Watching Frances as she taps out notes to Nick that she really shouldn’t, and then waits (and waits) for a reply, is excruciating.

Whatever Rooney and, by extension, the producers of this series have to tell us about a generation, they have vastly more to say about what it means to be in love with the wrong person with someone who may like you a great deal, but who is really only using you as a salve for their own sadness who is ultimately incapable of loving you truly and deeply who will string you along until cowardice gets the better of them.Ĭonversations with Friends is about the lies people tell themselves to survive this predicament – and haven’t we all been there? I love the way it uses text messages.

(Or are they the same thing?) But the tortuous situation it examines so forensically is, in my experience, much more common than you might think, if not entirely universal. Some will imagine that this series is only for the young, or for fans of Rooney. But it’s Oliver’s performance, all innocence and slyness and inward pain, that keeps you watching. The others are all perfectly fine: Lane is suitably annoying (how do they all stand Bobbi?) Alwyn is good at being absent even when present, and catches the blithe masculine cruelty, whether conscious or not, that cuts Frances to the quick Kirke is deliciously grand at moments, her character almost painfully aware of her position in this unlikely hierarchy, something that makes her both generous and mannered. I completely adore Alison Oliver, a newcomer, whose face, initially so blank, turns out to be so crazily expressive. But on balance, I still prefer this series. When the latter was screened, we were deep in lockdown its claustrophobia was right for the moment, and in any case, we had nothing else to do. Will Conversations with Friends be as big a hit as Normal People was? I’m not sure. Quite soon, she is in agony, though no one would know it from her glazed exterior. But alas, unlike the head, the heart is not an ironic organ it doesn’t shrug life off, and only rarely is it biddable.

They begin an affair about which Frances is determined to be nonchalant. Bobbi fancies Melissa, who flirts with her instinctively, and Frances is taken with Nick, with whom, sphinx-like, she shares a tendency to quiet.

Conversations with friends book review