Girls They Write Songs About by Carlene Bauer
What really goes on behind the closed doors of female friendships? Girls They Write Songs About (2022) by Carlene Bauer seeks to answer that question and many more in a witty, smart, thrumming novel that spans two tumultuous decades of friendship between the narrator Charlotte and her best friend Rose.
Girls They Write Songs About begins in the 1990s, in beguiling New York filled to the brim with opportunities for girls who are brave enough to take them. Charlotte and Rose meet working for the same music magazine, their relationship starting on shaky grounds as they’re both scornful and envious of each other. However, they quickly become inseparable, with their friendship seeing them through many ups and downs, marriages, motherhood, divorces, career glories and catastrophes in quick succession as the years melt away.
Female friendship has been enjoying its long-coming renaissance in 21st century publishing. After decades of focus on the significance of monogamous heterosexual relationships – of your spouse having to be your best friend, lover, and confidant all at once – an insurgence of female friendships can be clearly seen in bestselling books. With Elena Ferrante’s Elena and Raffaella modelling a relationship that lasts a lifetime in the Neapolitan Novels, books have moved away from the definition of soul mates being limited to romantic love interests and into the world of exploring all that female friendships have to offer.
Girls They Write Songs About does exactly that. While it paints an incomparable picture of intimacy between two women, it also doesn’t shy away from tropes of female friendships most often perpetuated by easy stereotypes: jealousy, arguments over love interests (in this case, men), or incessant comparison. Through the narration of Charlotte, Bauer does a commendable job of exploring every nook and cranny of these emotions without resorting to clichés: wanting what the other has, wanting it despite being actively against it, feeling shame at that desire, questioning an underlying belief system due to that desire. It would have been remiss of Bauer not to include these episodes, as they are just as much a part of female friendships as their necessity for survival and disposition towards a cellular understanding – and she does a striking job exploring them.
“Don't ever leave me, she said, and I linked my arm in hers—just like Anne and Diana did as they walked along the Lake of Shining Waters, just like Betsy and Tacy did as they entered the halls of Deep Valley High, just as girls across centuries have done, as they walk streets and sketch dreams—knowing that in doing so I'd made a choice.”
Bauer wrote this book for and about women, and as such they play a prominent part in Girls They Write Songs About– not just through the characters of Charlotte and Rose, but the women that shape them: authors and thinkers long dead; teachers; mothers, aunts, and grandmothers; daughters of theirs and daughters of men who are married to other women. And the women she writes about are exactly that: women. Nothing less and nothing more – raw and flawed, found wanting and shameful, too proud to admit the former and too stubborn to show the latter.
An electric power of feminine energy crackles between these pages. From jealousy to compassion, from unconditional love to judgement, Charlotte and Rose are two sides of the same coin. Yet they frequently overlap – if Charlotte thinks Rose to be the better writer, Rose wishes out loud that she could write like Charlotte; if Rose questions her marriage or motherhood, Charlotte begins to want those things despite her better judgement. Their friendship hinges on this duality and on their common passion, writing.
When they first become friends, the girls are full of ambition, hunger and dedication. They fancy themselves as different from others and they stake a claim on anything they want based on that assumed difference. They read and write and go out at night, taking parts of New York for themselves and for the dreams they believe in. They’re sentimental but not naive, and they work hard to turn those dreams into reality.
“What it was like to have read so much, and wanted so much, that you could sometimes ride a subway feeling distended with hope and intent as you'd finish a book, and then look up at all the people sitting around you and get what felt like the bends trying to reconcile the want that book had stoked in you with the chaos of the world in front of you, the world as it was.”
Charlotte’s decoding of the past lends the first half of the narration an omnipresent voice, as she remembers and recounts – and sometimes judges or critiques – the ways in which her and Rose went about their way in the world when they were younger.
“The attributes that made us want to write—curiosity, focus, and lability in both the negative and slightly less negative senses of the word—made us forget where we were and who we were, if we wanted to get to the bottom of you, whether you were a book or a movie or a painting or a person. We disappeared as we stared at and queried the other, whether that other took the form of a book or an ocean or a face floating across from ours on the subway—while also sensing that we were most ourselves, or the best version of ourselves, while utterly disembodied in this way.”
This assumed wisdom slowly fades away as the narration catches up to the present, and as Charlotte and Rose’s friendship begins to fall apart. In a way, this is worse than the breakups, divorces, breakdowns, abortions and unfaithfulness of their respective lives – worse because it is given up and blamed on the expiry date of friendships, of people changing and values shifting – and so the grieving that follows has no place to seep from, and instead festers inside, driving Charlotte away from the city and to other women. It is only apart from Rose that Charlotte begins to consider herself not in an absolute relation to anyone – professionally or personally – but as an individual in search of her own identity, taking stock of her many mistakes and perceived shortcomings.
“I hadn't made good use of the freedom I'd insisted on, it seemed to me, and I'd started to wish I'd saved my money, stayed married, and bought an apartment. I'd started to wish I'd wanted children, too, but it wasn't out of some yearning to be and know another animal. I thought being a mother would exempt me from having to be and know myself.”
Girls They Write Songs About is fresh with hunger but steeped in heartache – the kind of heartache that comes from never living up to the hopes that you and your girlfriends fostered in lines to bars at 3 am. The writing pulses and expands as it recounts the many intricacies and undoings of female friendship. Charged with the electric rivalry of Marlowe Granados’ Isa and Gala in Happy Hour, and underpinned by perspicacious prose like that of Lauren John Joseph’s in At Certain Points We Touch, Girls They Write Songs About is a beautifully written ode to women and their friendship, through thick and thin.
Fruzsina Gál is an aspiring writer, born in Hungary but living in Australia. She has been a reader all her life, and her first short story, 'The Turul' was published in Griffith University's 2018 anthology, Talent Implied. Her writing is often focussed on identity and the effects of immigration on the self. You can find her online at www.fruzsinagal.com or @thenovelconversation.