In a world where devoted female friendship is often hyper-idealised and aspirational, these books, films and TV series dare to show its messier, more complicated realities.
Here are characters who test and redefine the boundaries of what friendship can mean and show how beauty and meaning can emerge as we struggle with our differences, weather betrayals and understand that sometimes growth means growing apart.
The Spare Room by Helen Garner (2008)
Australian novelist Helen Garner is experiencing a well-deserved moment. Her masterpiece The Spare Room offers a tender yet heart-stopping portrait of two older friends temporarily living together while managing the increasingly painful realities of terminal illness. With unflinching honesty, Garner investigates what happens when you fundamentally disagree with a dear friend’s choices about their own mortality. This isn’t friendship as flawlessly giving and supportive. This is friendship as a perilous act of love.
Girlfriends dir. by Claudia Weill (1978)
Claudia Weill’s iconic New York film Girlfriends, about two best friends and flatmates, Susan and Anne, begins where many end. ‘You’re getting married?’ Susan asks incredulously. ‘You’re moving out?’ Their lives dramatically diverge, Anne settling into suburban marriage and motherhood while Susan navigates increasingly disastrous love affairs and her artistic career. Weill said she wanted to depict female friendship as ‘fragile, delicate, supportive, complex, nourishing, painful and difficult as a love affair’. But the transition Susan and Anne must make – if they even can, given the film’s ambivalent ending – is one few love affairs ever face, let alone survive.
Absolutely Fabulous (1992-2012)
Childhood friends Edina ‘Eddie’ Monsoon (Jennifer Saunders) and Patricia ‘Patsy’ Stone (Joanna Lumley) spent the sixties and seventies in a haze of drunken, drug-fuelled hedonism and are still attempting to keep the party going well into middle age. Nobody approves of their co-dependent relationship – not Eddie’s mother, not her daughter, not anyone with a shred of common sense.
Yet beneath the belittling, freeloading, criticism and career sabotage, something genuine exists. Only Patsy supports Eddie’s dreams and ambitions, and sees her as Eddie sees herself. And only Eddie gives Patsy the emotional security she would never admit she craves.
Truth and Beauty: A Friendship by Ann Patchett (2004)
This compulsively readable memoir chronicles Patchett’s eighteen-year friendship with her charismatic and gifted fellow writer Lucy Grealy and explores the complex dependencies between them: Patchett’s need to rescue her friend, Grealy’s possessiveness and the latter’s struggles with addiction and self-harm. Published less than two years after Grealy’s death, the memoir sparked controversy when Grealy’s family criticised Patchett for allegedly exploiting her friend’s suffering and death.
This controversy itself reveals some of friendship’s thorniest questions: what do we owe a friend? When does care tip into exploitation? Patchett’s later essay ‘These Precious Days‘ continues grappling with these questions, as the writer asks to what extent we should write about our friends at all.
Dance, Girl, Dance dir. by Dorothy Arzner (1940)
Dorothy Arzner – the only female director heading major studio features in Golden Age Hollywood – created her most autobiographical work with Dance, Girl, Dance. It tells the story of Bubbles (Lucille Ball in her breakout role), a burlesque dancer seeking a rich husband to divorce, and Judy (Maureen O’Hara), an ambitious ballerina. Their unlikely pairing navigates New York’s seedy dance world, doing what they must to survive – including ruthlessly using each other.
Arzner reveals female work friendships in all their complexity, showing not just camaraderie and support but the difficult moral choices women face when individual success requires stepping on someone else’s dreams.
Sula by Toni Morrison (1973)
Nel meets Sula aged twelve over a rope swing at their primary school amid the grinding poverty of the Bottom and is instantly captivated by her new friend’s dazzling bravado. The pair, as Morrison writes, ‘use each other to grow on’, until Sula betrays Nel, destroying their bond.
Morrison said she wanted to explore the impact of the sexual permissiveness of the 1970s ‘not only [on] conventional black society but on female friendship’. As Nel struggles to forgive, Sula descends into loneliness and mistrust, never learning how to befriend another woman, because she never fully understands that friendship requires accepting that the other person isn’t merely an extension of yourself.
The White Lotus Season 3, dir. by Mike White (2025)
When we first meet Laurie (Carrie Coon), Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan), and Kate (Leslie Bibb) at a fictional White Lotus resort in Koh Samui, these affluent white women seem almost interchangeable. They perform the rituals of female friendship perfectly, constantly declaring their happiness at being together as they clink glasses.
But quickly, cracks emerge. Their political differences, contrasting relationships and career divergences strain their bond and create a psychological minefield. It’s an exaggerated version of the difficulties many women face in their friendships as their lives move in different directions. As the psychoanalysts Susie Orbach and Luise Eichenbaum noted in their 1987 book Bittersweet, ‘the unspoken bargain between all women is that they must remain the same’. Laurie, Jaclyn and Kate show us how painful the struggle for individuation and the desire to stay the same can be.
The Gift of Imperfect Bonds
All these stories show true friendship not in the pristine myth of eternal sameness but in the brave and sometimes ugly reality of change, forgiveness and the messy vulnerabilities of truly knowing and being known by another.
A rebellious new history of female friendship and timely reclamation of the ‘bad friend’.
Tiffany Watt Smith is the author of The Book of Human Emotions and Schadenfreude. She has been a recipient of multiple awards and prizes including from the Wellcome Trust, the British Academy and in 2019 was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize for her work.
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