On “Frances Ha,” friendship breakups, and being 27
What Noah Baumbach’s evergreen dramedy taught me about self-sufficiency, falling out with friends, and the most challenging and rewarding year of my life so far.
“Do I look old to you?” “No. Yes.” “How old?” “Older than I am.” “Older than 27?” “No. 27 is old, though.”
According to astrology, 27 is supposed to be one of the hardest years of your life. It typically marks the beginning of your first Saturn return, an intense cosmic phase where Saturn returns to the degree and sign it was at the time of your birth. It essentially represents the first real step into adulthood, where you’re faced with major life challenges and responsibilities. That’s certainly true for Frances Halladay (Greta Gerwig), the endearingly messy, restless 27-year-old title character of Noah Baumbach's 2013 masterpiece. And in the year since I turned 27, it has rung true for me too.
Frances Ha has been in my life since I first watched it in high school, but it wasn’t until I reached the same age as Frances that I was truly able to relate to it. With each successive rewatch, I grew peripherally aware that I could become like Frances one day: someone who is creative yet struggles to ascend the ladder of their industry due to the financial instability of their chosen career; someone who is anxious and bitter toward people who appear to have their shit together and makes impulsive decisions outside of their best interest; someone who ultimately grows from those mistakes and comes to some important self-discoveries they may not have had otherwise.
Over the past year, I dealt with several frustrating pressures and demands that left me jaded and disaffected about the state of my chosen industry. But somehow, despite all the bullshit and chaos I encountered, I managed to keep a level head when it came to my creative work. Starting grad school in the fall of 2023 kicked my ass into gear. It forced me to get more organized than I had ever been before. It permitted me to make time for myself so I had enough energy to commit to the things I wanted to do outside of school. Most importantly, it pushed me to stay consistent in my creative output and open-minded in the constructive feedback I received from my classmates and instructors — so much so that by the time I turned 27, I had written the first draft of a feature, a TV spec script, a pitch for a pilot, and a few outlines for other film and television ideas I want to eventually develop.
As Frances says at one point in the film, sometimes it's good to do what you're supposed to do when you're supposed to do it, and that sentiment has certainly resonated for me in my professional and creative life. Like Frances, though, my quarter-life crisis also extended to my social life, especially after the dissolution of one of my closest friendships. Frances Ha begins with Frances and her bestie/roomie Sophie (Mickey Sumner) in a seemingly blissful state of platonic intimacy, spending tons of quality time together until Sophie mentions her interest in moving from their Brooklyn apartment to her dream neighborhood of Tribeca. On top of that, Sophie decides to get serious with her finance-bro boyfriend Patch (Patrick Heusinger). These major life decisions take Frances by surprise, and instead of approaching the situation maturely, she reacts poorly, memorably declaring to Sophie, “Don’t treat me like a three-hour brunch friend!”
I don’t know if I’ve ever had a friend like Sophie, someone with whom I’ve felt comfortable play-fighting or sharing a bed. But I’ve had friends I considered very close, including one person I stopped being friends with a little over a year ago, about a month before I turned 27. (For the sake of anonymity, let’s call him Gabe.) Gabe and I went to undergrad together and followed each other on Instagram, but we didn’t meet in person until a mutual friend’s comedy show in 2021. We realized we had another friend in common, and slowly but surely, we became closer, with all three of us hanging out regularly. As time went on, more people joined our initial trio, eventually blossoming into a queer friend group that saw movies and went to Drag Race viewings together. I felt a particularly special kinship with Gabe, as we lived relatively close to one another and shared a well-versed understanding and love of pop music and pop culture.
Then, early last year, I began to notice a shift in our relationship. I’d already had a hunch something was up; I wasn’t being invited to our friend group’s hangs as often, and he didn’t want to carpool to our friend’s drag shows like we used to. At the beginning of March, I tried making plans to hang out, just the two of us, but Gabe’s overscheduling resulted in the hang turning into a group hang. When I mentioned to him afterwards over text that I wanted us to see each other one-on-one, he didn’t respond. And at an Oscars party the next day, I sensed a slight cold shoulder from him when he greeted me with what seemed like a lack of enthusiasm, both in his voice and body language. In Frances’s words, I was starting to feel like a “three-hour brunch friend.”
Because there were multiple variables at play telling me something was wrong, I decided it was best to at least share these concerns with Gabe in the hopes that he could quell my doubts. I sent him a voice memo explaining my anxieties about our friendship, patterns I had noticed and wanted clarity on, and asked if we could discuss them over the phone or in person as opposed to over text. Gabe responded a couple of days later with, sigh, a very long text message, saying that he took offense to the assumptions I made about him and that he needed space from me, specifically until May. I was devastated, but I understood, so I sent back a voice memo apologizing for the offense I caused, clarifying some points he got defensive about, and acknowledging his need for space.
I’m no stranger to friendship fallouts — I’ve been through several throughout my life — but given how Gabe and I had developed a seemingly ironclad bond over three years, this incident completely destabilized everything I thought about our friendship. Did I overestimate how close we were? Did I take things too personally? Were my expectations for our friendship too high? I confided in other people about this, and they assured me Gabe and I would eventually reconcile. But by the end of May, Gabe hadn’t reached back out like he promised. I gave the possibility of reviving our friendship one last shot and texted him the first week of June, asking if he’d be interested in meeting up and talking. No response. The Saturday of that week, I saw him at our mutual friend’s drag comedy show in what felt like a full-circle moment from our first in-person encounter. But this time, Gabe completely ignored me — didn’t say hello, nothing. The following Tuesday, I sent one last text explicitly ending our friendship and blocked him on everything.
Despite the agony of those first few months of being 27, I didn’t regret making that decision. In fact, it was incredibly liberating to free myself from the people-pleasing, conflict-avoidant behavior that dictated so much of my decision-making up until that point. But from June on, I still struggled to navigate life without the platonic security I had had with Gabe and my former friend group. Unlike my fellow gay brethren, I did not have a “Brat summer” last summer. I was quite miserable. Like Squidward looking out his window at SpongeBob and Patrick having fun, I saw my good friends post their hangouts with Gabe on their Instagram stories. I was about 5 months into being on HRT and, wanting to further feminize myself, I decided to up my estradiol dosage from 2 to 4 mg, but the changes gave me more dysphoria and I stopped in July. I had a brief fling with someone that fizzled out as quickly as it began.
Like Frances, I felt stuck and unmoored and uncertain about my future. Around August 2024, I learned secondhand that Gabe had moved away to New York, just like Frances learning that Sophie moved to Japan with Patch for his job. But instead of doing something drastic and desperate like taking a spontaneous solo trip to Paris, I felt the pain from that falling out start to subside. Through the encouragement of another good friend, I downloaded Bumble BFF and matched with a fellow queer, trans filmmaker named Jude, who helped fill the void Gabe left and whose friendship I’m immensely grateful for. I restarted HRT back in January and have stayed on a low dose since. After a year and a half of being on a contact break, my ex and I are back on friendly terms.
27 may have been an emotionally disorienting year, but after processing my falling out with Gabe, I realized those intense changes were necessary for me to figure out my own needs, find the kind of people I wanted in my life, and ultimately become the type of person I wanted to be. During Frances Ha’s iconic monologue centerpiece, Frances tells someone that she wants to experience one moment where she sees her best friend across the room, her friend sees her, and they instantly, intuitively know that they’re each other’s person. Toward the end of the film, Frances puts on a dance performance she directed, and subsequently, she shares that special moment with Sophie, marking a proper reconciliation between the two. Perhaps it’s knowing we are (or in my case, were) loved by someone else that gives us permission to actually start our lives.
I’m not sure what 28 will hold, but I know that I enjoy getting older. I’m getting to know myself better and better, and learning how to handle difficulties I may have struggled with in the past more thoughtfully. The excellent title drop in the final moment of Frances Ha speaks to this feeling of quasi-self-actualization. After moving into a place of her own, Frances writes her name on a piece of paper to use as a label for her mailbox, but has to crop her last name from “Halladay” to “Ha” so it can fit, suggesting that despite attaining a comfortable lifestyle for herself, there will always be personal sacrifices she will have to make to become the person she wants to be. Like Frances, I’m not quite sure if I’m a real person yet, but after the past year, I think I’m starting to become one.
