Conversations with Friends Book Club Questions

If you are looking for Conversations with Friends book club questions, you have come to the right place.

Now a tv adaptation as a mini-series on Hulu, this debut novel by Sally Rooney will undoubtedly be making the rounds of book clubs in the near future.

And it’s easy to see why.

21-year-old college students deal with their fraught relationships as they figure out their own social value system when they meet married people they are attracted to.

Rooney’s writing style creates the antithesis of a beautiful world that is both familiar and uncomfortable as you see these characters, each with a real personality, cheat and lie.

In a lot of ways, this book highlights the roller coasters of emotion a person can go through in toxic relationships. And yet, at times it also feels like a love story.

With complicated moral questions set against a backdrop of everyday life, this book about two young women and their lives should stir up some, ahem, interesting conversation.

Here’s a list of questions to discuss with your reading group to get you started!

Conversations With Friends Book Club Questions

1. The friendship between Frances and Bobbi plays a major role in this debut novel from Sally Rooney. How does their relationship seem? Is it a healthy one for them? Draining? A net positive?

Are there any aspects of their friendship you share in relationships in your own life?

2. The novel has a way of portraying Frances as both a child who needs to be taken care of and an adult who is responsible for herself.

As a student who is having an affair with an older married man, which do you feel she is more of? Why?

3. Do you feel like Frances and Nick really love each other by the end of the book? Why or why not?

4. The book is called Conversations with Friends, and these friends really do have a lot of conversation. If you were going to rename it though, what would another title be?

Would having a different title make you approach the book differently by affecting your expectations?

5. After Nick and Frances start their affair, did it make you feel differently about them? How did it affect your feelings towards Melissa and Bobbi?

6. This book is heavily highlighted by other readers. Were there any quotes or passages that stood out to you?

7. We hear a lot about Frances’ relationship with her mother and father. Does knowing what she is dealing with in her home life change how you feel about her choices?

8. Who is the most likable character in the book? The least? Why?

9. Both Nick and Frances are at some point sick with an illness that leaves them very weak (Nick with pneumonia and Frances with endometriosis).

Why do you think Rooney chose to do that? Does it have any greater significance to the story? 

10. Did anything that happened in the book surprise you?

11. Frances makes choices that affect a lot of people in her life, from her affair to her publishing the story about Bobbi. Can you relate to any of her choices?

12. What do you think happens with our main characters after our final sentence of “Come get me”? How does the story likely continue?

Did you read Conversations with Friends for your book club? What did you think? Leave me a comment below about how the questions and book worked for you!