Someone Else's Shoes

Friendships and solidarity between women feature throughout Someone Else’s Shoes, and Moyes highlights how her protagonists’ relationships with other women are beneficial to their social, professional, and future prosperity. This is particularly true of Nisha, who begins the story distrusting other women and believing in the philosophy that “[w]omen smile understandingly at your confidences, then use them against you like weapons” (47). In her defense, Nisha has already suffered a variety of bad experiences at the hands of women in her husband’s social circle and can perhaps be forgiven for her jaded outlook on the nature of female friendship. However, her guilt-ridden memories of appeasing her husband by cutting short a valuable relationship with her best friend, Juliana, demonstrate that her approach to friendship was not always so cynical and that before her unhealthy marriage to an unethical man corrupted her morals, she was once capable of building and fostering mutually beneficial and supportive relationships with other women. It is this ability that proves to be the most valuable skill she regains during the stress of her troubles in London, for upon bonding with Jasmine and learning to allow others to help her, she also regains the mutual sense of trust and respect that grows naturally from healthy relationships.