When Sisterhood Gets Slippery

FRIENDSHIPS BETWEEN WOMEN—ESPECIALLY among groups of women, where tendrils of energy and intuition entwine and collide like the offshoots of willful plants—seem to come with so many attendant complications.

- Stephanie Zacharek

Ideally, everyone is growing toward and reaching for the same sun. But what if you’re battling for the same air and water? What happens when petty resentments become destructive lesions, or when envy chokes off reason? The promise women have made to one another, once unspoken but now a kind of noisy anthem, is that all women must support one another, all the time. But deep in our hearts we know it can’t always work like that, perhaps especially with those who are closest to us. Because women are people, and conflict between people is inevitable. Familiarity may nourish intimacy, but it can also breed that other thing, as damaging to a friendship as drought is to greenery.

Luckily, we have fiction to help us sort through these issues vicariously. Three new novels arriving in June examine, at close range and sometimes in painful detail, the intricacies of friendships between and among women: In Mona Awad’s Bunny, a clique of preening girl-women in a graduate program welcome an outlier into their group, with unsettling consequences. Lauren Mechling’s How Could She details the on-again, off-again friendship, fraught with jealousy and anxiety, between three women in the unstable world of New York media. And in The Paper Wasp, by Lauren Acampora, an awkward, solitary aspiring filmmaker languishes in her Michigan hometown, gazing from afar at the much shinier life of her childhood best friend turned Hollywood ingenue. Portions of these books are funny; some passages are eerily poetic. But each turns over that rock that most of us prefer not to look under, unafraid to face what may lie beneath.