Weldon writes domestic life like it’s a battlefield you’ve learned to decorate.

Female Friends follows three women across decades—friendship as continuity, but also as friction, imbalance, and quiet competition. Marriage, motherhood, work, desire—none of it is treated as stable ground. Everything shifts depending on who is looking, who is telling the story, and who is being left out of it.

She's sharp, unsentimental, occasionally very funny in a way that borders on cruel. Much like Joyce Carol Oates, or Mary Gaitskill in that way. Weldon doesn’t sentimentalise female friendship as solidarity; she treats it as something negotiated, shaped by class, opportunity, and the small violences of everyday life.

It feels both very much of its time and strangely current—especially in how it handles the idea that intimacy doesn’t equal understanding.