Bad Friends and Frenemies: A Can Lit Research Query

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As I’ve been working on Atwood’s The Robber Bride, I’ve wandered into writing an analysis of the author’s portrayal of problematic female friendships in several of her novels and short stories. This is clearly a digression, so I’m carving out this section to quickly draft an essay on poisonous female friendship in contemporary Canadian fiction.

If readers have suggestions about useful novels and stories, please share!

Because, oddly, all of the interesting examples that occur to me (with the exception of a few troubling Munro stories about women’s sexual rivalries, as in “Differently” or “Mischief”) are by non-Canadian authors: Ferrante, of course, but also Rooney, Messud, and many others.

There’s an interesting friendship in the autofictional How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti. But it’s supportive, not undermining. And there are lots of intimate relationships between women in various Emma Donoghue novels.

But I’m looking for a specific thing: toxic friendships.

The friend who lies and cheats, like Zenia; the one who betrays you more slowly, over time, with a drip drip of mild contempt and undermining. The complicated, fraught friendship that does as much harm as good but ultimately changes you. That friendship. And I’m coming up short, in Canadian examples.

Suggestions?

A close friend is writing a novel that precisely meets my requirements, but she’s withholding it until it’s in print.

She has, however, been a wonderful guide to the international literature of Bad Friends. Alas, she doesn’t think nearly as highly of Can Lit as I do, and since she can read in four languages, her tastes are much broader than my own.

Anyone? Anyone?