Just before giving birth in the summer of 2024, I joined a citywide “moms” group chat in Berlin. It was a digital confessional for the discussion of gestational sciatica or the inability to touch one’s toes, for descriptions of vaginal tearing during birth and photos of children’s inexplicable rashes. Complete strangers fought over used baby furniture (with Parent 1 calling out Parent 2 for selling a baby crib that she had given to her for free). The conversation was entertaining, yet the passive-aggressive jabs began to bore me, and I concluded that I had nothing in common with these other moms besides the year that we had a baby.
Over the past few months, I have quietly left over a dozen group chats based on apparent affinities, when I realized that they were no substitute for the warmth and intimacy I had with my real-life friends. Companions who supported me well before I became pregnant or had a child; who could help me understand how to remain whole during the uncertainties of early parenthood; and who, if I had needed it, would have acted like Desiree, a character in Angela Flournoy’s new novel, The Wilderness. “Better to just show up,” Desiree thinks when she gets some odd texts from her friend January soon after she gives birth. And it’s a good thing she does, because January is on the verge of a breakdown, trapped in the house with two infants, suffering from a prolapse, and desperate to leave her husband.
Texts and group chats appear seldom in The Wilderness, which comes 10 years after Flournoy’s debut, The Turner House, a multigenerational family saga that was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2015. Yet when they do, these electronic missives give texture to the friendships between the four women who make up its core. For instance, there is the tender lightness and chaff of this exchange:
JANUARY: We could just leave. Go someplace warm and not American.NAKIA: YES! Preferably with Blacks/browns.MONIQUE: Yesssss to an escape plan.MONIQUE: But do we feel comfortable calling brown folks browns?DESIREE: LOL don’t change the subject. We goin on vacay!!!
Here we have a glimpse of a group that feels genuine: born of off-screen relationships, inflected with politics without falling into formality or righteous monologue. The Wilderness follows the four friends in that chat from 2008 to 2027, though the timeline isn’t linear and the narration isn’t always strictly focused on them. The women, from their early twenties to their early forties, navigate life in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York City; they train as chefs, physicians, or librarians; some find themselves in unfulfilling relationships, while others experience estrangement from their families. Over the course of the novel, we uncover their connections and learn how class, family background, and even hair texture have shaped their life circumstances.
There are certain templates for the novel of female friendship, and with The Wilderness, Flournoy has broken with them. All of the women are African American—notable in and of itself, in a genre that mostly celebrates white protagonists—but they are not all friends from childhood, linked by growing up in the same city or neighborhood (like Sally Rooney’s characters, or Lenù and Lila from Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels). There are four of them, as opposed to the more typical pair navigating intense swings between rivalry and deep admiration; there is no singular conflict, no regular pattern of closeness and estrangement, as with the way that Lila reappears and disappears from Lenù’s life. The relationships in The Wilderness do not mirror the intensity of Jane Austen, who once wrote, “There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature.” By contrast, these are women whose departures from each other are constant, and often surprising. Yet the friendships persist: because they live in a digitally connected world, where people communicate through memes, social media, and text groups. Female bonds look different than they did in Austen’s era. Flournoy’s kaleidoscopic view feels true to our times.
The novel begins in 2008 when Desiree accompanies her grandfather Nolan to Switzerland, where he is seeking assisted suicide. Desiree has been taking care of him, though, she reflects, “she was a mere twenty years old when she moved back home, a young dummy.” After her grandfather’s death—which does not go according to his plan—she inherits a substantial sum. But the money doesn’t make it easier for her to cope with the world or to reconnect with her living biological family (her mother has also died, her father is absent, and her life choices and personality have distanced her from her sister, Danielle, who is a reverent Christian and a doctor). “In books,” Flournoy writes, “characters often felt an estranged or dead person’s presence at places where the two of them shared memories, but this never happened for Desiree.… She never felt presence, only absence.” Her friends fill those absences by sharing holidays and celebrations. After her grandfather dies and her sister moves to the Midwest, Desiree wonders whether she can stay in Los Angeles, her hometown: “Might as well cede the city to its ghosts. Ghosts who didn’t even have the decency to show any sign of themselves to her. Had they shown themselves—a whisper, shifting light, a cold breeze—she might have been able to stay.” But the city is not a friend, so she follows Nakia to New York. On the East Coast, the friends establish their careers, cultivate their romantic relationships, and engage in early-2000s R&B revelry.
These are women whose departures from each other are constant, and often surprising. Yet the friendships persist.
In The Wilderness, each character has to address how to make a home when one can be anywhere. Although anywhere, in this novel, is mostly two cities: New York and Los Angeles. Flournoy’s descriptions of both feel lived. In L.A., of course, there is traffic, the gnarled junctions of the 5 that keep the friends from visiting one another; there is Tommy the Clown, a dancer who moves through neighborhoods such as Compton, frolicking and krumping. But New York City carries a pulse even when an activity is banal; on the bus in Harlem, January observes “Seventh-Day Adventists looking Sabbath-sharp, aunties in headscarves running errands, people in OSHA-approved black work sneakers coming home from night shifts, and one potential walk of shame, judging by the slinky dress and off-kilter wig.”
The cities also shape the protagonists’ ambitions. Among Flournoy’s heroines, Monique represents one of the most despised types of our generation: the online influencer. We are introduced to her through a 2019 Tumblr-style blog in which she reflects on her “stint of virality”: a post she wrote a year earlier about a dispute at the Southern university where she used to work over how to handle historic slave quarters on campus. Monique was entangled in the the debate. “Part of me thought it was unfair for people to expect me, someone who had just given up an apartment, a job, all of New York City, for this new place and new job, to stick my neck out,” she wrote. “Another part of me wonders whether there was a way I could have done more.” Her “indictment” of the university is a way to do more—and she’s able to spin it into an online brand.
As her follower count grows, Monique seeks public relations assistance from Jay, Nakia’s girlfriend, whom she meets during one of their “progressively minded” Los Angeles dinner parties. Nakia disapproves; she looks down on the world of online fame (even though her girlfriend also moves in it). Monique, offended, argues that she needs an online presence to secure financial stability, unlike Nakia, who comes from money. This is one of many instances where Flournoy demonstrates a keen awareness of how class and career shape friendships. “Monique had gotten better after a few years of being shamelessly self-motivated,” she writes in one of January’s sections, “but she still put her own interests first to a degree that grated on January’s nerve.” A moral divide is established between a character who performs her activism online (Monique) and one who eventually does it on the streets (Nakia).
Near the end of the book, these concerns are woven into a somber yet emotional arc. Among her friends, Nakia carries the mark of the Black elite—she is part of a “striving family” that helped found Newark, New Jersey. Her shift from a restaurant owner to a mutual aid provider arises from her brief relationship with Reina, an undocumented woman from Guatemala. After their tense breakup, which prompts Nakia to reflect on her own power and privilege, she begins volunteering at a mobile soup kitchen for the unhoused in Los Angeles. In 2027, the Bunker Hill Uprisings trigger a state of emergency in the city. As Nakia observes, “The spark was the same as most sparks, historically: the police. And like most modern sparks, it spread via video share. An unhoused, one-legged woman in a wheelchair filmed the police standing by as her tent and all her belongings burned.” A regular food distribution turns chaotic after police kettle everyone and prevent them from leaving. Trapped and confused, Nakia experiences firsthand the truths that led to the protests. After last summer’s showdown between anti-ICE protesters and the National Guard in Los Angeles, Flournoy’s depiction of resistance from within the city’s encampments and the immigrant community feels prophetic.
It’s peculiar that the characters’ most concrete engagement with politics in the book occurs in an imagined event (even if an eerily plausible one). Elsewhere, the women are more loosely linked to major happenings, like the 2008 economic crisis. Desiree may be “waist-deep in student loans with no degree or certification to show for it, and waiting tables,” finding it “hard to take a step forward when anything could be lurking in the future,” but she so quickly inherits wealth from her grandfather that her lack of direction seems out of touch. Is it depression, grief, or something else? It points to a problem with the elliptical narration: I wanted to understand how she became friends with Monique, January, and Nakia, rather than just why she continued those relationships.
Reading The Wilderness, I also found myself seeking the medium I mildly detest: I wanted to see the group chats. I wanted a window into how they planned their Caribbean holidays, the outfits they would wear to the next wedding, gossip about the latest one-night stand. This did not happen, and for good reason; or rather, the same reason I’ve exited all those chats—these digital conversations are banal. And yet, in Flournoy’s rendering, I think I would have relished them.
The Turner House spanned six decades, telling the story of a Black family amid the economic decline of a fictional Detroit neighborhood. The Vietnam War, cancer, homelessness: the Turner siblings are not spared hardship, but their struggles are not the only things that define them, and they do not feel completely weighed down by the past. As Cha-Cha, the oldest Turner child, explains, they try to find a delicate balance between historical trauma and the American dream:
Slavery. Did there ever exist a more annoying way to try to make a modern-day black man feel like his troubles were insignificant, that he should be satisfied with the sorry hand society dealt him? Cha-Cha thought not. The line of reasoning was faulty; it was precisely because his grandfather’s father was born a slave that he should expect more from life, and more from this country, to make up for lost time at the very least.
Flournoy’s intentions are clear: to confront how African Americans have been dispossessed without viewing them as separate from the nation’s promise. Each Turner relative maintains a visceral desire to survive and an unwavering ambition to surpass their own expectations.
The women in The Wilderness try to emerge from circumstances unscathed; to forge their identities in the face of everything life throws at them.
In The Wilderness, Flournoy depicts women who are, overall, more financially comfortable, educated, and mobile than the Turners. It might seem like this is a portrait of coastal Black millennials, similar to Issa Rae’s show Insecure, one that doesn’t reflect a broader American narrative. But that would be a shallow interpretation. As she did with The Turner House, Flournoy manages to specifically highlight Black experiences while also expressing the universality of those experiences. The women in The Wilderness are not defined solely by their Blackness but by the kind of events that shape a generation—economic crises, political polarization—and a person—like pregnancy and death. They try to emerge from those circumstances unscathed; to forge their identities in the face of everything life throws at them. Their struggles echo Cha-Cha’s hopes, which are channeled by Nakia protesting on the bridge in 2027: “They had done it. All of them. They had fought back, run past. They had been beaten but they prevailed. Together.”
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