Top 10 novels about toxic friendships
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Loading... - Amelia Poulin
- 17 Mar 2022
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Romantic love and family dynamics might be the staples of literature, but fictional friendships have provided readers with some of the most enduring, and memorable, pairings – and none more so than the toxic variety. Complex love/hate relationships have inspired novelists from Thackeray to Ferrante, and are the engine that drives many recent thrillers, including Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen and Tara Isabella Burton’s Social Creature.
In my debut novel, The House Guest, 25-year-old Kate strikes up an unlikely friendship with Della, a life coach a decade older. Their uneven alliance is put to the test when Della invites Kate to join her family for a summer in France, cutting the younger woman off from everyone she knows as events spiral out of her control.
Put under the microscope, friendships are uniquely fascinating – free from familial duty or, usually, from sexual desire. We choose our friends, and yet they can have great sway over our lives, holding up a mirror, providing support, but also exerting an influence that can be hard to unravel. These novels of toxic friendship explore much more than just cruelty or manipulation – their characters are caught up in a tangle of co-dependency and intimacy, affection and deception.
1. Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood
When painter Elaine returns to Toronto for a retrospective of her work, she is assailed by memories from her past and the friendships that blighted her childhood, in particular with Cordelia, who taunts and bullies her “as if she’s driven by the urge to see how far she can go”. But who really held the power in that relationship, and what gives early friendships their unique hold over our lives? Atwood explores these destructive dynamics with customary insight and brilliance. As Elaine reflects, years after she has lost touch with Cordelia, even though they have tormented one another, “We are like the twins in old fables, each of whom has been given half a key.”
2. The Neapolitan Quartet by Elena Ferrante
Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels tell the story of another pair of friends whose lives are inextricably entwined over decades. From their poverty-stricken childhood in postwar Naples, to their diverging paths through education, work, marriage and children, Elena and Lila are bound together in a feverish dance of competition and compassion, jealousy and love. More complex than toxic, their relationship nonetheless brings them both misery as well as solace. The pair may have spent their whole lives locked in rivalry, but it is Elena who gets the final word, as she sits down to write their story: “We’ll see who wins this time.”
3. Sula by Toni Morrison
In Morrison’s 1973 novel, it is a man who causes the rupture between childhood friends Nel and Sula. Growing up in Medallion, a fictional black community in Ohio, after the first world war, the two girls are inseparable. Though she’s very different in nature to the transgressive Sula, for Nel, “Talking to Sula had always been a conversation with herself”. Life is hard for women in Medallion, yet while the friendship survives a number of traumas, it is Sula’s sexual betrayal of Nel that causes the irreparable rift. It is only looking back later in life that Nel reassesses what has been the most important relationship of her life.
4. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Boys have toxic friendships too, of course, and in Golding’s 1954 debut, the young survivors of a plane crash first form alliances, and then turn on each other, in a classic exploration of group dynamics and social hierarchies. Through the now classic tale of Ralph, Jack, Piggy and Simon, Golding reveals just how quickly the social contract can break down under pressure, how friends can become rivals and finally sworn enemies, with disastrous results. Read More…
