Conversations with Friends

Frances and Nick spend the next several months having only brief conversations when they run into each other in person, but they maintain regular communication over email. Their written correspondence has a flirtatious tone but is also full of irony and mutual teasing.

At the end of June, Frances goes to Ballina to visit each of her parents. As a girl, she and her mother tiptoed around her father’s moods, which were colored by depression and alcoholism. He sometimes stole money from Frances’s savings bank, and one time threw a shoe at her head. When her parents divorced, she visited him every other weekend, but the visits gradually lessened in frequency as she got older and realized being near him made her tense and unhappy. 

At her mother’s house, she talks about Nick and Melissa more than she means to, which her mother notices and finds odd given that Frances has never been particularly interested in wealthy people before. When Frances goes to her father’s apartment, she finds it filthy and unkempt and spends the visit cleaning up after him while he eats.