[from the archive] fleabag is a ghost story
A close reading of friendship and loneliness in my favorite TV show
Hi all,
I had a busy work week of traveling and airports, and spent yesterday at the park to read and unplug for the day. It felt so good to rest and rejuvenate in the sunny spring breeze.
I am still busily planning out our Age of Innocence read-a-long, and can’t wait to share all the details soon.
Today, I am re-sharing one of my (recently) paywalled pieces — a close reading of the brilliant first season of Fleabag — with you all. As a reminder, all newsletters go into the archive on my site after six months. To gain access to the full history, become a paid subscriber (right now, there’s a 20% off deal)!
This archived piece is one of my all-time favorites I’ve written here, and not only because Fleabag is one of my top favorite TV shows of all time. It’s one of those pieces where my starting point was so far from my conclusion. I wrote my way to the realizations in the piece, rather than thinking through them and recording them later. It was really so fun to write!
There are spoilers throughout the piece, so if you have not yet seen this remarkable series yet, don’t read on until you have. Or, you know, go forth but don’t be mad when I give too much away.
Who is Fleabag?
In the first moments of the first episode of the first season of Fleabag, we very quickly learn a few things about our main character:
She’s talking directly to us through an unsettling fourth-wall breakage that occurs from the very first scene.
She is asserting narrative control over every little moment of what unfolds. She seems pretty intent on us seeing her, and her story, in specific ways.
She’s using sex as some kind of coping mechanism, sleeping with all kinds of foolish, misogynistic, boring, and otherwise uninteresting men.
She’s deeply, heartbreakingly lonely.
She’s hilarious.
By the end of the first episode, we start to learn why Fleabag is so intense and haunted: her best friend has died, leaving Fleabag with the cafe they opened together and a very big hole in her heart.
As Fleabag works at their cafe each day, she looks around at the decor on the walls, the table where they used to sit, and attempts to keep the business open by doing everything but actually doing meaningful work there. (She microwaves frozen food for customers; lies about sandwich prices; opens and closes at strange hours.)
The cafe becomes a haunted house, where Fleabag goes every day to confront the loss that haunts her.
“A crazy guinea pig lady lives here,” reads a sweet, campy sign on the wall — but it doesn’t refer to Fleabag. It refers instead to the absent, tender-hearted, funny best friend Fleabag has lost to a tragic accident.
As I was thinking about my favorite spooky ghost stories, Fleabag unexpectedly popped into my mind and then I thought of Fleabag’s dead best friend’s name:
Boo.
It made me laugh out loud. I’ve seen this show so many times and had never realized that the sad memories that haunt Fleabag all feature a woman, who has died, named Boo.
And then I thought of the haunted look on Fleabag’s face when, despite herself, she looks away from whoever she’s with — even avoiding the fourth-wall camera gaze she usually solicits — and finds herself interrupted with memories of Boo, from the sweet to the horrible.
Her avoidance puts us, the viewers who are usually confronted by Fleabag’s intense metacommentary and insistent, dark humor, in a wincingly strange position. While Fleabag seems so often to be begging for our attention, our unrelenting gaze, our constant and ready attunement to whatever she wants us to notice… in these moments, when she’s arrested by an unbidden memory of Boo, her gaze shifts downward or off the screen, out of the frame, and we briefly lose track of her.
She becomes lost in something that looks, and feels, like shame.
Remembering boo
Unlike many ghost stories, where flashbacks or appearances in the narrative feature garish cries and ghoulish images, Fleabag’s memories of Boo are colorful, bright, happy.
There’s the hilarious moment in a dressing room, when Boo admits she hates Fleabag’s clothes.
There’s the time Fleabag gifted Boo a guinea pig for her birthday, and Boo “took Hillary very seriously” and ended up theming their cafe with silly pictures and drawings of the sweet animal.
And there are terrible flashbacks, too, like when Fleabag imagines a tear-stained and desperate-looking Boo, standing on a curb, about to step into traffic.
As Fleabag tells a cab driver one night, Boo didn’t really mean to die. She just wanted to get hurt badly enough to scare her boyfriend, who had recently slept with someone else.
Has the horrible trauma she has experienced, of losing her mother and then losing her best friend, rendered Fleabag a ghost, too?
We have to wait quite a few episodes to find out who he slept with — and why it hurt Boo so badly that she’d step into traffic — but it feels painfully obvious as we watch Fleabag wince in shame, again.
Fleabag is a story about deep loneliness
Fleabag employs the familiar devices of ghost story — most centrally a woman haunted by ghostly memories of the friend she loved and wronged — to give us a deep understanding of loss, guilt, anger, and love.
We also find:
The haunted home is a haunted café
The scary ghost is a dead best friend, the memories of whom relentlessly haunt Fleabag
The typical gloomy graveyards are visited only in the daytime, as a way Fleabag can attempt to be close to her recently deceased mother
The disembodied voice is Boo’s sweet, funny voicemail message, (“leave me a messagio!”) which Fleabag calls just to hear her voice
There are other ghosts, too — most notably, Fleabag’s late mother who we never even see a photo of. She is a disappeared spirit: a vibrant energy whose warmth still glows in her two daughters, who haunts their broken father, and whose memory infuriates their jealous godmother so much so that she immortalizes the mother’s naked form in a beautiful headless and limbless bronze statue, which Fleabag steals.
Breaking the fourth wall
One afternoon, an unnamed man stops by the café for a sandwich, and spies a framed photograph of Fleabag and Boo on the counter.
“Do I know her? Is she famous?”
Fleabag turns to us, breaking the fourth wall for what seems like the hundredth time in the episode, to explain: “Boo’s death hit the papers. ‘Local cafe girl gets hit by bike…and a car…and another bike.’”
Her humor, like her sex addiction, is an elaborate performance — a mask of emotional stability and charm that is all-too-seductive. Has the horrible trauma she has experienced, of losing her mother and then losing her best friend, rendered Fleabag a ghost, too?
In a particularly honest moment toward the end of the episode where Fleabag and Clare attend a silent retreat, Fleabag utters an unexpected truth to an unexpected character: “I just want to cry, all the time.”
Her unrelenting wails—of masked humor, of sexual addiction, of unchecked wit and intentional distancing—make up the rhythms of the story, the waves of heartbreak as she rides them. If Fleabag is a ghost story, Fleabag is our ghost, crying out in long, aching peals, begging to be heard.
As I rewatched the first season over the last few days, I realized that Fleabag is perhaps my favorite ghost story of all time. Because rather than ever learn all that much about our central ghost, Boo — or about Fleabag’s late mother — we instead learn about the haunted heartbreak that ghosts leave behind.
(We also learn that Fleabag goes jogging in the graveyard where her mother is buried every single day. She doesn’t tell us or seem to want us to know that fact; her sister puzzles it out, and we happen to be there.)
What details like this do are give us a front row, often uncomfortable seat to the ravages of being haunted.
Boo never exists to frighten or jump-scare or disturb us. She simply and wonderfully existed, and we learn about the traces of her from the person, her best friend, who loved her the most.
“You know,” her brother-in-law tells her one day at the café, as he observes Hillary in her pen, “Guinea pigs can die of loneliness.”
Fleabag turns, slightly horrified, slightly smirking, to stare us straight in the face. The scene cuts to Boo, holding Hillary out to Fleabag, teasingly telling her that “she needs to be loved!” It’s sweetly vague which “she” Boo is referring to.
The scene cuts right back to Fleabag, staring at us, her gaze flickering to unease, as she turns back to the pen. She knows all-too-well that guinea pigs, as well as people, can die from loneliness.
Later, Fleabag receives a hamster from a friend and tucks her into the pen with Hillary. It’s a glimmer of hope, revealing that Fleabag is not nearly as cold or harsh or brass as she’s been pretending. She misses her friend and she wants Hillary to have a friend, too. She doesn’t want Hillary to suffer; perhaps, eventually, she’ll want the same for herself.
Somewhere under the ghastly mask of sarcasm and avoidance she has constructed, there is the kind and warm person—the person Boo loved so dearly, the person so like her wonderful mother—has gone dormant.
Maybe something, someday, will bring her back to life. (Maybe that something will be a very hot priest in season 2?)
You can read part two — an analysis of the foxes in season 2 of Fleabag — now: