Pop Culture Is Obsessed With Female Friendships

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books.

In Toni Morrison’s Sula, the title character and Nel are friends and enemies all at once: Nel envies and eventually hates Sula but, at the end of the novel, finds herself entirely bereft without her. In Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, Lila and Elena are united by their similarities in an unforgiving world, until their differences send them hurtling away from each other. These intense, fickle friendships between women have been chronicled in literature “for as long as women have been able to publish their work,” Lily Meyer wrote in The Atlantic this week, “but the past 10 years have seen more and more novels about prickly, intellectual, and conflictedly maternal women like Elena, as well as gifted