The non-linearity of friendships/love/life
Thoughts on Frances Ha – A Decade Later | The Muse Letter No. 159
This essay was originally published on off-chance.com, honestly one of my favourite corners of the internet right now.
Re-watching Frances Ha – A Decade Later
A decade ago I lived in Berlin and didn’t know anyone. I had moved there in April and by June I still had not found someone I wanted to sit next to when watching a movie that I could sense would be important to me. Or at least that’s what I told myself. Sitting in the cool evening air, all wrapped up in a blanket, my feet resting on the grass, I watched the audience, groups of friends, mostly women in their early and mid-twenties, giggling and shuffling around. Can you hold this please? I’m gonna get some popcorn for us. And. Can you get me another blanket, thanks babe. Open-air cinemas have this distinct quality of a summer well spent. Something between a picnic and a spectacle, much like watching fireworks: it feels strange when you’re doing it alone.
Moving to Berlin had been an old dream. When we were seventeen me and my best friend would imagine our lives in the capital. We would look up flats and draw up budgets, who would take which room? In which Bezirk did we want to live?
I would write and direct plays and she would manage bands and sneak me backstage. No more small town agony, where the coolest thing you could do is own a car and drive to McDonalds after school, which neither of us did. In Berlin we would finally belong. We would be artists.
– But then like so many things in life, it did not go according to plan. We did not get accepted at any of the universities in Berlin and so we settled for a much smaller city close to our hometown, moved into our first flat and called it Bananafishboat after a J.D. Salinger short story.
Looking back we were just young, so very young, we were trying to become by imitation, by surrounding ourselves with the right objects, the right artefacts, signifiers of belonging to create a future where we would have become these versions: our true selves. We would share our clothes and then get silently mad for wearing them too much, be in love with the same boys and lie about it, go to parties and only dance with each other. We would figure out how to buy groceries and cook, do laundry and find out our personal limits to hygiene. It was messy and naive, fun and annoying but most of all: we were growing up together.
“Tell me the story of us”, Frances asks Sophie her best friend at the beginning of the film, as their both lying in bed together. “Again?”, Sophie replies sheepishly but clearly happy to oblige. Frances, freshly broken up with her boyfriend in probably one of the most disengaged break-up scenes I’ve ever seen on screen, seeks comfort in the one person she actually truly cares about. “I love you, I love you.”, she shouted earlier into her phone talking to Sophie as her soon to be ex was grappling with the fact that Frances was not ready to move in or quite frankly cared if he lived or died.
Friends describe them as a lesbian couple who have stopped having sex and they seem to be fine with it. They sleep in the same bed, tell each other their “story of us” and take each other home after a night out. Breakups are hard but they don’t mean anything because they have each other, sharing cigarettes on the fire escape. – Until one of them starts to change. “We’re the same person, just with different hair.”, Frances will proclaim later at a dinner party where she’ll find out that Sophie is going to move to Japan with her boyfriend Patch. The guy who Sophie previously described as: “He’s a nice guy. For today.”
Over the course of Frances Ha, we see their friendship unravel, seeming to be a classic tale of one person using the other as a placeholder for something else. Sophie needs Frances to share a cigarette or sleep in her bed until she finds Patch, who is not only named appropriately in his function but from how he is introduced and continuously portrayed in the film only serves as a minor character.
Yet for Frances Sophie is her person. In a long winding monologue which is one of the key scenes of the film, she describes the kind of unbreakable bond she is looking for: “It’s that thing when you're with someone, and you love them and they know it, and they love you and you know it... but it's a party... and you're both talking to other people, and you're laughing and shining... and you look across the room and catch each other's eyes... but - but not because you're possessive, or it's precisely sexual... but because... that is your person in this life. And it's funny and sad, but only because this life will end, and it's this secret world that exists right there in public, unnoticed, that no one else knows about. It's sort of like how they say that other dimensions exist all around us, but we don't have the ability to perceive them. That's - That's what I want out of a relationship. Or just life, I guess.”
It’s this monologue that has been haunting me ever since, I saw it for the first time.
At 24, alone and without my best friend, I felt disconnected, as if the audio wasn’t synchronised with the imagery: it was irritating. What was I doing here all on my own in Berlin? Who was this person? Was I Frances? Someone who longs for this deep connection, always ending up with the Sophie’s of this life and delusional to the reality of change?
In the universe of girlhood, having a best friend is the ultimate badge of honour. Declaring that someone is your best friend is a promotion much like being a boyfriend is a job. It comes with a certain level of commitment, privileges and special expectations. Unlike a normal friend, a best friend has a spot reserved closest to your heart and in girl-logic it is often highly rivalled with a potential future romantic partner. The tale of the best friend lost to a boy or worse a new other best friend has been told quite a lot over the recent years in cinema. Most hilariously in the now cult classic Bridesmaids. Kristin Wiig singing “That’s What Friends Are For” in a desperate attempt to gain the upper hand at the engagement party of her best friend Lilian lives rent-free in my head. It’s a specific kind of pain to lose a best friend as it is not just the friendship that ends but a sense of identity that was crafted together.
I remember how frustrated I was with Sophie’s character back then. How she seemed almost villainess, leaving her best friend the way she does, not even letting her know in person about the life changing decisions she was making. Flippant and neglectful. But now I see that Frances was also using Sophie as a placeholder but: for herself. The way she talks about Sophie who is clearly very different from Frances, it feels like, she doesn’t actually see her at all. She just needs her to be the same as her and when Sophie finally starts to make autonomous decisions, like moving out to live with another friend in TriBeCa or later on moving abroad with her partner their friendship has no way of communicating that.
Unlike in Frances Ha my best friendship did not end because of a boy. It ended because of a lot of things and most of them we did not talk about then. But ultimately the instability of an intense best friendship like that cannot last and it should not. Nobody should be like another person. When your edges are congruent with theirs in a complete overlap: it gets hard to breath. It’s that specific kind of enablement that these friendships entail, who are often formed in years where your frontal cortex hasn’t fully developed yet and generally nothing is ever your fault. “I’m not a real person yet. It’s embarrassing.”, Frances says somewhere in passing, to explain her half-formed life and I think it is exactly the reason why these best friendships are so enticing to begin with. You don’t need to be complete when you can latch onto each other and enmesh. You can be one, together. And then one day the unimaginable happens and it’s like Lillian Hellman said: “People change and forget to tell each other.”
For the most part of the film Frances is trying her best to reject the reality she lives in. She wants to be a dancer but evidently isn’t good enough, she wants to be in Paris but actually can’t afford it and uses a credit card to fund the trip that predictably turns into a total disaster. Catering at an event, she bumps into Sophie and it becomes apparent that both of them have been lying to each other. Frances about her career and Sophie newly engaged about the seriousness of her relationship. Neither is navigating those changes well. Only when both finally accept their circumstances, things start to shift for the better. “Things run their course, fall out of relevance, and shift their meanings. They do this whether or not we admit that they do, and whether or not we’re willing to live within the reality of those changes as they happen.”, Helena Fitzgerald once wrote in an essay about navigating change, which I think describes precisely the conundrum Frances is in.
Perhaps change is so difficult to cope with in your mid 20s because most of these things happen to you for the first time. The really big loves, the proposals, the weddings, the moving in together, the moving apart, the big heartbreaks. Everything seems so linear, so directed towards goals and milestones. Watching Frances Ha now a decade later, in my own flat, laptop resting on my knees: it hits different. Because I know now that the perceived linearity of life steps is an illusion in many ways. At 34, I have seen the beginnings but I have also seen some ends and re-starts and comebacks and major u-turns.
I wrote earlier that my best friendship ended when I should have said: it broke and then it changed. We didn’t speak for two years but we still knew of each other. When I went through a breakup, her text reached me. When it was her birthday I messaged her. Stuck at home for Christmas three years later we met for coffee. Because true connection is like that Beyonce song: “Boy, nothing real can be threatened.” Which is a song about a heterosexual relationship – I know. But perhaps that’s the whole point I am trying to make, “that best friendships, coming at you like a hurricane, are really the great romance of most girls’ lives.”
And that is perhaps where those best friendships should stay: in Girl-Land. That when you finally do become a full grown-up person, distinguished in many ways, you don’t need to be the same. You don’t need to experience things similarly to be close and connected. You can shine, separately but together in the same room. Catching each other's eyes. Truly seeing another.
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If you liked this essay I am sure you will really, really enjoy reading the books that I wrote so far. As I am currently in the midst of crowdfunding the third and final book of the poetic memoir trilogy (read below why and how I do it) I would so appreciate it, if you support the Kickstarter today by pre-ordering a copy or choosing any other of the lovely rewards I created specifically for the crowdfunding and help that vision come to life. We’re already halfway there! But there’s still the other half to go xx
The Final Book of the Poetic Memoir Trilogy
A homage to change, why we don‘t want to and how life will make you.
About the book
Things I Have Changed – That Are Different Now
When I started writing about my own life, searching for myself ("Things I Have Noticed," 2020) and for my self-worth ("Things I Have Loved," 2023), this book dedicated to self-narration ("Things I Have Changed") had actually already begun long before. It is a collage of all the blind spots and omissions, the things I couldn't or wouldn't see over the years. It is about the things I don't want to write about: my mother, money, control, obsessive thoughts, fear. – But must.
I started this book in the belief that I could write about change, that I could excavate what constitutes transformation, to understand “the process” and figure out how to trust it along the way. Yet I am finding myself in a constant shift of what feels like performing open heart surgery on myself, trying to explain, whilst understanding, whilst doing. Amidst the constant blind spots sprouting every time I choose a perspective, I lose another. There’s always something. In many ways this book snuck its way onto the page, as if remembering a faint dream in the morning, barely feeling its presence. And then later through the day suddenly rushing in, with all its vividness into the forefront of my mind. It was all there – all real.
So I guess in the end this book is not exactly about change but about being alive in one body, one existence, moving forward.
– No wonder I am struggling.
What is the Kickstarter for?
£5000 is the minimum budget that will ensure a first round of printing high-qualitiy softcover books, hiring a professional editor to finalise the book and creating a marketing campaign to get the word out.
There’s a line I often think of by the German poet Hilde Domin that translated goes something like this:
I put my foot in the air. And it carried me.
(Ich setzte den Fuss in die Luft. Und sie trug.)
Four years ago I started writing a book that literally changed my life: Things I Have Noticed – Essays on leaving/searching/finding. It started with an idea to create a zine, that quickly turned into a full collection and Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign to publish it. Since then I sold thousand of copies, found homes in indie bookshops, was invited to readings, wrote and published the second book Things I Have Loved – A collection (sort of) – but most of all I understood that you don’t need a publisher or an agent to reach people with your writing.
That it’s a special honour to create a book from start to finish, to design the cover, to illustrate it, to be in charge of how it is presented and find its own niche. To create something that feels like a Gesamtkunstwerk – an object that is conceptually, visually, inherently in the way that it is made: art in itself.
That it’s not just about the process of writing a book but also the way it comes into the world: supported by people who believe in my vision, who trust that I can do it all on my own.
Now, the circle is coming to a close.
What is a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign?
I believe a Kickstarter is a way to proof an idea. It’s a way for people to support independent artists. To create work that is different, new and exciting.
But mostly it is 6 weeks of me, pressing the refresh button every ten minutes and hoping that I make the targeted budget, because if not: no money will be transferred. Kickstarter has an all-or-nothing approach, you only get the money if you reach your goal. If you do not reach the goal within the set time frame, all backers get their money back and the project will not happen.
So, I love your writing and I want to support you, what can I do?
Make a pledge as soon as possible. The more people pledge in the beginning the higher the chances are that we will actually reach the target.
Tell your friends about the Kickstarter and/or make a post on social media and show other people that you've made a pledge to encourage them.
The Promise
"Things I Have Changed" will be the third and final book of the poetic memoir trilogy I started in 2020. The collection is nearly finished but will need to go through a round of editing. Just like the first two books it will be illustrated with my own visual artwork. The artwork for the book is currently in the idea stage.
As a backer you will witness the creative process up close and I will give frequent updates on how it's going.
Approx. publishing date: Spring 2025
Approx. pages: 200
Paperback: softcover
SHIPPING Please note: We will be shipping all rewards national and internationally, with duty and tax prepaid. So you don't have to worry about customs at all.
Each of your essays are their own piece of art and a lesson. In the craft of writing and emotional growth. Thanks for sharing this and congratulations on book #3 💚
Really enjoyed this. Such beautiful and realistic reflections on female friendship through the lens of Frances Ha