one who is deceiving a primary partner.
The apex of Frances’s tendency toward deprecation is when she tells Nick that she will “ironically” sleep with him. Her intentions remain unclear to Nick, as well as the reader. Does she genuinely want Nick to think that sleeping with him will not have real emotional resonance to her? Or is she poking fun at herself and the way her every interaction with him is draped in layers of irony and guardedness? Rooney leaves open the possibility that Frances herself does not know, as she cannot figure out how emotionally invested she is or should be in the affair.
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By Sally Rooney
