What Went Wrong?

Illustration by Jillian Tamaki

There’s a hilarious Roz Chast cartoon that appeared in The New Yorker earlier this year that I have been sending to all my friends. Chast sometimes riffs on the theme of cards that Hallmark (or some other greeting card company) would never make, but should. This particular cartoon is called Special Cards for Special Friends, and Chast proposes one under the innocuous heading “Just a Note.” On the outside, it reads: “You’re never in a crappy mood,/ You always buy organic food,/ Your family is smart and nice,/ You always give me good advice,/ Yet every time that we converse,/ I always feel a little worse.” Inside, it asks cheerily: “Why is that, I wonder?”

My friends and I have laughed and laughed about this cartoon, recognizing with both horror and the relief of the bewildered those “friends” we have all encountered at some point. We agree that sending a note like Chast’s would be the perfect (passive-aggressive) way to break up. For, as most women know, sometimes you really do have to break up with a friend. Fading away simply won’t cut it with some people. Though it’s generally due to more serious transgressions than eating organic food, breaking up with a good friend is not dissimilar to ending a relationship with a romantic partner. If the friendship has been especially intense or lasted for a long time, there can be extremes of sadness and anger, feelings of betrayal, disappointment, even grief.

The biggest difference is that there is no script for dealing with the dissolution of a friendship. Bookstore shelves groan under the weight of self-help tomes for the lovelorn, but the complexity and intensity of non-romantic female relationships is rarely acknowledged. In fact, they are regularly oversimplified in the shoes-and-dirty-talk, Sex and the City mould and underplayed everywhere else as a mere shadow of the Most Important Relationships In Your Life (i.e. husband and children).

Until now, that is. Think of it as a backlash against romance overdose or a revival of some old-fashioned respect for non-romantic relationships, but there is something of a boomlet in books about female friendships. (It’s hard to imagine a flood of books dissecting the deep, emotional pull of men’s friendships — not because they don’t have them, but because they tend not to bother analyzing them in the same way.) Last year, there was Secrets and Confidences: The Complicated Truth about Women’s Friendships, a collection of essays by, among others, New York zinester Ayun Halliday and Bitch magazine’s Andi Zeisler. More recently, comic writers Mike Albo and Virginia Heffernan came out with The Underminer: Or, The Best Friend Who Casually Destroys Your Life, a very funny and creepily bang-on first-person monologue in which a so-called friend not so subtly crushes the silent protagonist with put-downs framed as compassion. A typical passage (there are 164 pages of it!) goes like this: “Are you sick? You look sort of tired. Is there something wrong? Oh, you went out drinking last night? It’s so great how you can still do those college things. You’re so crazy! Did you throw up? No, no, I just smelled throw-up for a second.”

Courtesy Random House Canada.

The latest and arguably most insightful entry in this recent spate of books is The Friend Who Got Away: Twenty Women’s True-Life Tales of Friendships That Blew Up, Burned Out, or Faded Away. Featuring well-known writers like Dorothy Allison, Katie Roiphe, Francine Prose, Lydia Millet and Emily White, the anthology travels the universe of friendship from childhood pals and intense college connections to political friends and those lost to motherhood and illness. It is the tension in its death-watch premise —friendships may be paramount, but these ones are going down — that gives the collection such energy and momentum. But the writing is also uniformly good (though far from uniform) and the tone compellingly, sometimes shockingly self-reflective.

The editors, novelists Jenny Offill and Elissa Schappell, even managed to find two former college friends who were willing to write their own takes on the same friendship. This “she-said, she-said” exchange gives the book some of its most intense moments as Emily Chenoweth and Heather Abel, both accomplished writers, detail the different ways they witnessed their friendship grind to a halt. When Emily’s mother died, her best friend Heather tried to fill the breach but, inevitably couldn’t. Emily was depressed. Heather developed an eating disorder. A boy they both liked chose Heather.

The fact that they don’t really blame one another so much as probe the reasons — emotional and otherwise — that their connection cracked up makes these two essays especially heart-breaking, even humbling. For it takes courage to write about a broken friendship. Among some women, admitting you lost a friend is actually shameful. While we all expect to go through a series of romantic disappointments and lost love, friends are supposed to last forever. Even though it happens to nearly everyone (regardless of gender), it’s as if women feel that it’s due to a personal failing that our friendships don’t always survive.

Sometimes, of course, one person is largely responsible, as in Katie Roiphe’s revealing essay about sleeping with her best friend’s boyfriend or Ann Hood’s tragic tale of an old friend who disappeared from her life when Hood’s five-year-old daughter died suddenly. But mostly, it’s muddy and complicated; as with a failed romance, it’s difficult to untangle exactly what happened. Kate Bernheimer’s essay describing how her own struggles with miscarriage distanced her from her two (pregnant) best friends is especially ambiguous — and resonant. “When I talk to my friends about their growing babies, I brim with excitement and pride, and then when I am alone, I cry, or sometimes, much to my shame, become angry,” she confesses. “I once told my husband a terrible thing, that I wished it hadn’t been so easy for them because then they’d understand me. As soon as I said this, I burst into tears, knowing it was utterly wrong. I did not really wish it, but I thought it, I did.”

This kind of frankness, combined with the intensity of emotion and attachment present in so many women’s friendships, makes the best stories in The Friend Who Got Away feel almost illicit. It makes for an enjoyable, even occasionally thrilling read, but it also raises the question of why, if it’s so rich, the subject of women’s friendships has been paid so little heed in the literary and public spheres. If it has this much power, why is friendship so utterly in the shadow of romantic love, with its relatively predictable and well-trod narrative arch?

In the essay “It Felt Like Love,” contributor Vivian Gornick looks to history for insight into her failed friendship; she finds Montaigne writing in the 16th century about his profound attachment to a friend, explaining that their connection is derived not out of sexual need or obligation but, as Gornick explains, “because it feeds the spirit.” Surely we could all do with a little more of that sort of food.

Andrea Curtis is a Toronto-based writer and editor.