What is a friend?

And why I will not see the movie version of Sigrid Nunez' beautiful novel

Before we begin…

What is a friend? Or do you just know one when you find him/her/them? How has a friend or friends affected the course of your life?

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Fifty years ago this summer, I met my best friend, Rae. We can’t remember whether we met in July or August 1975 but we know it was hot, uncomfortable, and we weren’t at all certain then that we had much to offer one another. Today we live on opposite coasts but the bond has endured far worse things than distance.

In honor of this, I’m devoting this newsletter to the fascinating, perplexing, sometimes unexplainable relationships with the people we call friends. I begin by revisiting an old post about my friendship with Rae and pulling the most important bit of to share here.

I can’t tell my story without her

I have known my best friend, Rae, for fifty years. I know this because my son was only a few months old when we met in the summer of 1975 at a meeting of our student housing tenant’s committee. I was sweating in the heat, my breasts were still leaking, and my hair hung on either side of my face like drab brown curtains connected by a sawed-off fringe of bangs. Rae, on the other hand, was tall, graceful, and sported a sleek asymmetrical haircut that struck me as bold, sophisticated, fearless. That haircut told me that I was not in her league.

Turns out she hated that haircut. She’d been so horrified by it that she made the stylist do everything he could to mitigate what she called the damage. She was also, like me, trying to raise a child and go to college. We both loved writing and had no idea if we could ever make a living at it. I learned all this later, after we’d started to talk, after we became friends.

Looking back, there was no way either of us could have predicted that we’d somehow form a relationship that would endure decades. We were strangers with nothing but bad hair in common when we met, but fifty years later here we are with a weekly phone appointment that lasts an hour. We cover everything from the squirrel trying to chew its way into her house to our deepest fears about getting older. We laugh. We complain. We talk about our writing. We try to give each other glimpses into the vast swaths of our lives that we live outside our friendship. Sometimes, we revisit the past. This is risky and, sometimes, painful. We did a lot of growing up during those forty-five years and mistakes, big ones, were made. But looking back also fills me with deep gratitude. After each of my worst moments, ones I had forgotten probably because the shame was too much to bear, she found it in herself to give me another chance.

These days, she asks that we celebrate where we are now and where we are headed. Because even though our time together going forward is likely to be shorter than the fifty years we’ve shared, there are still possibilities to explore. We are not done yet.

We can make new friends at any point in our lives and they can be real, and strong, and true. But we can only make old friends when we are young. This is what my husband meant when he once said,

“I'm too old to make old friends.”

I felt a little catch in my throat when he said it. We won’t have another chance to build that kind of history with friends we meet now no matter how much we all enjoy each other, care about each other, and help each other. The history I share with my best friend holds not just the story of our friendship, but a huge part of mine. I can’t tell my story now without her.

As a reader and a writer, I’ve been always drawn to the subject of friendship. My first novel featured a woman who had no close friends but, in the course of the story, formed an intense bond with a fellow loner and stranger. My novel-in-progress hinges on a relationship between two women who meet as antagonists but forge a decades-long bond when they come together for a common purpose. One of my favorite reading experiences was working my way through all twenty Patrick O’Brian novels and watching one of the greatest friendships in fiction unfold between Captain Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin.

When I come across old friends together I am instantly curious. I want to hear the stories. I want to know how they met each other. I want to laugh along with them as they recall “that time when..” I want to peek under the hood to see what makes this relationship tick. Maybe this is why years ago I loved Ellen Goodman’s “I Know Just What You Mean,” and more recently, Gail Caldwell’s “Let’s Take The Long Way Home, a Memoir of Friendship” It is even why I kept plowing my way through “A Little Life” by Hanya Yanagihara which follows four male friends from their twenties through middle age. “A Little Life” was bloated in a way that often struck me as self-indulgent but it was also deeply compelling. The characters, one of whom spent a lifetime trying and failing to overcome sexual trauma and abuse he experienced as a child, showed the vastness as well as the limits of friendship. The author captured the voluntary nature of friendship in an interview back in 2015 when “A Little Life” came out:

“To me, the thing about friendship that makes it so singular is... It’s a relationship we don’t have to pursue …It’s two people who every day choose to keep it going, and in that way it’s very powerful because it’s one you choose to work on, and you choose to without any agreement; it’s an unspoken bond.”― Hanya Yanagihara

All friendships contain mystery. They come out of the blue, arrive on the backs of circumstance, or necessity, or complete serendipity. Nothing binds friends together, not marriage, blood, or sexual attraction. We are free to leave at any time. Long friendships are proof not simply of some basic human need but of our capacity for love, acceptance, forgiveness, and growth. The reward: when we look into the face of an old friend we feel seen in a way that no one else can see us.

Which brings me to The Friend by Sigrid Nunez

I have just finished rereading The Friend by Sigrid Nunez because, as I told my friend of fifty years and the person who gave me my copy, I wanted to remember why it touched me the way it did. I told her I needed to do this before I accidentally saw a trailer for the movie or heard much about it from others because I have very little faith that the essence of this novel will be captured on the screen.

And now, having searched out and watched the trailer, I see I was right. I will not see this movie. As a film, I’m sure it is wonderful, but it will never convey all that this little novel conveys with such intimacy and so few words.

On the surface, The Friend is about a woman who loses her friend of many years to suicide and inherits his dog, a great Dane. But because this is a journey of grief, much of the journey takes place way beneath the surface of what we see. The unnamed protagonist, a writer, writes the book as if she is writing it to her dead friend, another writer. Reading it is like eavesdropping on one of those conversations that many continue with a loved one who has died. It is intimate, very specific to the relationship and interests of the two people involved. Yet it also echoes with the pain, joy, anger, confusion, fatigue, yearning that are universal. Anyone who has lost anyone will find themselves retracing their own old or ongoing conversations with the object of their love.

The relationship at the core of The Friend is one between a man and a woman which begins when she was his student and spans decades. Their friendship survives his three marriages, his rise and fall as a published author and teacher who seduces his students or allows himself to be seduced and is ultimately sidelined by the times and shifting mores. It survives her own impermanent relationships, her journey as a writer and teacher, and the occasional separations caused by life, geography, and, early on, the experiment with trying to be lovers. She ends up single and, mostly, embracing solitude, while he cannot bear to be alone. His wives are alternately threatened or perplexed by their friendship.

He leaves her with unfinished conversations about writing, male-female relationships, and the nature of love. He leaves her with a Great Dane, Apollo, the only character in the novel with a name. Apollo, found as a stray, is grieving the loss of her friend as much as she is. Her friend knows her well enough to know that she will not abandon the dog even if she resents him at first for forcing this on her. She and the dog become the catalysts for each other’s eventual healing. Anyone familiar with the work of Sigrid Nunez will not be surprised that this is not a sentimental dog-saves-human story. Instead it is a story of a woman in her sixties studying her own heart and mind with the help of two friends: the one who dies and the one he leaves to her.

So, tell me what exactly is a friend?

Photo by Alexis Chloe on Unsplash...

Not long ago, my husband surprised me by asking “What exactly is a friend?” We’ve spent hours since then, off and on, exploring this question. You’d think it was a simple one to answer but as we went into it, we realized we had different ways of looking at friendship and different experiences with it. In the end, we just kept coming up with more questions. Got some insights? Please share them, clearly we need help.

• Does a person have to know another for a long time to be a friend? If so, then what do you call the person you know for a few weeks, a year, maybe a few years at most yet for that period, you are as close as you’ve been with anyone before or since?

• How do you define that connection that rises out of a shared love of a sport or interest even when the other person is younger, older, a different gender, comes from a different ethnic background or may not even speak the same language as fluently?

• Why are friends and neighbors often listed as distinct groups when we think of them?

• At what point in a new relationship do you know you are friends?

• Are there times in our lives when it is easier to make new friends? When is it more difficult? Does age matter?

• Does marriage kill friendships? What do people mean when they say they’ve married their best friend?

• What makes friendships last? What tears them apart?

Abigail Thomas: “on paper we had little in common”

Well, my dear, it has a name now.

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P.S. And now, your moment of Zen…all tangled up

Photo by Rae Francoeur

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