BA50 TalkersThis article, It’s Your Friends Who Break Your Heart by Jennifer Senior from The Atlantic with the tag line….”The older we get, the more we need our friends—and the harder it is to keep them,” was recommended to me by a dear friend. We often talk about friendship and how important it is at our age and how these past 2 years have been especially challenging on friendships.
Please read this piece or listen to it all the way to the end. I am betting every single one of you will find this totally relatable at some point in the piece. It gets even better as Jennifer Senior breaks down the different categories of friendships. Her writing is spectacular.
And this is where it begins….
“It is an insolent cliché, almost, to note that our culture lacks the proper script for ending friendships. We have no rituals to observe, no paperwork to do, no boilerplate dialogue to crib from.
Yet when Elisa Albert and Rebecca Wolff were in the final throes of their friendship, they managed, entirely by accident, to leave behind just such a script. The problem was that it read like an Edward Albee play—tart, unsparing, fluorescent with rage.
I met Elisa one evening in 2008, after an old friend’s book reading. She was such mesmerizing company that I rushed out to buy her debut novel, The Book of Dahlia, which had been published a few months earlier. I was instantly struck by how unafraid of darkness and emotional chaos she was. The same articulate fury suffused After Birth, her follow-up; her next book, Human Blues (her “monster,” as she likes to say), comes out in July.
Read the rest of the post in the Atlantic here