‘I’M HAVING A FRIENDSHIP AFFAIR’
(…) As girls and young women, we are allowed our friendships. We are afforded our close, intimate, intense relationships with one another. It is accepted and expected of us. On television, in novels, in every corner of popular culture, we are inundated by examples of women enmeshed in joyful, painful, complicated, stormy relationships with each other: the girls of Girls, the women of Sex and the City, the novels of Elena Ferrante. In The Story of a New Name, Lena thinks of her tortured, lifelong friendship with Lila: “It was as if, because of an evil spell, the joy or sorrow of one required the sorrow or joy of the other; even our physical aspect, it seemed to me, shared in that swing.” A friend tells me the image of Strawberry Shortcake and Blueberry Muffin locked arm-in-arm is seared deeply into her brain. Others: Think of Thelma and Louise, Hannah and her sisters,Truth & Beauty, Amy Poehler and Tina Fey, the Golden Girls. According to the Times, celebrity female BFFs are the new power couples.