With Friends Like This, Who Needs Enemies?

Friends, enemies and frenemies—women's relationships can be complex: a source of endless comfort and strength or something that makes you wish human mothers ate their young. Here are some novels to help appreciate all the really good women in your life, or to help you recognize the ones that need to be un-friended! 

Her by Harriet Lane. A disturbing, haunting novel about the relationship between Nina, a confident and self-possessed artist who is drawn to Emma, a stay-at-home mother. Nina's narration remains calm, but her passive-aggressive sabotage of Emma shows a dark and lethal side of female friendship; Emma's struggles with late motherhood will ring true and have you rooting for her to realize what Nina is up to, before it's too late.

The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud. Nora, who teaches to support her art career, meets the mother of a young boy in her class and is immediately dazzled by Sirena's beauty and artistic ambition. The family is visiting while the husband teaches at Harvard, and Nora is drawn into their circle. Nora seethes with anger about the "good neighbor" image foisted on women of a certain age; and Messud relates her inability to be ruthless to her failure to become an artist.

What Was She Thinking? [notes on a scandal] by Zoe Heller. A lonely and bitter spinster, Barbara, befriends a younger teaching colleague, Sheba. Then Sheba begins an affair with a student, and Barbara obsessively documents it as she envies Sheba's family life and tries to worm her way into it. Made into a fantastic film with Judi Dench and Cate Blanchet.

Precious Thing by Colette McBeth. When journalist Rachel Walsh goes out to report on a missing woman, she realizes it's her childhood friend Clara. A tense and page-turning story emerges as Rachel tries to fight her way to the truth and find out why their friendship soured.