Post by Bozur on Jul 4, 2005 1:50:40 GMT -5
BOOK REVIEW DESK
A Girl's Best Friend
By SUZY HANSEN
Published: May 22, 2005, Sunday
THE FRIEND WHO GOT AWAY
Twenty Women's True-Life Tales of Friendships That Blew Up, Burned Out, or Faded Away.
Edited by Jenny Offill
and Elissa Schappell.
294 pp. Doubleday. $24.95.
Women, especially girls, aren't always nice to one another, and writers and movie directors have tried to document this pathology as if it were a sociological ill to be cured. The catty and bullying few were recast as Queen Bees and Mean Girls and Tyra Banks; even the feminist Phyllis Chesler published a book called ''Woman's Inhumanity to Woman.'' Of course, woman-to-woman cruelty has always existed (we all have mothers, don't we?), and it certainly wasn't Margaret Atwood who broke the news that women could be sociopathic misogynists (though her women may be the freakiest). Still, it's all a little hysterical, isn't it?
So it's a relief to report that ''The Friend Who Got Away,'' an anthology in the ''Bitch in the House'' tradition, reveals women to be thoughtful and kind, sometimes callous and neglectful, like all humans. There are more slow fades than blowups here, and (sorry, guys) there's nary a catfight in sight.
That might not be the best thing for an essay collection. In a book about fighting dames, one naturally expects lots of cheating lovers, hair pulling or face slapping (or both), friendship necklaces flushed down toilets and perhaps a husband or two ensnared at the neighborhood barbecue.
''The Friend Who Got Away'' doesn't serve up such banal treasures, and at first, that's disappointing. Instead, we get, out of 20, a handful of painful, resonant essays and a handful of painfully boring ones. The editors, Jenny Offill and Elissa Schappell, are themselves serious writers, and their endeavor reflects that. Wholesale nastiness is sacrificed for the nuances and generally flat rhythms of real life. The truth is most friendships do in fact break down slowly. Perhaps two friends each start to dislike how the other has changed over time. Problems fester, and then the slightest insult or missed meeting dissolves the strongest of bonds.
Admittedly, this complexity makes for richer reading, but why must there be so many tame essays? There's one about a 12-year-old confused by her friend's Christianity (Offill's humdrum ''End Days''); one about a breakup over the women's movement (Beverly Gologorsky's predictable ''In a Whirlwind''); one by Katie Roiphe (in which she admits she's self-absorbed, yet no wisdom is imparted). Some writers don't seem all that troubled they've lost their comrades; others weren't really friends with them at all.
Some essays also fail because of the writers' odd inability to conjure up their friends. The editors' premise is that female friendships curiously resemble romantic relationships; in that case, the writer should describe the friend as passionately as she would a lover. What's interesting, always, is why another human being captivates us and has the power to wreck us. The heartbreakers should come to life more vividly than the vexed narrators, who, especially in the case of destroyed friendships, are fundamentally unreliable.
That's why the clever pairing of Heather Abel and Emily Chenoweth -- friends who tell different sides of the same story, the death of Chenoweth's mother -- provides the book with a much needed core. If ''The Friend Who Got Away'' has a common theme, it's that when tragedy strikes one friend, the other falls apart. The miseries include a child's death (Ann Hood's devastating ''How I Lost Her''), multiple miscarriages (Kate Bernheimer's acute study of insensitivity, ''Other Women'') and life-altering disease (Jennifer Gilmore's magnificent and Atwood-like ''Kindness of Strangers''). Each time, the desertion is inexcusable; the more it happens, the more inevitable it seems.
The Abel and Chenoweth essays succeed because both writers have uncanny memories for the tenderest details of teenage emotions, mixed with impossibly sharp but sympathetic powers of retrospection. Abel explains that early on she learned to ''compete without competing.'' (She writes, for example: ''Apartheid was mine. Athleticism was not mine.'') One thing that she did not have was suffering, and she enjoyed taking care of her best friend, whose mother fell ill during their freshman year of college. But Chenoweth's subsequent withdrawal and transformation baffled Abel, and her essay burns with confusion. Chenoweth's essay -- wisely printed after Abel's -- begins not with Abel but with, of course, the real tragedy at hand, her mother. ''My mother was my first best friend,'' she begins, and it stings. Even when Abel was the problem, she was not the problem.
Friends pride themselves on being able to understand everything about their counterparts, but with tragedy, the one friend becomes aware that no matter how many tears are shed, she will never know the other's pain. Being shut out is almost like being killed off -- for both parties. Chenoweth's essay is the only one in the book that captures the severity of loss.
YET sometimes tragedy ruins relationships for an even uglier reason: a personal loss makes someone special. Outsiders want to share in its totality of emotion, or flee for fear of feeling average in comparison. If the friendship already had a tinge of rivalry to it, as almost all do, then a friend's sudden tragic glow, as well as her much admired recovery and quickly forgiven mistakes, weighs heavily on the more ordinary friend.
The Abel and Chenoweth essays are so obviously winning it's surprising this book didn't turn into an anthology of companion essays subtitled ''Twenty Women Tell Their Sides of the Story: You Be the Judge.'' The results, though, would probably be the same each time: both writers would plead their cases, only to reveal that they're sad simply because the friendship no longer exists. On the page, at least, the end of a friendship is one tragedy two women can share, without the tiniest bit of envy.
Suzy Hansen is an editor at The New York Observer.
A Girl's Best Friend
By SUZY HANSEN
Published: May 22, 2005, Sunday
THE FRIEND WHO GOT AWAY
Twenty Women's True-Life Tales of Friendships That Blew Up, Burned Out, or Faded Away.
Edited by Jenny Offill
and Elissa Schappell.
294 pp. Doubleday. $24.95.
Women, especially girls, aren't always nice to one another, and writers and movie directors have tried to document this pathology as if it were a sociological ill to be cured. The catty and bullying few were recast as Queen Bees and Mean Girls and Tyra Banks; even the feminist Phyllis Chesler published a book called ''Woman's Inhumanity to Woman.'' Of course, woman-to-woman cruelty has always existed (we all have mothers, don't we?), and it certainly wasn't Margaret Atwood who broke the news that women could be sociopathic misogynists (though her women may be the freakiest). Still, it's all a little hysterical, isn't it?
So it's a relief to report that ''The Friend Who Got Away,'' an anthology in the ''Bitch in the House'' tradition, reveals women to be thoughtful and kind, sometimes callous and neglectful, like all humans. There are more slow fades than blowups here, and (sorry, guys) there's nary a catfight in sight.
That might not be the best thing for an essay collection. In a book about fighting dames, one naturally expects lots of cheating lovers, hair pulling or face slapping (or both), friendship necklaces flushed down toilets and perhaps a husband or two ensnared at the neighborhood barbecue.
''The Friend Who Got Away'' doesn't serve up such banal treasures, and at first, that's disappointing. Instead, we get, out of 20, a handful of painful, resonant essays and a handful of painfully boring ones. The editors, Jenny Offill and Elissa Schappell, are themselves serious writers, and their endeavor reflects that. Wholesale nastiness is sacrificed for the nuances and generally flat rhythms of real life. The truth is most friendships do in fact break down slowly. Perhaps two friends each start to dislike how the other has changed over time. Problems fester, and then the slightest insult or missed meeting dissolves the strongest of bonds.
Admittedly, this complexity makes for richer reading, but why must there be so many tame essays? There's one about a 12-year-old confused by her friend's Christianity (Offill's humdrum ''End Days''); one about a breakup over the women's movement (Beverly Gologorsky's predictable ''In a Whirlwind''); one by Katie Roiphe (in which she admits she's self-absorbed, yet no wisdom is imparted). Some writers don't seem all that troubled they've lost their comrades; others weren't really friends with them at all.
Some essays also fail because of the writers' odd inability to conjure up their friends. The editors' premise is that female friendships curiously resemble romantic relationships; in that case, the writer should describe the friend as passionately as she would a lover. What's interesting, always, is why another human being captivates us and has the power to wreck us. The heartbreakers should come to life more vividly than the vexed narrators, who, especially in the case of destroyed friendships, are fundamentally unreliable.
That's why the clever pairing of Heather Abel and Emily Chenoweth -- friends who tell different sides of the same story, the death of Chenoweth's mother -- provides the book with a much needed core. If ''The Friend Who Got Away'' has a common theme, it's that when tragedy strikes one friend, the other falls apart. The miseries include a child's death (Ann Hood's devastating ''How I Lost Her''), multiple miscarriages (Kate Bernheimer's acute study of insensitivity, ''Other Women'') and life-altering disease (Jennifer Gilmore's magnificent and Atwood-like ''Kindness of Strangers''). Each time, the desertion is inexcusable; the more it happens, the more inevitable it seems.
The Abel and Chenoweth essays succeed because both writers have uncanny memories for the tenderest details of teenage emotions, mixed with impossibly sharp but sympathetic powers of retrospection. Abel explains that early on she learned to ''compete without competing.'' (She writes, for example: ''Apartheid was mine. Athleticism was not mine.'') One thing that she did not have was suffering, and she enjoyed taking care of her best friend, whose mother fell ill during their freshman year of college. But Chenoweth's subsequent withdrawal and transformation baffled Abel, and her essay burns with confusion. Chenoweth's essay -- wisely printed after Abel's -- begins not with Abel but with, of course, the real tragedy at hand, her mother. ''My mother was my first best friend,'' she begins, and it stings. Even when Abel was the problem, she was not the problem.
Friends pride themselves on being able to understand everything about their counterparts, but with tragedy, the one friend becomes aware that no matter how many tears are shed, she will never know the other's pain. Being shut out is almost like being killed off -- for both parties. Chenoweth's essay is the only one in the book that captures the severity of loss.
YET sometimes tragedy ruins relationships for an even uglier reason: a personal loss makes someone special. Outsiders want to share in its totality of emotion, or flee for fear of feeling average in comparison. If the friendship already had a tinge of rivalry to it, as almost all do, then a friend's sudden tragic glow, as well as her much admired recovery and quickly forgiven mistakes, weighs heavily on the more ordinary friend.
The Abel and Chenoweth essays are so obviously winning it's surprising this book didn't turn into an anthology of companion essays subtitled ''Twenty Women Tell Their Sides of the Story: You Be the Judge.'' The results, though, would probably be the same each time: both writers would plead their cases, only to reveal that they're sad simply because the friendship no longer exists. On the page, at least, the end of a friendship is one tragedy two women can share, without the tiniest bit of envy.
Suzy Hansen is an editor at The New York Observer.