‘Conversations with Friends’ aspires to be a modern, complex love story in the cloak of a fiction-memoir. It also spends a lot of time exploring the seam between wealthy early millenials and up-and-coming Gen Z / late millenials.
Stylistically, it’s marked by a total lack of quotation marks. Dialogue blends into narration. This mostly didn’t annoy me and occasionally I felt like it was improving the flow of the writing. An interesting move.
The characters aren’t terribly likeable, but that isn’t the objective. I think that how they connect is worthwhile, maybe just because it explores an angle of the relationships between men and women - one in which a man isn’t the dominant figure - which is rarely discussed.