Codependent Female Friendships and The Book of Goose
Yiyun Li on female friendship and the stories we tell in order to live
Over the last two months, my best friend has been developing a film about female friendships. And recently, we sat down together to look at references for inspiration. But we found very few cultural touchstones that addressed the particular rhythm of female friendship we had in mind—and the relative absence of this practice in literature and film seemed particularly glaring to us.
The only time I had ever come across something of the sort was when I read Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels series, which traces—over four novels that span decades—the beautiful and troubling dimensions of a friendship between two girls, Lila and Elena. (And I’d recommend it, not just for its depiction of friendship, but also for an experience of place, Naples, being so fully realized that it operates as a character in the novel.) It’s only ten years later, at present, that I’ve found Yiyun Li’s The Book of Goose and been taken back to the subject.
The Book of Goose opens with Agnès, our narrator, receiving the news that her childhood best friend, Fabienne, is dead. Agnès recounts the development of her and Fabienne's friendship in rural France, a friendship based in mutually constructed fictions that whisk them out of their immediate environment and into their shared imagination. Their games result in a co-written book—dictated by the commanding Fabienne and documented by the devoted Agnès—that propels Agnès into early fame as a child author. Her success takes her to Paris and the UK, while Fabienne chooses to stay in rural France. The novel serves as a kind of meditation on codependent female friendships, what it means to grow up—or come of age—within one, and on the fictions that we all create about the “real world” and ourselves. The tragedy of the novel strikes when these two threads interact, revealing the stories that shatter—and the new stories we must tell—as a consequence of becoming real-life adults.
It was a timely and terrifying read for me. In college, the friendship between my best friend and I emerged from the simplicity of our shared humour, strangeness, passions, and, to some extent, being from India and Pakistan, the comfort of our shared language and culture. But forming a friendship is easy, requiring just a source of mutual joy or excitement. Sustaining one is more of a challenge. Things can get complicated when expectations differ, or when you don’t have a reciprocal understanding of how you fit into each others’ lives, especially as you move through different stages of growth. At some point, I realized that the vitality of our own was not just based in the bond itself, but in a shared practice of female friendship. Friendship is a serious thing. At home, we had both known its rules, importance, and its propensity for encouraging a comforting, but potentially dangerous, codependency in navigating the world and forming an identity. It was this form and practice of friendship that I had been missing in the fiction I consumed, an essential relationship that seemed to go undocumented in our cultural canon.
This novel, then, is radical in its scope: it is a radical act to dedicate a novel to the subject of friendship between girls, and to take that subject seriously. And, it’s particularly radical to do that in the form of a coming-of-age novel or bildungsroman. Agnès says:
“I could be myself only when I was with Fabienne. Can a wall describe its own dimensions and texture, can a wall even sense its own existence, if not for the ball that constantly bounces off of it?”
Agnès, our narrator, is unable to know (or write) herself without defining herself in relation to Fabienne. The bildungsroman here presents itself anew in depicting a coming-of-age that is defined by the dualism of the two best friends.
Recently, I read a New Yorker piece about the novel (as a genre) favouring the young over the old. Charlie Tyson argues for a history of the novel as a form that was produced in eighteenth-century Europe from the reverberations of the capitalist world, one in which the notion of prescribed social positions fell away. As members of the growing middle class experienced new prospects of class mobility, readers and writers gravitated towards the coming-of-age story that took root in the form of the novel. The novel served as the expression of the individual, in particular, grappling with their psyche or position within their new social order.
Li presents us with an expanded conception of the novel—here, she makes the argument that, for these girls, an understanding of self is inextricable from an understanding of the other. Fabienne ends up working her way into the actual writing of Agnès’s novel, her presence haunting the pages even after death, a voice of judgment and commentary in Agnès’s consciousness. (Film has already been here, with its formal freedom to explore the reverberations and eclipses of women’s psyches—think: Persona, Three Women, The Double Life of Veronique.)
What is different about Li’s entangling of these girls’ psyches, different from the psychosexual doubles of these films and the insidious envy of Ferrante’s Lila and Elena, is that it begins from a shared imagination, from a shared world of nonsense. Li is the most feminist of them all, though she doesn’t articulate it in those terms. And I really think that writers of female friendship—besides TV writers particularly dealing in comedy (think Girls or Broad City)—tend to forget that women and girls are nonsensical and strange and weird too, without necessarily being mad. I can confidently say that my closest female friendships are all with ridiculous individuals, and there is something special in Li capturing that. She writes:
“Such were the conversations we often had then, nonsense to the world, but the world, we already knew, was full of nonsense. We might as well amuse ourselves with our own nonsense.”
It is the nonsense, after all, that is the refuge that female friendship offers. In the shared world of female friendship, the greatest sin is boredom.
Agnès and Fabienne’s nonsense, in turn, weaves an entire world of fiction that buoys them within the mundane and the commonplace of the “real world.” And isn’t that what friendship is, essentially—a shared creation born of two individual souls?
Agnès’s propulsion into the world outside of rural France—her journeys to Paris and an English finishing school as a child author groomed for celebrity—begins to show her that to survive, the real world, too, subsists on elaborate fictions. (Joan Didion famously wrote, “we tell ourselves stories in order to live,” a sentence that, as Zadie Smith recently pointed out, was always meant as an indictment and not the “personal credo” it has now become.) Moving through adolescence, she is quick to notice that success in Paris relies on how you are perceived, on the self you are able to fashion to secure your place in society. Agnès writes: “Lies easily told could just as easily come true—how had I not understood this before?” Adulthood, work, it’s all a farce. Fabienne, whose coming-of-age was accelerated by her mother’s premature death and by her own innate genius, seems to have understood this a long time ago, explaining the darkness and melancholia that undergirds her character without explanation for a long while in the novel.
How would Agnés and Fabienne confront the truth of coming of age? Would they continue to escape it, living as anti-social adults in a constant make-believe? Or would they jointly succumb to the play-acting of being a member of society, losing their shared world, their only desired world, to the expected trajectories of womanhood, domesticity and married life, in which friendship (and freedom) is a side-act, and not an institution?
I won’t answer that question for you. Li’s novel asks this question of its readers for us all to answer ourselves. Her own response is clear: she accepts our human need to narrativize our lives, but counters the world’s prevailing fictions by writing her own.