In most forms of entertainment, friendships—and conversations—between women are all too often portrayed as backstabbing, competitive, or simply perfunctory. There’s the withered cliché of the post-coital huddle-up promoted by “Sex and the City,” whereby friends inexpertly repurpose directives from their own psychotherapy sessions; there’s the us-against-the-world friendship, intimacy so exaggerated it becomes suffocation; there’s also, of course, the friendship that’s just waiting to be ruptured by a man. Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels break from this tradition, as do other contemporary works about female friendship written by Lauren Fox, Emily Gould, Tayari Jones, Sheila Heti and other women writers. Podcasts are also well-suited to resist these reductions; “Black Girls Talking” and “Call Your Girlfriend” are just two examples of candid creative work. But by and large, the way that women speak and relate in the absence of men is poorly represented in both popular and literary culture.

About Women: Conversations Between a Writer and a Painter is an antidote, if an imperfect one, to this cultural weakness. The premise of About Women is simple: two longtime friends, Lisa Alther and Françoise Gilot, began making tape recordings of the casual, frequent conversations they had in Gilot’s art studio in Paris. Originally the recordings were a playful project, an archive for the two women to expand on privately. Alther is 71, a renowned novelist and feminist, and originally from Tennessee; Gilot is 93, Parisian, a painter, and was both muse and partner to Pablo Picasso for nearly a decade. At a certain point, the tapes were transcribed. When the women began to pass the transcripts back and forth, the idea of the book was born, and so began the process of editing, clarifying, erasing, and rewriting.

It’s hard to categorize About Women. First and foremost, the book is not about women; it is about two women, both of whom bring rich experiences and insight, but whose perspectives are nevertheless limited by the parameters of their own lives, however worldly or searching. Both are accomplished in their respective fields; both have lived hungrily, often rebelling against expectation. Their personal narratives are interwoven with historical details and cultural touchstones, but neither woman is speaking universally—as it should be. In the introduction, Gilot writes:

It is a well-known fact that women are often gifted ‘raconteuses.’ Retelling legends or personal remembrances, they transmit the power of speech to the next generation…. it is often thanks to anecdotes relating unusual information that we succeed in taming important ideas and unexpected phenomena.

Speech is where About Women stands out: its representation of the way women speak to one another is impure, given the extensive editing process the book must have gone through, but it’s an approximation, and it rings true, however tailored it may be. The book lives somewhere between No Regrets, n+1’s slim collection of candid conversations between women writers, and Linda Rosenkrantz’s Talk, a novel-in-dialogue carved from hours of recorded conversation between three friends.

With a certain lens, About Women could be seen as a discursive shared memoir, selections from two intersecting lives. But given the emphasis on cultural difference—between France and the United States, and their respective women in particular—it seems that the book is also interested in sparking conversation around womanhood, and the different manifestations of feminism over the last century. To approach this book as a book of ideas is, in my opinion, missing the point. Speech is the thing.