Toni Morrison Archives - The Narratologist

In honour of Galentine’s Day (what’s Galentine’s Day? Oh, it’s only the best day of the year!), I decided to focus on a topic that is overlooked far too often in fiction: friendship between women. We all know about the Bechdel test, but try putting together a list of books where female friendship is the focus of the story, I dare you. Bonus points if the women in question are not related. It is practically impossible! That said, here are some of my favourite fictional examples of female friendship – the good and the bad. Some of these duos are attached at the hip for life, whereas other relationships go sour in the worst possible way.

If you can think of more titles, please leave a comment below!

Archibald J. Motley, “Nightlife” (1943).

Jazz is a peculiar book because it is more a stylistic exercise than a regular novel. Morrison set out to create a work that would not just be about the jazz age, but actually become it; she did not design the novel’s structure to enhance meaning, but to equal it. Jazz is not a book you read for the plot (it’s all right there on the very first page, no twists beyond that point), but for the language, the rhythm pumping through the lines, the taste of it. In an interview with the Paris Review, Morrison said that it was the most intricate thing she had ever done, “a very simple story about people who do not know that they are living in the jazz age and to never use the word.”

The Narratologist

Toni Morrison

Reading List: Female Friendships

Book Review: “Jazz” (1992) by Toni Morrison