In Praise of “Toxic” Female Friendships

Only one storyline in The White Lotus Season Three has anything resembling a happy ending: childhood friends Laurie, Jacklyn, and Kate finally rekindle their lifelong love for each other after a week of backstabbing and gossip. The viewer is left with no doubt that the three will continue to talk shit about each other until death do they part, but by the same token, the viewer has no doubts that they’ll be in touch for the rest of their lives. There’s no contradiction between the toxicity and the beauty in this female friendship: it has both.

In modern literature, this same theme is increasingly familiar. In fact, it’s been at the center of three of the best novels of the past few years: Alison Espach’s The Wedding People, Ann Napolitano’s Hello Beautiful, and Claire Jia’s Wanting, out in July. In each novel, the female friendship takes a different form, but in each, the toxicity is what allows it to endure and transform.

Claire Jia’s gorgeous debut, Wanting, features a friendship most similar to the one seen on The White Lotus. Two childhood best friends—Lian and Wenyu—reunite under strained conditions, each separately unhappy with the turns their life has taken, each unwilling to admit it. Lian openly covets Wenyu’s success in America. Wenyu’s dissatisfaction takes longer to reveal itself, but by the end of the novel, there’s no question that Wenyu wishes she’d copied a few of Lian’s decisions, regardless of how glamorous her life looks to the world. But their mutual envy overlaps with admiration, which is what draws them back into the friendship years later.

After Lian learns that Wenyu’s life isn’t what it looks like, “There was something poisonous twisting inside [her], glee at the confirmation that the glossy life Wenyu had shown the world these last few years was not so pristine. It was nice when people confirmed who they were. People always came back to their worst vices, and Lian felt a heavy and complicated satisfaction, having been right about Luo Wenyu.” And while Lian spends much of the novel enabling these vices in Wenyu, Wenyu also pushes Lian to abandon her commitment to the cautious life she’d been living. But each needs the other’s bad influence to understand what they want to keep from their own lives. In the end, it’s only in drawing out the worst from each other that they can draw out the best; the toxicity is what makes their friendship a catalyst for growth.

In Alison Espach’s The Wedding People, a friendship between Lila and Phoebe quickly forms at the canonical site of the toxic female friendship: a wedding. Weddings, as the patriarchy would have us believe, are where women go to love and hate each other with equal abandon. Lila has booked out nearly an entire hotel for her “wedding week,” but the one extra room was snagged by Phoebe, who came to kill herself. The women meet and unwittingly form a tight bond, despite each finding the other’s behavior irritating.

Soon, the spoiled Lila demands that the listless Phoebe be her maid of honor, which exacerbates the tension between them. As Epsach writes: “Bridesmaids need the same kinds of stories soldiers do, stories that justify why they do what they do. Why they are willing to sacrifice who they are and a good night’s sleep for the noble cause of defending democracy and Lila and Gary’s love.” But the only thing worse than being a bridesmaid is not being asked, and in being asked, and even though she’s also asked to meet all of Lila’s absurd demands, Phoebe finds new purpose in her role at the wedding.

Lila, meanwhile, picks up on Phoebe’s contempt for her lavish lifestyle and general pessimism, and this pushes her to explain parts of her life that simply can’t be explained. It’s through each other’s demands that the friends realize they can also ask for better of themselves. That’s part of the beauty of the toxicity in female friendship: our friends ask much of us, and in return, we give more than we knew we could.

I’ve always believed friend fall-outs are worse than romantic breakups. I suspect it’s because they’re not inevitable; when you connect with a new friend, you can reasonably hope it will last a lifetime. Or at least, until one of you loses touch. Ann Napolitano’s Hello Beautiful explores what happens when you break one of the most powerful and intimate bonds of friendship: sisterhood. As Napolitano writes: “[Sylvie’s] sisters had always been her best friends; in Chicago, there had never been a need for anyone else in her life. She and Sylvie and the twins knew every version, every age, every mood of one another.” But the Padavano sisters are separated for decades by one of the most toxic forces that can befall a female friendship: a fight over a romantic partner.

It’s only because of this separation, though, that their ultimate reunion holds so much meaning. The toxic falling out is necessary for each of the sisters to understand how badly they need the others. In one of the book’s most beautiful passages, Napolitano says: “When your love for a person is so profound that it’s part of who you are, then the absence of the person becomes part of your DNA, your bones, and your skin.” That, too, is the essence of female friendship: the way its absence affects us.

In each of these stories, it’s not simply that the female friendships are both toxic and beautiful; it’s that neither the beauty and toxicity can occur without the other. In Wanting, if Wenyu and Lian didn’t enable each other to behave badly, they also wouldn’t push each other to recognize what they stood to lose. In The Wedding People, if Lila and Phoebe weren’t both so focused on their own pain—in Lila’s case, the need to make her wedding look perfect to hide the truth, and in Phoebe’s case, her complete despair about the dissolution of her marriage—they wouldn’t have survived the massive choice each had to make. In Hello Beautiful, if the Padavano sisters hadn’t had a clean break decades ago, their reunion wouldn’t have been so life-affirming. A friendship that moves along seamlessly for decades is wonderful, but a friendship that bends without breaking instills confidence that it’s meant to last forever.

In light of the oft-discussed male loneliness epidemic, female friendship can seem easy. And it’s because it doesn’t have to fit one mold, especially since the toxicity is baked in—toxicity is part of the experience of being a woman. A female friendship can last through fights, through discovering a friend spoke badly about you behind your back, through bad decisions, through openly yearning for what your friend has.

As women, we’re primed to believe not everything will go our way, that the world wasn’t designed to meet our needs perfectly. We’re primed to take care of each other and ourselves. As Espach writes, “It’s good to hear Lila make fun of herself. But Phoebe is starting to understand that on some nights, Lila is probably the loneliest girl in the world, just like Phoebe. And maybe they are all lonely. Maybe this is just what it means to be a person. To constantly reckon with being a single being in one body.”  We’re primed for disappointment and toxic behavior, and so, we can tolerate it—even from our friends. Just as long as we have our friends there to help us get through it.