Jessica Winter's 6 favorite books about female friendships
The Slate features editor recommends six novels that offer vivid portrayals of female friendships

NW by Zadie Smith (Penguin, $17).
Smith's 2012 masterpiece paints a wry and rueful portrait of contemporary Britain by zeroing in on a north London housing estate and a pair of lifelong friends: one hardworking but secretly reckless, the other all but sleepwalking through life. Their relationship is unforgettable; the fact that they never fully understand each other makes their mutual loyalty all the more moving.
Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood (Anchor, $16).
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Diabolical, irresistible Cordelia is one of Atwood's most indelible creations — the original (and worst) Mean Girl, who in the protagonist's flashbacks torments her to a near-lethal breaking point. No one else has ever conjured with such fury and precision the head games played among prepubescent girls, nor shown so well why these games' bewitched losers keep returning for more.
Veronica by Mary Gaitskill (Vintage, $16).
Alison, an ex-model, enters office life and finds herself both fascinated and repelled by the decidedly unglamorous but equally self-destructive Veronica. This ill-fitting friendship becomes a frame through which Alison looks back, to devastating effect, on the guilt-inducing ruins of her life.
An Experiment in Love by Hilary Mantel (Picador, $14).
Sign up for Today's Best Articles in your inbox
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
Two childhood foes are uncomfortably bound to each other when they enter the forbidding realm of a Catholic school. Mantel, with heartbreaking acuity, portrays these otherwise dissimilar girls as sharing a bottomless hunger — which one manages through anorexic self-denial and the other only feeds and feeds.
Rich and Pretty by Rumaan Alam (Ecco, $26).
Witty, perceptive, and light on its feet, this recent novel about a cross-class friendship asks if the inevitable conflicts between the protagonists have refined their connection or simply frayed it. The title's meaning, once revealed, carries the sting of a taunt expertly tossed across a cafeteria table.
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante (Europa, $17).
In the first novel of Ferrante's celebrated Neapolitan Quartet, a bond forms early between Elena and Lila, who grow up in a violent Naples slum. One of Ferrante's many remarkable gifts is her ability to see through the eyes of her young characters, whose rich imaginations help them make sense of an often bruising reality.
— Jessica Winter's first novel, Break in Case of Emergency, is a satire set in the office of a nonprofit that purports to empower women. Winter is also the features editor at Slate.com.
-
Book reviews: ‘Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America’ and ‘How to End a Story: Collected Diaries, 1978–1998’
Feature A political ‘witch hunt’ and Helen Garner’s journal entries
By The Week US Published
-
The backlash against ChatGPT's Studio Ghibli filter
The Explainer The studio's charming style has become part of a nebulous social media trend
By Theara Coleman, The Week US Published
-
Why are student loan borrowers falling behind on payments?
Today's Big Question Delinquencies surge as the Trump administration upends the program
By Joel Mathis, The Week US Published