Friend fatale

So much time is devoted to the reasons that men and women leave marriages and jobs, and to why they feel unequal to the task of parenting. So little is devoted to the moments at which women decide, often irrationally, that the burden of friendship is simply too much to bear. Millet's and Hood's stories dovetailed for me, as I remembered how, a few years ago, I met the new boyfriend of one of my closest friends and detested him on sight. Rather than figure out a way to grit my teeth and lie, or be gently honest with her about it, I disappeared. It was simply easier than coming up with the right thing to say. I stopped returning calls, even -- especially -- when they were painful crying calls about something this guy had done to her. We haven't spoken for more than two years.

"The Friend Who Got Away" has an obvious centerpiece, a pair of essays by Heather Abel and Emily Chenoweth, women who became best friends their freshman year of college, only to grow painfully apart after the death of Chenoweth's mother, and subsequent friction over boys and eating disorders. The friendship they describe will be familiar to many -- the sort in which two women fall so deeply for each other that they actually confuse their selves. "Sometimes when I saw her and she was beautiful, I thought I was seeing myself," writes Abel, while Chenoweth, in her piece, describes a shopping trip this way: "Because there were mirrors everywhere around us, I saw her ... from many angles at once. For one thrilling, vertiginous moment, I stared at her and I thought: What am I doing over there?" When the friendship unravels, they lose parts of themselves. "It was just that sometimes she'd be sitting across from me at dinner... and I'd miss her terribly," writes Abel. "I'd miss my vision of her as buoyant, and I missed her vision of me as brilliant. It was a kind of heartbreak, the kind that makes you wish someone never existed." Chenoweth writes, "For a long time, my love for Heather was a piece of glass in my heart; it hurt every time I moved."

Bonds between women get severed for reasons so multilayered and complex that figuring out the back story and power dynamics is more exhausting -- as most women will tell you -- than telling the story of the breakup of a marriage. That's not to say that romantic and sexual relationships aren't multilayered as well. But there are certain generally accepted assumptions about them: for instance, that they will either "work out," or end in dissolution. For those of us who anticipate a monogamous future, there is only one permanent slot for real romance at a time, while there are infinite spaces waiting to be filled by platonic companions.

So when those platonic companions leave us, or we leave them, there are more penetrating and discombobulating questions to be asked: Why was there abandonment when there didn't have to be? How can we possibly explain why this person -- whom we'll never be bound to economically or legally or sexually -- is someone who, for some reason, we cannot bear to know any longer?

There are scripts for romantic breakups. While no two may be exactly the same, there are support groups, movies, novels, soap operas, little inspirational quotation books sold at the front of Barnes & Noble, and our girlfriends themselves to help us get through our "real" splits and let us know that we are not alone in our despair. But there isn't much to help us understand the vulnerability that overtakes us when one of our best friends is cut loose, with a part of us inside them, into the world.

It's exactly why books like these two anthologies are such a valuable contribution to whatever canon will someday serve as a record of how women feel about each other.

What "Secrets & Confidences" feels like, especially reading it right after "TFWGA," is another couple of dozen hammer blows to the head and heart. Edited by Karen Eng, the book includes a few illustrated story panels along with traditional essays, and some broader musings, like Kathleen Collins' piece on why the relationship between Patsy and Edina on "Absolutely Fabulous" is so important. Sara Bir's story is less of a dirge for her faded three-way childhood friendship than it is for the Barbie universe they created.

But "Secrets & Confidences" provides tales that are as familiar as the heartbreaks recorded in "TFWGA." Both collections include pieces by women unable to have children, describing the pain of spending time with friends who are mothers, as well as pieces about conflating lesbianism and friendship. Both contain tales of how racial differences can devour friendship; in "Secrets & Confidences, " white Juliet Eastland writes about her confusion when her grade-school best friend, African-American Caren, abandons her for a group of black friends. "So why did race matter?" writes Eastland at the end of her tale, with a voice that is surely true to her fifth-grade self.

The variety of stories in both volumes creates a road map leading to one powerful conclusion. Girls break up with other girls for precisely the same reasons that they break up with lovers and spouses: tussles over money, politics, religion, ethnicity, an inability to commit, betrayal, infidelity, growing out of each other.

But why can't we apply the same set of well-honed reactions to our friends as we can to our lovers? As Bitch magazine co-founder Andi Zeisler writes in her "Secrets & Confidences" essay, "Few women will say of a friendship that 'it's not the right time for us,' or 'the thrill is gone,' even when those things are completely accurate." Why do we have such a hard time ending things, and why, when we finally cast each other out, do we feel such guilt, sorrow and self-hatred afterward, when tossing boyfriends to the curb is considered a rite of emotional development? Karen Eng is so desperate for comprehensible parity in terms of how we treat our friends and how we treat our lovers that she describes an impulse to end a codependent black hole of a best friendship like a divorce -- with papers, to make it official and "real."

Perhaps severing our female bonds and then getting over them is so difficult because it's still hard for us to articulate how important we are to each other in the first place. But it's high time we figured out how to get over our self-consciousness about the intensity of our female alliances. Because while friendship may have always existed as a shaping force in women's lives, it has never been so integral to so many.

As our biological and professional horizons change, we are freer to make our associations with women the center of our lives for longer periods of time -- not simply refuges from our dealings with men, though certainly those kinds of camaraderies still exist and are as valuable as ever.

Our friendships -- their beginnings, their durations and their ends -- have become as crucial to the timelines of our lives and to the shape of our selves as the traditional family structures we have long revered and respected. A couple of new books that take the pains of female love seriously are exactly what we need to begin to develop a vocabulary of female loss.

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