Rachel B Glaser, Paulina and Fran: 'The importance of being special', book review

The book maps their relationship; from the intense bonding on a trip to Norway to its disintegration after Fran sleeps with Paulina’s ex

When our anti-heroines initially meet, Paulina first notices Fran’s curly hair, then her outfit, and then realises that Fran is friends with one of Paulina’s enemies: “Her idea of Fran darkened. She wanted to be her, or be with her, or destroy her.” Glaser’s biting, witty novel charts the girls’ flirtations with all of these outcomes as she explores the intense, shifting nature of female friendship and the savage battle to carve out your own identity.

The book maps their relationship; from the intense bonding on a trip to Norway (“Paulina had bought them a pair of striped tunics for twenty kroner at an Oslo market. It was too cold to wear them outdoors, but they’d done it anyway”) to its disintegration after Fran sleeps with Paulina’s ex, and on to their lives after university, for which their visual arts degrees have ill prepared them.

There is an easy shift between the perspectives of the two women that is quick to relax into, and effectively sets up the way they see themselves and each other. While Glaser pushes the two women to an extreme that allows us to laugh at them, there are also plenty of moments of recognition. When you feel yourself reaching the limits of sympathy for the women, Glaser yanks you back in with a sudden, brutal stab of understanding or weakness.

Glaser’s incisiveness is best on the intense ridiculousness of being young: the obsession with working out who we are, protectiveness over the persona we’ve created, and jealousy towards anyone who seems to be trying within the same framework and doing it better. Paulina and Fran are both fixated on the way they appear to be; they live to construct stories about themselves, penning imaginary letters to friends or stories to future grandchildren.

Paulina, who steals the tragic life story of a man she overhears on the street and ends up believing it herself, is hyper aware of her image, and Glaser is shrewd on the relationship that women have with clothes.

The book is full of crackly sharp sentences – not surprising given Glaser’s background in short stories. She particularly excels with moments of darkly poignant humour: “Her orgasm was like a shooting star one pretends to have seen after a friend ecstatically points it out.”

An impromptu dance battle swings from being erotically charged to laugh out loud funny as Fran considers praying to a recently deceased classmate but concludes: “That was ridiculous, she knew – Eileen had just gotten there, she couldn’t do anything yet.”

An unapologetic and unpredictable look at the pull between feeling you must be special while worrying you are not, and constantly looking for wonder and being relentlessly confronted by the mundane.

Paulina and Fran, by Rachel B Glaser. Granta £12.99