Novelist Zoë Eisenberg and journalist-turned-author Rhaina Cohen have something in common: they both published books about extraordinarily intimate friendships. Their debut books published in February of this year with strikingly similar titles—Significant Others (Eisenberg) and The Other Significant Others (Cohen). They talk about their books as “literary fraternal twins.”
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Cohen’s book, a work of narrative nonfiction, profiles sets of friends who’ve made deep commitments to each other—owning homes together, raising kids together and caring for each other in old age. Through their stories, Cohen argues that friendship has untapped potential to be an anchoring part of our lives and challenges the idea that you need to be in a romantic relationship to be “complete” or fulfilled.
Eisenberg’s novel jumps between the perspectives of two very different women, Jess and Ren, who have been close friends and roommates since they met in college. Now in their late thirties, the women co-own a home and co-mother a dog. When Ren becomes unexpectedly pregnant following a one night stand, she asks Jess to co-parent her child with her, and though Jess agrees, as the novel progresses the duo realize for the first time in two decades they may not want the same thing.
In this conversation, Cohen and Eisenberg discuss the genesis for their work, what platonic intimacy can look like, and how cultivating deep friendship can offer a stabilizing alternative to the romance plot—both on and off the page.
(The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.)
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Rhaina Cohen: So much of our books are about people individually trying to work through a kind of relationship that they’re not aware other people have and that they don’t have any resources for. What was it like for you coming up with a narrative we haven’t seen much of?
Zoë Eisenberg: For me, going through the process of letting people read drafts I did get some feedback like, I don’t really understand the relationship, in the same way that I would get this note in my own life with my deep friendships, and the same way that Jess and Ren would certainly get in their life. So it was like being in kind of this funny vacuum.
RC: Did you have to alter anything that felt fundamental because people weren’t getting it? Or did you just say like, that’s not for you?
ZE: Both. I did make it more clear that Jess was never in love with Ren, although she poses the question to herself, am I?, because everyone else is posing that question to her as well.
But if you go on Goodreads, which you know, is a terrifying place to be as an author, it is interesting to see how some people are like: I don’t understand the relationship in this book. I think that’s all right. It isn’t for everyone.
In my own life I tend to refer to mine as romantic friendships. Not like, this is my romantic friend, but just I’m aware that I am very romantic in my friendships. I think about romance more as an expression of love.
Can I ask, what was it like coming up with the common language used in your book? I was excited for all the terms you use to name relationships like this, even historically, things like affrèrement. I would love to bring back the term “smash” as a friend crush. Can we bring that back?
RC: Actually when I was doing some brainstorming with friends, one suggested Smashed as a title, but I’m like, people are gonna think it’s a different “smashed.” But yeah, I was really interested from the outset in naming this kind of friendship, because really, without a name you don’t have legitimacy.
ZE: In my own life I tend to refer to mine as romantic friendships. Not like, this is my romantic friend, but just I’m aware that I am very romantic in my friendships. I think about romance more as an expression of love.
RC: I started off thinking I was writing a book about modern day romantic friendships, which is the historical term for really intimate same-sex friendships, because the friendship that I have with the person [who inspired me to write] the book is very romantic. There’s infatuation that we both felt, there’s a lot of physical and emotional intimacy and affection.
Once I started to put the pieces together that I knew other people who had these sorts of friendships throughout my life and a little bit about the historical precedent for these sorts of friendships, it made me stop thinking there was something that I needed to explain, but instead turn around and ask what can friendships like ours show about what might be inaccurate with everybody else’s thinking about what friendship is, what romantic relationships are, what family is.
But I moved away from using the term “romantic friendship,” partly because people didn’t understand what it meant. And I still constantly hear people making the distinction, well, Rhaina’s writing about friendships, they’re not romantic. And I’m like, well, they’re not sexual, but what is romance?
ZE: I also develop friendships like the ones that you’re describing. I’ve had some that are longstanding, but I’ve also had several that last a few years and then end much like a traditional romantic relationship. When the idea for this story came I was going through the ending of one of these friendships that felt really pivotal because the person had been so integral to my life, the primary person I would call, my closest point of contact.
And so when we ultimately had a fallout based on a lack of communication and just, we were growing apart and not realizing it, not accepting it—it had such similarities to a romantic relationship. But it wasn’t one, and I had such a hard time processing it for myself, but also with the people around me.
Because I’m queer and I’ve had romantic relationships with women, everyone really wanted me to be in love with this other woman. It was just so much easier for them to understand why I would be so devastated.
When I read your book, I was struck by the fact that a lot of the people in the friendships you were looking at are queer. Have you found queer people are more naturally inclined to create these friendships?
RC: There’s a few things here. When I was searching I disproportionately found queer people without searching explicitly. There are really good reasons why queer people seem to have an easier time with this.
I think of a line from a book about asexuality by Angela Chen, where it’s something to the effect: once you start deprogramming yourself in one way, you start asking yourself a lot of other questions. Like, what is the nature of the feeling that I need to have in order to build a life with another person?
The idea that you would incorporate a friend into something as fundamental and permanent as building a family is not something a lot of people in opposite-sex relationships naturally are gonna be confronted with. There’s also just a lot of history and culture of having chosen family [in queer communities].
Like when people ask the very common question, essentially, can men and women be friends? I’m like, this is really a straight people question.
ZE: Ha! Yes, it is.
RC: But I do wanna say that all sorts of people have these friendships and it was important for me to show that you don’t have to subscribe to a particular ideology or have a particular sexual orientation in order to have these sorts of friendships. Can I ask, as a fiction writer, what did it feel like reading a real-life version of what you conjured from your imagination? Did you notice things that fiction can do that non-fiction can’t?
ZE: Hm. I tend to have this interesting relationship with consequence in my writing, where I don’t want to be overly moralistic. This novel was always to me a platonic divorce story. That’s not a spoiler, it’s what I couch it in. When I was approaching Jess and Ren, it was really important to me that the ending felt similar to how I felt. So I got some pushback with the ending of the story that I might not have if I was able to be like, yeah, but this is how it happened.
RC: Was the pushback that people felt you were saying something global about the viability of these friendships?
ZE: I think it was twofold. The first was just that it’s a story people are reading to be entertained, and it doesn’t end how some of them want it to. But there has been some pushback where, yes, certain readers are like, what are you saying about the viability of a friendship like this?
And what I am trying to say is that friendships can be just as important and as integral as a romantic relationship, but they take just as much work. Just like for a lot of romantic couples, if you don’t work on it the way you should, the relationship ultimately could disintegrate. Which isn’t necessarily the rosy outlook on friendship that I think maybe some readers would like.
RC: Well, part of what felt really important to me about writing a chapter on loss in friendship was that one of the most effective ways to show the importance of a friendship like this is to show how people suffer after the loss of it.
ZE: Exactly. I talk a lot about loneliness in my life and in my work, and I wanna talk about the diversifying the portfolio concept. I hadn’t ever seen it framed quite that way.
RC: This idea comes from work by Elaine Cheung. She and her coauthors talks about how people who have multiple close emotional relationships tend to be happier than those who invest everything in one person.
Many people, Esther Perel most notably, have talked about how the expectation that one partner is going to bring everything to you really undermines romantic relationships, because people can’t fulfill those unrealistic expectations, and people who aren’t partnered might feel it’s either you have everything or you have nothing, nobody.
ZE: I agree, and people are looking for the “perfect partner” or leaving a relationship that is good, throwing the baby out with the bath water, because they’re like, oh, well they don’t do 100 percent of everything I need.
If you have multiple emotional anchor points, then you won’t feel unmoored completely when one lifts.
I also think some people stay in relationships because they’ve put so much energy into it and they’re like, If I leave this relationship, I would have no one. Whereas if you have multiple emotional anchor points, then you won’t feel unmoored completely when one lifts.
RC: It could be a sibling, it could be friends, it could be parents. It means you have more stability. We’ve been told to search for “the one.” That finding one human—a romantic partner—is the difference between loneliness and feeling complete. But connection and love doesn’t need to be a one-stop-shop.
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The Other Significant Others by Rhaina Cohen is available via St. Martin’s Press.
Significant Others by Zoe Eisenberg is available via Mira Press.
