Diana Reid on female friendships and rivalry in Love & Virtue

Diana Reid is a Sydney-based writer, who graduated from the University of Sydney last year with a Bachelor of Arts (First Class Hons Philosophy)/Laws. In January 2020, her career in theatre was off to a promising start: the musical she co-wrote and produced, 1984! The Musical!, debuted and she was set to direct and write theatre performances in Sydney and over to the Edinburgh Fringe. When COVID-19 saw the cancellation of global theatre, she decided she’d spend her time in shutdown writing a manuscript. Love & Virtue is her debut novel.

Today, Diana Reid is on the blog to share her thoughts behind the central friendship between the two women at the heart of Love & Virtue. Read on …

Diana Reid

I wrote Love & Virtue in 2020, the year after I graduated university. Like many students, I made friends at university that I hope to keep for life. They are the people I look up to, live with, unwind with, and, recently, the people I miss in lockdowns. My debut novel, however, is about a friendship of an entirely different kind.

The protagonists, Eve and Michaela, meet in their first year at a university college, where they live in adjacent rooms. It is no spoiler to say that their friendship does not last: we’re told in the first sentence of Chapter 1. Very different, but equally brilliant, the two women bond easily, aided by a shared sense of humour, and a sharp eye for the college’s mix of material wealth and moral poverty. But the cracks are quick to appear. Eve is bold and self-assured, with firm ideas about right and wrong. Michaela—an outsider in this privileged world—is less sure in her beliefs.

Their friendship—its beginnings in mutual admiration, right through to its explosive conclusion—was always at the heart of Love & Virtue. There’s a paradox to these short-lived, far-reaching early-adult friendships that I find interesting. On the one hand, they’re confined to the past: contained within a story. On the other hand, like all good stories, they resonate in the present.

In Love & Virtue, this friendship derives its potency—its life-changing resonance—from two features: the university backdrop, and the flawed female protagonists at its centre.

Two canonical campus novels, The Secret History by Donna Tartt and Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh also begin with friendships that have ended. Their narrators, like mine, look back over that time in their lives that made them who they are, and the people that continue to shape them. For Tartt’s narrator, Richard Papen, he writes about friendships he made a decade ago. When Waugh’s Charles Ryder looks back, it’s from a distance of twenty years. Why are these narrators, and the readers that keep returning to them so obsessed with these lost friendships? We could put it down to a literary trope: a quirk of the campus novel genre. But I think it reveals something deeper about campus life.

First, is the obvious fact that campuses are, predominantly, populated by the young. For many students university is their first foray into adulthood. They arrive with a dangerous combination of inexperience and ambition: equally unsure of who they are, and determined to become someone. In this time of self-fashioning, we look to our peers for inspiration. Enter a bold character, who seems fully-formed, who knows themselves completely, and strikes you as exactly the kind of person you would like to become. You’re drawn in immediately.

Second, aside from the youth, we have the campus itself, which lends itself to intense, personality-shaping friendships. Universities are places where young people learn, and sometimes live, alongside each other. Any closed environment generates its own hierarchies and social codes (read: drama!). You don’t need to have read The Secret History, or Brideshead Revisited, or more recent campus novels like Batuman’s The Idiot or Rooney’s Normal People. If you’ve watched five minutes of reality television, you’ll know that environments where people live on top of each other are hotbeds for drama. Falling in and out of love—and friendship—comes easily.

But students are at university, not only to eat and drink and sleep (sometimes, with each other) but also, hopefully, to learn. In addition to the personal drama, there’s a broader engagement with the wider world as students try to discover what place they will eventually take in it. In Love & Virtue, for example, Michaela and Eve moralise in philosophy lectures and tutorials, and then grapple with the complexities of sex, power and consent in real life. So theirs is not just a drama of personalities—it’s also a theatre for ideas, as they test each other’s worldview, and try always to be better versions of themselves.

While universities might cultivate aspirational friendships, where one person strives to emulate the other, there is a darker side to all the copying and flattery. Love & Virtue explores the way friendships—in this case, a female friendship—can flirt with something more insidious: rivalry. Because what are our protagonists strive for, is not simply to be the best version of themselves. They want to be the best. To quote Gore Vidal (as the Michaela does): “It is not enough to succeed, others must fail.”

In Michaela and Eve’s case, their competition heats up in the engine-room that is academia. Specifically, male-dominated academia. Although very different, and differently situated in terms of class—Eve is a wealthy, confident insider, Michaela a comparative outsider—both women are fiercely intelligent. Thrust into the overwhelmingly male world that is the study of philosophy, they display little interest in what the boys are achieving. I think, at least in part, this is a natural response to an environment where space for women feels limited. Indeed, it is a classic symptom of internalised misogyny: to perceive other women as threats.

Perhaps this all sounds very toxic: a depressing commentary on the way un-diverse environments can pit minorities against each other. I, personally, find something empowering in Eve and Michaela’s rivalry. Because, although the story of a rivalry is one of intimidation and self-doubt, its origins are in respect. To count someone as a rival means you admire them and take them seriously. It also means—importantly, for women in an academic context—that you take yourself seriously, and your ambitions seriously. The very exercise of bringing each other down pushes them both to greater heights.

Whether this dynamic is a mere product of patriarchy, or whether it will exist wherever there are women with ambition, is not a question that I am in a position to answer. Who knows? Maybe in a time where there are as many female philosophers studied at university as there are male philosophers, these relationships will look quaint and historical. I suspect, however, that there is something deeper here: something that scratches beneath structural privileges and social codes. In part, this suspicion is based (like many of my hazy intuitions) on novels I love and admire. Zadie Smith’s Swing Time and Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet both follow the twisty, toxic dynamic of two women who aspire to be like, and be better than each other.

The suspicion that this kind of friendship is innately, timelessly female, also owes something to my readers—although, admittedly, this is a small sample (the book is not published until 29 September). While I have had many enthusiastic and insightful male readers (indeed, the manuscript’s very first readers were, by coincidence, all male friends of mine) it is only the women—and, for that matter, almost all the women—who read it and say: “When I was younger, I had an Eve.”

I feel conflicted about this last observation, because I fear it reveals something unsavoury, not to mention gender-essentialist, about womanhood. But then I tell myself that representation in literature has to be about representing people—not as types, or tropes, or embodiments of political and philosophical positions—but as people. And real people are flawed. If Michaela and Eve are too, then we cannot begrudge them.

Maybe it is no mystery after all that these messy, sometimes-dangerous, always-formative university friendships have inspired so many novels, including mine. For all our attempts to emulate those we admire, and sometimes replace them, the self is made in the gaps: in the differences these friendships distil. Michaela arrives at university unsure of herself, but hungry for love, knowledge, and power. She sees something of all of these in Eve. To the extent that Michaela finds them—and finds herself—it is not for all the ways she is like Eve, but for all the ways she is unlike her.

And so, although these relationships might be short-lived, we can understand why their fascination lasts. Without them, we would be different people. I suspect—despite the twists and turns these university friendships take, and all the mistakes we make along the way—most of us (Michaela included) would agree with Waugh’s Charles Ryder, when he concludes: Looking back now … there is little I would have left undone or done otherwise.

—Love & Virtue by Diana Reid (Ultimo Press) is out now.

Love & Virtue

by Diana Reid

Michaela and Eve are two bright, bold women who befriend each other their first year at a residential college at university, where they live in adjacent rooms. They could not be more different; one assured and popular – the other uncertain and eager-to-please. But something happens one night in O-week – a drunken encounter, a foggy memory that will force them to confront the realities of consent and wrestle with the dynamics of power.

Initially bonded by their wit and sharp eye for the colleges’ mix of material wealth and moral poverty, Michaela and Eve soon discover how fragile friendship is, and how capable of betrayal they both are...

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