Seven Essays on Friendships

A reading list...

leezsnow/iStock

Earlier this month, as I tried to tuck my unwell mother into bed, I turned on the TV to watch Notting Hill for the nth time. My mother doesn’t fully understand English, but over the years has grown familiar with the visuals of some movies that make me endlessly happy. Drugged, and sleepy, she nestled in with me and watched the movie, our friendship quietly blossoming from a cliched love-hate mother-daughter relationship to a meaningful connection that’s refreshing and constantly evolving. In the last handful of years, the bond between us has transcended into a more congenial one. We are now more interested in each other’s well-being — always concocting a new recipe for the other, thinking of a better joke to crack the other one up.

As I’ve pondered over this new, unexpected friendship I had so strongly yearned for as a child, I’ve also contemplated my friendships growing up: The childhood best friend for whom I was never enough. The junior in my high school who went from being a best friend to a friend with benefits. The college roommate who I, admittedly, didn’t think was cool enough to be friends with. Over time, I’ve lost more friends than I’ve managed to make. I’ve realized that over the last three decades, my friendships have all been so different that “friendship” has become hard to define.

A reading list of seven essays that I have found myself going back to over and over again in the last few years…

The last two decades I spent on social media have also changed the way I’ve made friends. Whether I met people on MySpace or through Facebook, or stumbled on new friends by accident — I once dialed a person by mistake and started SMSing with her, thinking she was my cousin — I’ve kept busy creating and maintaining my own tribe of friends online. People at home, however — from family members with former boyfriends — tend to be suspicious of friends I’ve met on the internet. How do you know her? Did you go to college together? She’s in Mumbai and you’re in Delhi, so how did you meet? Then there are those clutch of valued work friendships that have evolved to hold so much more meaning over time. Trans-continental friendships with someone I merely went to college with, or a guarded bond with a certain someone whom I might’ve only ever met once in person — I hold many of these virtual and non-internet(y) friendships close to the heart. That is not to say that I haven’t often times struggled to maintain them, to keep up with their moving rhythms and changing landscapes with shifting times.

It is with all this in mind that I share a reading list of seven essays that I have found myself going back to over and over again in the last few years.

---

What If Friendship, Not Marriage, Was at the Center of Life? (Rhaina Cohen, The Atlantic, October 2020)

Rhaina Cohen’s essay outlines society’s general lack of regard for platonic relationships. In a world where marriage and family are key currencies to living a socially agreed upon life, friendships have taken a backseat. As someone who has always pondered about the exclusion of even a mention of friends in Indian families like mine, I felt this piece in my bones. The essay cuts deep into the social codes that prohibit us from mentioning friends as our first choice of family, much like in my own life. When I was in school, weekends were pious brackets of time, reserved only for family. Even suggesting to hang out with friends was forbidden. It was different though, if I made an excuse of studies, an exam, or a group presentation.

Cohen also underlines the importance of approaching friendship as the foundation for every meaningful relationship in one’s life — be it familial or romantic. Conditioned to think only one way, in the first few adult years of my life I hardly had the knack to allow friendships the room they required in my life. I was quick to close them off into specific segments of my world that didn’t directly interfere with my regular activities. Little did I understand then that friendships, as Cohen emphasizes, could be my whole life.

She challenges the norm in which our partners are expected to be our priorities and points out how this notion doesn’t seem to be questioned, except in queer circles.

“Just in the past several months, experts and public intellectuals from disparate ideological persuasions have encouraged heterosexual couples to look to the queer and immigrant communities for healthy models of marriage and family. The coronavirus pandemic, by underscoring human vulnerability and interdependence, has inspired people to imagine networks of care beyond the nuclear family. Polyamory and asexuality, both of which push back against the notion that a monogamous sexual relationship is the key to a fulfilling adult life, are rapidly gaining visibility. Expanding the possible roles that friends can play in one another’s lives could be the next frontier.”  

My Buddy (Patti Smith, The New Yorker, August 2017)

When I first stumbled upon Patti Smith’s essay, I let out a deep sigh of joy. I’ve devoured each of Smith’s books, read all of her poetry, and listened to her music, and I knew her piece about her friend and fellow creator, the late playwright and actor Sam Shepard, would be as beautiful as her other work. Shepard was a multi-hyphenate whose work outlived him, and there couldn’t have been anyone better than Smith to pen this ode to his life and their friendship. The essay, much like Smith’s poetry, sings with an ease that worms its way into my heart each time I reread it. There are surprises too, but the writing carries a charm — perhaps an offshoot of Smith’s deeply lived and enjoyed life — and leaves me asking for more. 

Just a late-night phone call out of a blue, as startling as a canvas by Yves Klein; a blue to get lost in, a blue that might lead anywhere. I’d happily awake, stir up some Nescafé and we’d talk about anything. About the emeralds of Cortez, or the white crosses in Flanders Fields, about our kids, or the history of the Kentucky Derby. But mostly we talked about writers and their books. Latin writers. Rudy Wurlitzer. Nabokov. Bruno Schulz.

There I Almost Am: On Envy and Twinship (Jean Garnett, The Yale Review, May 2021)

Jean Garnett’s essay is, at the surface level, about twinship. But it goes beyond this, delving deep into topics of sisterhood, envy, and self-destruction. Though Garnett writes about her relationship with her twin sister from both a personal and professional perspective, the nature of their relationship echoes one of friendship. Garnett ruminates about being in constant competition with her sister, and how that has evolved into an uglier feeling of envy — what Socrates called the “ulcer of the soul.” 

She writes:

“I remember how, in our early twenties when my sister was at her thinnest, I was always angling for a view of her, using barback mirrors and public bathrooms and shop windows to catch secret glimpses. I remember how perverted I felt whenever our eyes met in the reflection and she caught me in the act of envy. I am never more disgusted with myself than when I am engaged in this covert looking and assessing, treating her body as a human mirror. But I still do it. I spy on her. She’ll be walking or crying or dancing or getting dressed or trying to tell me something important, and I’ll become aware that my eyes are scanning her as though she were a bar code.”

This is How a Friendship Ends: A Recipe for Miso Ginger Carrot Bisque (Nina Coomes, Catapult, March 2022)

In this hybrid essay that’s part of Nina Coome’s narrative recipe series, Half Recipes, she comes to adult friendships with a new, encouraging language. She writes specifically about severing a friendship that was no longer meaningful to her and the other person — one that she writes was not built to transition, and had to end. There is an immediacy, and a strong sense of self-empathy in Coomes' writing. In letting this friend go, she is not only allowing herself to grow, but also making room for both of them to accommodate newer versions of themselves. The recipe format of this essay makes it even more endearing. 

“In retrospect, we both were growing out of our old selves, slowly becoming adults. I can’t give you an exact date or dramatic dinner where we stopped being friends. I can only say that it was a slow fading, a gradual and at times painful transition from being in communication every day, to every week, to every few months, to once a year and, now, not at all.”

Friendships Have Never Been Harder to Maintain (Jo Piazza, The Cut, March 2022)

In this essay, Jo Piazza meditates on the joy and beauty of friendship in our lives. She writes about contemporary friendship from the perspective of someone who knows firsthand what it’s like to be lonely, having lived in San Francisco in her mid-30s with no friends. Piazza highlights how crucial it is to find one's tribe and how maintaining that is also ongoing, intentional work. During the pandemic, these responsibilities became even more complicated, leaving people without friends, or in unbalanced friendships. 

“A friend is often seen as less important than a husband or a wife and definitely ranks lower than blood relations. So despite legions of studies proving they are essential to long-term mental and physical health, friendships are often the first relationships to fall by the wayside when life gets crazy. It seems so easy to make friends in college and your early 20s, when you’re more carefree and have the hours to dedicate to the groundwork.”

Friendship (Devon Brody, The Paris Review, July 2023)

It doesn't happen too often in life that we find ourselves in a friendship that leans more towards being a romance. Out of nowhere you are drawn towards a person you know little about. They might be a neighbor, a coworker, a bookshop checkout person. You want to know everything about them, the thoughts that circle inside their heads, the dreams and hopes they nurture, who they call family. Something like this, if felt in the context of a romance, might take a more heavy, underlined, nuanced meaning. But often we tend to slight these efforts in friendships.

In this essay, Brody writes along similar lines about a friendship that is so unthreatening, so slight, so simple it becomes the all-encompassing ultimate relationship of their life, and yet not. Through the essay Brody tries to capture the essence of such friendships that become more than the sum total of their parts, making us look at them from a new lens, and mine them for more than what they offer. In the essay, they parse the comfort of being there for each other, the shared knowledge of never betraying in any way, and that cocoon-like space that exists in the cervices of such fleeting relationships against the vast canvas of marriages, flings and familial ties. 

Brody writes: 

“On the phone I asked him if he was still there. He said he was, and I started crying a little, then stopped, I think. I asked him if he could meet me at the hospital. He said he would, still in the same tone.”

This sense of belonging is unique, ephemeral and also a touchstone of a matured way of looking at people. I feel this essay makes for an unmissable selection on this list, giving me the much-needed space, time and tenderness to regard these friendships with a love that is often denied to them, and by extension, us.

It’s Your Friends Who Break Your Heart (Jennifer Senior, The Atlantic, March 2022)

In this essay, Jennifer Senior focuses on how friendships sometimes exist vaguely during midlife. She delves deeply into the intersection of friendship and aging, and how friendships come to an end. At the start of the essay, Senior structures the piece as a connection between two women, Elisa and Rebecca, and how their friendship comes to a “painful dissolution.” She then blends socio-cultural commentary with her own personal narrative, writing about the friends she has lost over the years. This speaks to readers who have lost one too many friends and are now at the cusp of a kind of change.

I decided to close my reading list with Senior’s essay as it felt like a good place to let things be. Her essay left me with thoughts, feelings and ruminations that bordered on the pensive. The essay made me think deeply about the friendships I have lost, and how those losses sit within my current state of mind. As I enjoyed the repose of this serene essay, I felt other readers might also be able to find such moments for themselves.

“You lose friends to marriage, to parenthood, to politics—even when you share the same politics. (Political obsessions are a big, underdiscussed friendship-ender in my view, and they seem to only deepen with age.) You lose friends to success, to failure, to flukish strokes of good or ill luck. (Envy, dear God—it’s the mother of all unspeakables in a friendship, the lulu of all shames.) These life changes and upheavals don’t just consume your friends’ time and attention. They often reveal unseemly characterological truths about the people you love most, behaviors and traits you previously hadn’t imagined possible.”

---

Anandi Mishra is an essayist and policy professional, whose work has been published by the LA Review of Books, Aeon, The Atlantic, Electric Literature, among others. She has also worked as a reporter for The Times of India and The Hindu. She lives in Delhi and writes about it in her newsletter Scurf.