- Conversations with Friends — Sally Rooney, 2017
Rooney is sharp on the way modern friendships dissolve without an event: a missed text, a slightly cooler reply, a slow decline in the number of times someone is the first person you tell. The book is about other things, but the drift is everywhere in it.
- Old Joy — Kelly Reichardt, 2006
Two old friends take a weekend trip and realize, slowly, that the friendship has already happened. The film does not make the ending dramatic. It lets it be quiet and slightly embarrassing, which is what these endings actually are.
- Bookends — Simon & Garfunkel, 1968
An album partly about the friendship that made it, recorded as that friendship was quietly coming apart. Listened to now, it sounds like two people noting, with affection, the distance that has opened between them while continuing to harmonize.