An idle observer of the cultural marketplace might have noticed something of an inflection point in the mid-2010s, when the trope of female companionship began to heavily pervade fiction and film: novels by Elena Ferrante (and “Ferrante fever” ephemera), Sheila Heti, Zadie Smith, Sally Rooney, and series and films directed by Lena Dunham and Greta Gerwig, in which best friends, not boyfriends, star. Cheerleaders behind the New York Times culture desk chanted headlines like: “Sisterhood (and Friendship) Is Powerful,” “A Debut Calls a Ferrante-Style Female Friendship to the Fore,” and (a real gem, this) “A Call to Action for Girl Squads Everywhere.” Men, meanwhile, seemed to be suffering something of a friendship drought. Corresponding headlines carped: “The Challenges of Male Friendships,” “Can’t Guys Just Learn to Fight for a Friendship?” and even in the science section, “Why Male Baboons Benefit from Female Friends.”
It is easy enough to sketch a composite image of the female friend, tin-stamped with sheepish heroism. Invariably an artist or writer, or trying hard to be one, she has yet to produce her great masterpiece and is afflicted by feelings of fraudulence. Often her status as an artist may seem more a clamorous speech act than an earnest sign of resolve. Yet she is quick (too quick) to call her own bluff. Her companion — the one with the wilder hair, rawer talent, but sometimes consigned a dimmer fate — she is the true artist. So the protagonist laments. If the visible world of friendship is formed in love and protective urges, the more obscure backdrop is often enough formed in envy and rivalry.
Does the luster of the female friend emerge in compensatory fashion at a time when it is especially financially daunting (or ideologically unappealing) for many women to form a family? Has this niche proven a winning formula for a book industry catering to a readership skewing more than a smidge female (80 percent)? Putting such cynical speculations to the side, a girl-power generation has spoken with the confessional flair of Flaubert himself: “Madame Bovary, c’est moi”!
And publishers have taken note. Following the friendship boom, a more recent spate of group biographies of female writers and artists works a similar terrain, surveying the social worlds women have forged on their own defiant terms. Fortunes here are shaped by Parnassian pals, and lives oriented against patriarchal slights. But if Emma Bovary erred in viewing trite art as a model for life, the trade-press historian risks viewing it as an efficient formula for the writing of the past. One gathers that the (female?) reader is meant to experience a frisson of uplift and admiring recognition throughout. More often, you can feel you are getting a peppy archetype in the place of any difficult reckoning with the making of art or social relations. The female friend certainly sells books. But does she offer a way of capturing the lives of artists?