Yes, your friends are talking about you.

And other finale lessons from the 'White Lotus Three'.

I have a friend who thinks I’m not always the best mother.

She thinks I’m a bit slap-dash. A bit inconsistent. That I’m not across the details enough, and that for children, details matter. She thinks that out of guilt, I indulge my kids a bit.

She’s right.

I have a friend who thinks I can be a bit selfish. That emotional labour isn’t my strong suit, and it wouldn’t kill me to lift my head and organise a birthday dinner every now and again.

She’s right.

I have a friend who thinks I make my life harder than it needs to be. That I can procrastinate to the point where problems become crises.

She’s 100 per cent right.

The old friends who know you best do not think you are perfect. In fact, they know, with absolute certainty, that you are not. Just as you know the same about them.

The people who’ve been embedded in your life a long time also know all the things you got wrong. The relationships that should have been flings. The flings that belonged to someone else. The lies you got caught in. That time your boss made a clumsy pass and you didn’t slap them down. What you say about your mother when you’re drunk. That you flirt when you’re feeling insecure. The hairstyles you thought were hot but made you look like a thumb.

They know all that. Ideally, they know when to remind you of these things, and when to swallow them. But not always. Because they’re not perfect, either.

Any woman lucky enough to have friends knows all this.

And yet. When we depict female friendship out in the world, if there is anything other than perfection, any hint of complexity beyond blind cheerleading support, we have some words at hand: Toxic. Bitchy. Catty.

There are two dominant pop-culture tropes about women friends. One, they just secretly hate each other. Two, they are selfless angels who sacrifice all for ‘the girls’.

This year we’ve been gifted a new model in the genre that dares to suggest the truth might be more complex. Fancy white ladies elbowing out the Sex And The City women as the dominant friend group. I’m talking about Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan), Kate (Leslie Bibb) and Laurie (Carrie Coon) of The White Lotus, who, over the course of eight episodes, went from geysers gushing shiny positivity - “You look fabulous!” “No, you look fabulous!” - to sniping concern-trolls - “Did you see how much wine she drank at dinner?” - to truth-tellers - “You haven’t changed, remember when you flirted with her husband at my wedding?”

In the penultimate episode of The White Lotus, the women fell out. Sort of over a man, but really over themselves. In the finale, they made up. And if you are not a woman, with complicated, long-lived friendships, that might look strange to you, the way they kind of talked about things, and kind of didn’t, and how one of them was truly honest, and one of them hardly said a word, and then they all stroked each other’s hair and snuggled.

The words came out. Toxic. Bitchy. Catty. But many, many women knew exactly what they saw. Something recognisable. Something real. Something like family.

Our old friends are trick mirrors reflecting a version of ourselves we’re not sure is accurate, might be outdated, is probably unflattering, but overall pretty true. And our old friends are also windows, views into lives that have things in common with ours but are completely different. Varying inputs and choices we wouldn’t or couldn’t have made. Luck and chance and fortunes all shaken up and scattered to add up to a different result.

When Jaclyn told her friends at least they criticised the real her, and not an idea of her, and Laurie admitted that sometimes, the other two’s apparently ‘perfect’ lives made her feel shit about her own, it was clear that we were wrong when we looked at them arriving at the White Lotus in a cloud of cocktail enthusiasm and empty compliments and said “These women aren’t real friends.”

They are friends. They’re imperfect friends for imperfect people. Vain. Insecure. Competitive. Loving. Forgiving. Loyal.

The kind of friends who can talk shit to each other about each other, because they know each other’s shit. But to the outside world, women like these are a closed shop.

In my fan-fic version of these characters out in the wild, I know that if Kate or Laurie was at a party in Austin or New York, and some snarky young thing fished for gossip about Jaclyn Lemon, their famous, beautiful friend, they would tell her, “Yes, she’s as lovely as she seems.” “She works so hard.” “We’re so proud of her.” And smile and walk away.

You can bet that even though Kate thinks Laurie makes her life harder than it needs to be (hi, my old friend), she would open up her beautiful Austin home to her if she needed to run from it. Although she might not introduce her to the church ladies.

That when Jaclyn’s supposedly sexy marriage fades into something ordinary, it will be Laurie she calls to talk shit about divorce.

And that Kate, who votes “independent”, will not be blamed by her friends for the callous chaos of Trump’s America, even if she’s the closest they’ll get to understanding why he won.

Female friends - imaginary, real, yours, mine - will talk. Your life will sometimes be fodder and entertainment. Sometimes it will be a cause for celebration. A cautionary tale. A sliver of excellent gossip.

You will feel differently about all kinds of things - parenting and work and love and sex and politics - and you’ll tiptoe around whether and when you choose to hack into those.

But as Laurie put it, there’s depth to just being around the people who’ve known you forever. A depth that can withstand a little inner-circle gossip, a contested fling with a handsome Russian masseuse, and even a visit to the ‘old’ people’s pool. Because people who’ve known many versions of you don’t have to pretend that this current one is perfection. They just have to love you regardless.

Even if, actually, they think you’re not always the best mother.

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WHILE WE’RE HERE: I have a thing to tell you about. Today I got the first physical copies of my new novel He Would Never delivered to the Mamamia office.

This is my fifth novel, but please let me tell you that this NEVER gets old. A book doesn’t seem real until this very moment, even though it has consumed many of your waking hours for literal years. It’s an idea in your head, then it’s a file on your computer, then it’s a pile of pages. It’s yours. And then, it’s… HERE.

I have plenty to tell you about what He Would Never is about over the next few weeks. It’s out on April 29 and if you feel like it, you can pre-order it, here. But for now, let’s just appreciate how gorgeous the book is, thanks to an extraordinary designer called Christa Moffit. Here we go.

Hx