The Female Friendship Novel in the Era of the Group Chat

The novel begins in 2008 when Desiree accompanies her grandfather Nolan to Switzerland, where he is seeking assisted suicide. Desiree has been taking care of him, though, she reflects, “she was a mere twenty years old when she moved back home, a young dummy.” After her grandfather’s death—which does not go according to his plan—she inherits a substantial sum. But the money doesn’t make it easier for her to cope with the world or to reconnect with her living biological family (her mother has also died, her father is absent, and her life choices and personality have distanced her from her sister, Danielle, who is a reverent Christian and a doctor). “In books,” Flournoy writes, “characters often felt an estranged or dead person’s presence at places where the two of them shared memories, but this never happened for Desiree.… She never felt presence, only absence.” Her friends fill those absences by sharing holidays and celebrations. After her grandfather dies and her sister moves to the Midwest, Desiree wonders whether she can stay in Los Angeles, her hometown: “Might as well cede the city to its ghosts. Ghosts who didn’t even have the decency to show any sign of themselves to her. Had they shown themselves—a whisper, shifting light, a cold breeze—she might have been able to stay.” But the city is not a friend, so she follows Nakia to New York. On the East Coast, the friends establish their careers, cultivate their romantic relationships, and engage in early-2000s R&B revelry.

In The Wilderness, each character has to address how to make a home when one can be anywhere. Although anywhere, in this novel, is mostly two cities: New York and Los Angeles. Flournoy’s descriptions of both feel lived. In L.A., of course, there is traffic, the gnarled junctions of the 5 that keep the friends from visiting one another; there is Tommy the Clown, a dancer who moves through neighborhoods such as Compton, frolicking and krumping. But New York City carries a pulse even when an activity is banal; on the bus in Harlem, January observes “Seventh-Day Adventists looking Sabbath-sharp, aunties in headscarves running errands, people in OSHA-approved black work sneakers coming home from night shifts, and one potential walk of shame, judging by the slinky dress and off-kilter wig.”

The cities also shape the protagonists’ ambitions. Among Flournoy’s heroines, Monique represents one of the most despised types of our generation: the online influencer. We are introduced to her through a 2019 Tumblr-style blog in which she reflects on her “stint of virality”: a post she wrote a year earlier about a dispute at the Southern university where she used to work over how to handle historic slave quarters on campus. Monique was entangled in the the debate. “Part of me thought it was unfair for people to expect me, someone who had just given up an apartment, a job, all of New York City, for this new place and new job, to stick my neck out,” she wrote. “Another part of me wonders whether there was a way I could have done more.” Her “indictment” of the university is a way to do more—and she’s able to spin it into an online brand.