Friend fatale

Whether it happens in a blowout battle or years of sniping comments, the ends of our girl friendships make us feel more alone, guilty and bereft than the ends of our greatest romances.

By Rebecca Traister

May 22, 2005 | It was January when I found myself yelling out loud at Katie Roiphe's essay in my galley of "The Friend Who Got Away: Twenty Women's True-Life Tales of Friendships That Blew Up, Burned Out or Faded Away." When the volume first landed on my desk, my heart started beating fast, as I realized that someone had finally put together a book to chronicle an experience that every woman I know has been through, but which still feels illicit, shameful, nausea-inducing: the friend breakup.

It was probably all that anticipation that led to the yelling.

Roiphe's ugly tale is about how she slept with the romantic obsession of her brilliant college best friend, Stella, a big, brash woman whom Roiphe describes in a sentence that feels cribbed from "frenemy" bible "The Underminer: The Best Friend Who Casually Destroys Your Life": "She was kind of wonderful looking, with her fabulous, disheveled gestalt, but at the time being overweight was an enormous, almost insurmountable, taboo." Roiphe half-apologizes for her betrayal, but mostly wonders about why she did it. "Why would one night with a boy I didn't even particularly like seem worth ruining a serious and irreplaceable friendship?" she wonders.

It was in response to that sentence that I began shouting and scribbling furious notes in my book. "Maybe because you need to assert your dominance over other women, to prove you were more desirable than a friend who threatened you intellectually?" I scrawled. "Maybe because you enjoyed preying on the weaknesses that the intimacies of friendship had revealed to you?" Roiphe's essay does not touch on the insights that I would gladly have shared with her, had I been her editor. Instead, she explains that she probably did it because of her own sexual insecurities.

I don't usually yell at books. As much as I dislike what I read in Roiphe's piece, it clearly struck a nerve. I know it sounds as if I reacted so strongly because I've had a close friend sleep with a man I was interested in, but that's not true. Friend breakups are like LSD; years later, hearing tales of other women's strife, even when they don't have anything to do with the specifics of our own bust-ups, can trigger vivid emotional flashbacks. All it takes is the slightest tickle of recognition, the tiniest tremor in our girlfriend nervous systems, and suddenly all the agony and fury and sadness flood back. It often seems that no one -- neither man nor beast nor mother-in-law -- can hurt us with the same intensity as our best friends. Whether it happens fast, in a blowout battle, or insidiously, with sniping comments about how our clothes look tight, or imperceptibly, as life drives space between us, the ends of our girl friendships have the power to make us feel more alone, guilty and bereft than even the ends of our greatest romances.

Female friendship has been around as long as females have, and no one can claim that it's an institution wholly ignored by art. There are Hero and Beatrice in "Much Ado About Nothing;" lonely Jane Eyre finds solace in fragile schoolmate Helen Burns; Clarissa Harlowe pours out her fears in letters to Anna Howe; and Anne Shirley makes a "bosom friend" in Diana Barry. But these bonds often existed to pave the way for real relationships ... with men. (And when they didn't, we rarely heard about them.) Female friends -- fictional and non -- have used each other as refuge, safe havens from the romantic upheavals or dark ends awaiting them in the world of men.

But as the terms and purposes of female friendship have shifted, so have its costs. No longer tethered to the world only by our relationships with men, women have free-standing relationships with each other that are formed in schools and at work and at playgrounds and in yoga studios. We bond over politics and religion and shopping and food. And that leaves more room for our friendships -- while nourishing and vital -- to turn poisonous and painful.

And so novelist Jenny Offill and Vanity Fair books columnist Elissa Schappell have edited "The Friend Who Got Away," a collection of essays about the devastation we feel when our friendships nose-dive. I devoured the book -- and yelled at it -- in one emotional binge that brought images of faces long banished from my own life popping into my mind. Then, just a week ago, I stumbled across "Secrets and Confidences: The Complicated Truth About Women's Friendships," an anthology published late last year by small Seal Press, dealing with the same tremulous, sticky discomforts.

Reading these two anthologies was exhilarating, and simultaneously left me feeling heavy and sad. Simply hearing that others have shared your pain is enough to both relieve it and make you relive it.

"The Friend Who Got Away," like all anthologies, is uneven. Aside from the Roiphe essay, highlights include Offill's rapturous piece about her childhood friend Mary, from whom she drifts, but whose intense religious faith stays with her -- in the form of apocalyptic fears -- for the rest of her life. It's gorgeous and original, and amplifies the fact that other women don't simply shape our interior worlds, but the ways we view the universe. That girl we played with on the swings or had our first sleepover with could also be the person -- more than any pastor or rabbi -- who informs our impressions of good and evil, of sin and redemption.

Lydia Millet writes about older, sophisticated Wendy, whom she befriends while studying abroad and idolizes. Millet loses Wendy years later, when she tells her that she doesn't like her live-in boyfriend, an admitted rapist. Years after, when Wendy has broken up with her boyfriend and asks to rekindle the friendship, Millet doesn't respond, because she feels the need to have been right. Ann Hood's piece is about how her best friend for over three decades suddenly drops out of her life when Hood's young daughter dies. It's one of the most affecting stories I have ever read about the inscrutable, mysterious dynamics between women. Why would a girlfriend -- a best friend -- dematerialize at exactly the moment when she is most needed?

And yet don't we all recognize it? Haven't we all had it happen or done it ourselves, in circumstances hopefully less tragic than the death of a child? Haven't we all at some point been so overcome by the enormous responsibility that is female friendship -- a responsibility that doesn't come with rings or mortgages or regular sex to offset it -- that we have bolted or seen someone near to us bolt because it was simply not possible to deal?

Next Page: Why can't friendships end in official divorces, just like marriages?

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