Friends Forever
There was once a friend who did my dishes whenever she came over. Another time I took a nap on her couch when I had a brand new baby and was exhausted. By the time we’d known each other for a year, we knew where everything went in the kitchen—hers and mine. She once told me I was out of line in the way I’d treated someone, and though it stung, I deeply appreciated her words.
We’re still friends, best friends, really. But she lives in Illinois and I’ve moved to South Carolina. Not “sharing life” with her is a small tragedy I’ve had to weather.
How do you make friends? I never had close friends in high school or college or afterwards. I argued with a few boys at choir, ambled through Chicago with some college classmates, and I sort-of dated two guys in college.
Perhaps one of the closest healthy friendships I had at college was with the guy who came to find me in the north suburbs when I got lost once. We went out for lunch and had a discussion about whether we should date… decided naw, it’s good as it is.
I’m close with my sister. It was always the two of us, besides my four brothers. Over the years, our relationship has gone through a lot of tumultuous changes for the better. I modeled the brother-sister relationship in A Voracious Grief off of our real-life relationship. If you ever read a published novel by that title, you’ll understand how far our friendship has had to go to reach the healthy balance we enjoy today. (Well, its mostly healthy. Still a work in progress as are most things.)
People are messy, and that’s the fun thing about writing. Character arcs and the development of heroes and villains are simply psychology set to music. Maybe I should have been a psychologist. But writing is loads more fun.
How about you, if you write? Do you write yourself into novels? Are you the hero, or the villain? A bit of both?
How does one depict the gradual formation of an enduring bond?
I don’t really even understand how those deep friendships begin in real life. It’s so subtle, the first steps are completely ordinary. We don’t feel the significance of a single moment spent in conversation or laughter with another human being, not in the moment itself. It’s only when time has passed and there’s a mountain of terrain covered that you can pause, look back over what grew between you, and appreciate the meaning of all those little forward movements. I’m attempting to create that sort of relationship build in The Waking, between Goel and Evelynn. Because theirs is also a romantic relationship, there will be certain markers along the road—romantic tropes—that signal to the reader when they’ve reached another level of intimacy. But I want to capture the friendship that grows between them even more than the romance.
Once again, I’m inspired by real life. When I met my husband, both of us were pretty interested in each other. But we kept things to a friendship (for as long as we could—6 months!) and I truly believe that has been a wonderful foundation for a lifelong friendship.
It’s fascinating and magical, the way human beings form connections. As a writer, I’ll be studying this all my life. If I were a psychologist, I’d probably have it all figured it out—but where’s the fun in that?
