Author Essay: Writing About Friendship
My interest in writing about female friendship began with a humorous essay I wrote for The New York Times magazine in 2001 called “How to Dump a Friend.” The piece offered up semi-serious prescriptions (i.e. keep canceling until they get the idea) for getting rid of the “dead wood” pals in your life. But it was a few more years before I realized I could construct a novel around the topic of friends. I was then in my early thirties, had begun to attend friends’ baby showers on a regular basis—and felt vaguely outraged by the spectacle of all these super smart, accomplished women sitting around “oohing” and “awing” about sock puppets and teddy bears. Not being married or having kids myself at the time, I suppose I also felt vaguely threatened by these events. I also saw them as ripe for satire.
I began to write a short story about a baby shower in which the protagonist/host freaks out on the guest of honor (her old friend). And while I wanted the protagonist’s behavior to be hostile and outrageous, I also wanted the reader to understand and sympathize with the feelings that had led to her actions. That same year (2004), I also wrote an essay for New York magazine entitled, “Our Mutual Friend: how to steal friends and influence people.”
As I was writing what later became I'm So Happy For You's critical baby shower scene, it occurred to me that I’d become more interested in relationships between female friends than between women and men. I’d also noticed that friends of mine seemed to spend more of their time talking about each other than about their husbands, boyfriends, or partners. Writing-wise, I was also ready for a change of topic. My first two novels, What She Saw . . . and Why She Went Home were both to a large extent about sex and love, subjects about which I felt I had nothing more to say, at least for the moment. Finally, having grown up with two older sisters who are close in age, I’ve always been hyper aware of competition between women—the real theme of the novel. The cheap psychology reading of I'm So Happy For You might be that the book was a way for me to write about my sisters without actually writing about them!
With the publication of I'm So Happy For You, I now consider myself something of an expert in the topic of female friendship, its joys as well as its danger zones. As such, I’ve begun writing “Friend or Foe,” a friendship advice column for doublex.com. Please feel free to send your friend-related predicaments to lucinda@imsohappyforyou.com--and I’ll do my best to answer them in print.