The Book of Goose

In The Book of Goose, an adult Agnès celebrates the complex intimacy of young friendship. Her most formative relationship is her childhood friendship with Fabienne, her love for Fabienne being platonic and romantic. She puts the brilliant Fabienne on a pedestal and idolizes her as a source of stimulation. In postwar reconstruction France, Agnès and Fabienne’s families experience poverty, death, and other hardships. Only together can the girls escape the reality of such tragedies. They inspire each other’s resilience in an otherwise threatening world. Fabienne is also Agnès’s source of identity. Agnès believes she only exists in tandem with Fabienne, their friendship being codependent but supportive.

In a world of tragedy, true love is hard to find. Agnès and Fabienne don’t receive much love from their families, who are too busy trying to survive. The girls’ love for each other is their only source of companionship, sisterhood, and romance. Young friendship is complex, but Agnès and Fabienne’s friendship is all the more complicated because of their situation. What makes young friendship intimate is that children are still learning about themselves and the world. Agnès and Fabienne are already hardened by the challenges of life, but through their roleplaying games and writing, they are able to reclaim some innocence. Because Agnès is a child without a concrete guide, she develops her identity based on Fabienne, who at least acts self-assured. This relationship has the potential to be toxic, but it is the only way Agnès knows how to navigate adolescence. She doesn’t know how to plan for the future or act on her own dreams. Fabienne is the leader in their relationship, which works for Agnès because Fabienne leads her to opportunities through their collaborative writing. This writing includes Fabienne’s use of the pen name Jacques, her imaginary brother and Agnès’s boyfriend, whom Agnès conflates with Fabienne out of love.

Agnès and Fabienne’s friendship effectively ends when they become women (i.e., turn 15) because their childhood together was the height of their happiness. They don’t believe they can continue this magic into adulthood because part of this magic was innocence. With loss of innocence comes loss of reliance. Even so, for Agnès, Fabienne stays with her throughout her life. She reclaims this friendship by writing about it in The Book of Goose.