As a child in Brooklyn, my spirits rose and fell on the tides of a girl named Susan’s moods and disposition. We met in 1958, when both of us were three, our mothers both pregnant with unwanted (by us) younger siblings. We were inseparable—soulmates, I would have said, if I’d known the word—for years. Eight years, to be exact. And then my family moved a half-mile away, into a different school district.
Susan was only the first of a lifelong parade of best and near-best, second-, third-, and close-but-not-best friends (I often maintained a deep bench). I think about them all, whether we’re still close (Hula) or not (Ronnie). Whether we are still in touch or not—whether they are still alive or not. I think about them all—Maria, Amy, Vicki, Debra, Marly, Kathy, et al.—far more often, and with far more feeling (sadness, gladness, longing, love, regret, nostalgia—and, in one case, hurt and grief) than I think about any of my ex-boyfriends.
The truth is that even in my youth—my boy-crazy teens, my heat-missile-seeking 20s/early 30s—my friendships have always been more crucial to me than the romances that came and went. These were the relationships I knew I could count on (until, once in a while, I couldn’t—and then it was more shattering, and harder to get over, than a failed romance). It’s no surprise that I have gravitated all my life to good stories that center friendship. Or that I’ve been writing about friendship since before I published my first story in 1979. My latest book, the essay collection If You Say So, is dedicated to the friends who’ve come into my life in the last decade. It is also populated by them—a whole community that I lucked into in my 60s, a time when it’s supposed to be practically impossible to make new friends. The title essay is about one of them. Others sweep (and spin and leap) throughout. (This is not a metaphor. We take dance classes and perform together, and much of the book takes place in the dance studio.) And since stories about women’s and girls’ friendships—unlike those about romantic love—are not a dime a dozen, here’s a list of books in which it’s friendship that matters most, in every decade of a woman’s life.
In Childhood
The Betsy-Tacy Treasury by Maud Hart Lovelace
I’m cheating a bit with this first one, as the Treasury includes all four of the first books in the Betsy-Tacy series—four of my favorite books of all time. Written in the 1940s, set in the last years of the 19th century, the depiction of friendship may be the most accurate, authentic, loving, nuanced one I’ve ever encountered. In these first four, the girls are five through 12 years old. The books chart their adventures and discoveries—their imaginative play, their lives at school and at home, their differences in temperament, the way they help each other understand the world. Light on plot, rich on characterization, insight, and emotion, these semi-autobiographical novels include moments of gravity and great profundity–including a scene, late in the first book, that dares to reckon with a child’s death. It’s a scene I’ve returned to again and again over the years–it is that beautiful, generous, and comforting.
In Their Teens
Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson
This extraordinary novel is narrated by the now-adult August, an anthropologist whose research on customs and practices around death takes her all over the world. The slow reveal of her mother’s suicide by drowning, nearly three decades before—and August’s yearslong refusal to believe that her mother is dead—gives the book its shape; the story of her friendship with Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi—four Black girls in 1970s Bushwick holding onto one another for dear life—is at the book’s heart. The narrative weaves in and out of past and present, circuitously tracing August’s childhood from its start, on a decaying family farm in Tennessee—and the coming undone of her mother after the Vietnam war death of her sensitive, artistic brother, August’s Uncle Clyde—through the move to Brooklyn and the years August spends growing up there, “sharing the weight of growing up Girl” with her three best friends. In terms of pages, August and her friends’ teenage years are a small part of this slim, lyrical novel, but they are the book’s focal point, and it is only after the intensely close friendship between the four girls comes to an abrupt end when they are 15 that August acknowledges her mother’s death. (The novel opens with the line, “For a long time, my mother wasn’t dead yet.”)
In Their 20s
Absolution by Alice McDermott
Absolution is a looking-back novel, too, but of a different kind. It’s mostly written in direct address, as if in letters—or one very, very long letter—by Patricia, to the daughter of a woman who had been her friend six decades ago, when they were young wives and “helpmeets” in Saigon: two white American wives—Patricia, naïve, newly arrived, desperate to have a child, and haunted by an earlier friendship, and Charlene, careless mother of three, recklessly determined, driven by what she fiercely believes is altruism. The narrative, in the first and third parts of the novel, is such that one often forgets Patricia is writing to anyone: whole scenes unfold, in vivid and eventually searing detail, along with Patricia’s thoughts and feelings at the time. The periodic reminders (“the little girl, of course, was you”) serve to gently turn what might have been a more conventional first-person narrative (not that there’s anything wrong with that) into something warmer and more intimate. The epistolary form also complicates the narrative’s intention, as Patricia’s feeling about Charlene—then as well as now—are complex and contradictory, and her avowed purpose in telling this story to Charlene’s daughter Rainey is to help her understand her mother. (The middle third of the book is from Rainey’s point of view.) The story Patricia tells is, as the title suggests, one of absolution. But it is also about friendship—the way it changes us, the way it reverberates long after it is over.
In Their 30s
Still Born by Guadalupe Nettel, translated by Rosalind Harvey
The friendship between Alina and Laura in their mid-30s, in Mexico City, is rendered through Laura’s eyes. Part of what has long united them, as other friends from their 20s have fallen away, is their shared conviction that motherhood is off the table for them. When they come to what might have been—what the novel prepares us to expect to be, and what at first seems to be—a crossroads that will separate them (Laura reveals that she’s had her tubes tied—a decision made final; in return, Alina confesses that she has been trying to have a child), Laura surprises us—she surprises herself—by ultimately drawing closer to her friend. What follows is a deeply moving, subtle, and engrossing portrait of a friendship that sustains the two women in it, even as each of their own lives are challenged, even as they find themselves changing in ways they could not have foreseen. Alina’s storyline made me think of Heather Lanier’s beautiful memoir, Raising a Rare Girl (which I recommend as an excellent companion read to Still Born), and the story that unfolds in parallel to it, of Laura’s growing attachment to the troubled child of a neighbor who is too depressed to properly care for him, is so unexpected yet believable and affecting, the empathetic energy that’s generated makes reading this novel a transformational experience.
In Their 40s
Let’s Take the Long Way Home by Gail Caldwell
Here’s an outlier: a memoir, not a novel. I had to sneak it into this list because it’s one of the best memoirs I’ve ever read, and the only book I know of, in any genre, that does full justice to what having a best friend in middle age can be like. Caldwell was in her 40s when she met the writer Caroline Knapp (Pack of Two, Drinking: A Love Story, and other books—all of which are also well worth reading), and the two women—and their respective dogs—fell deeply in friendship-love almost at once. Caldwell writes: “Apart, we had each been frightened drunks and single women and dog lovers; together, we became a small corporation.” The two writers are inseparable: ferociously, determinedly independent women, devoted to their dog companions, holding onto one another for dear life, in continuous conversation. We know from the start that Knapp’s death (far too young, from stage IV lung cancer) is coming: the memoir opens with this information. Yet when the narrative brings us to her diagnosis, the blow is devastating. This chronicle of a once-in-a-lifetime friendship—in a way, the Platonic ideal of friendship—is imbued with so much tenderness, drawn with such lyric precision, it is something like the prose equivalent of a love sonnet.
In Their 50s and 60s
What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez
This is a short, fierce novel sharply focused on a friendship (just as Nunez’s previous novel, The Friend, was). The two women in What Are You Going Through, both writers, are at the tail end of middle age—rough waters for us all. They have been friends for a long time, but it is only now that they’ve become particularly close—so close that one of them, who’s dying, asks the other to help her die, to go away with her and stay with her until she’s ready to take the pills that will end her life before cancer takes her “in mortifying anguish.” The narrator (of most of the novel, I hasten to say; there is a brief, wry, utterly perfect first-person account by a cat of its early, terrible life) reckons with the knowledge that saying yes and saying no are both morally perilous. Empathy, love—friendship—wins.
In Their 70s
The Weekend by Charlotte Wood
Now we’ve reached old age and we must brace ourselves (I just turned 70 myself; I’m happy to be your navigator). If the 50s and 60s are still euphemistically called “middle age,” there is no fooling oneself in the seventh decade of a life. Now we are old, like it or not. The friends in The Weekend—Jude, Wendy, and Adele—gather at the beach house that belonged to a fourth friend, Sylvie, who has died. They are in mourning and in full Marie Kondo-mode as they clear out the house, at the same time releasing long-buried old grievances against one another, but they are also worried about their careers, their bodies, lovers who won’t text them back, children and childlessness—in short, all the same preoccupations of women decades younger. This novel came out in 2020 and it thrilled me—I read it in the early days of lockdown, grateful for the company of women older than I (I had just turned 65), pleased beyond measure that these women and their friendship were being given their due. I’d never read anything remotely like it.
In Their 80s
Fellowship Point by Alice Elliott Dark
Until two years later, when Dark’s novel was published. It’s a very different kind of novel—a thick, sprawling one that grounds big philosophical, political, sociological, and psychological ideas in individuals and tackles its big subjects in dramatic ways (there is a big plot to match—not usually my thing, but in this instance it captivated me). What it has in common with The Weekend is how seriously it takes its main characters, Agnes and Polly, who have been friends for 80 years—since they were babies. There is nothing sentimental or cute in the portrayal of either their relationship or their old age. Agnes is a solitary, never-married, irritable, famous writer of children’s books with a secret identity as the author of a best-selling series of novels skewering the thinly disguised women of her social class—a feminist and conservationist who has been seething with anger for years at her friend, Polly, whose devotion and attention to her husband, Dick, infuriates her, both on principle and because Agnes wants to be (don’t we all?) the most important person in her best friend’s life. There are too many complicated plot lines to describe (trust me: they’re fascinating), but a secondary pairing—a cross-generational friendship that develops between Agnes and an indomitable 27-year-old editorial assistant named Maud—is a powerful force in the novel too. And just as in the great novels of the 19th century that I love most—Middlemarch and War and Peace and Anna Karenina—everything, remarkably, comes together in the end.
In Their 90s
Ladies’ Lunch and Other Stories by Lore Segal
No round-up of books about women’s friendship would be complete without this one by Lore Segal. Brilliant, witty, fierce, full of surprises, this book was published a year almost to the day before her death, in 2024, at 96. (Full disclosure: Lore Segal and I were longtime friends.) If you don’t know her work, I urge you to read all of it, but there’s no reason not to start with this final collection, most of which is about a group of friends, now in their 90s, who’ve been close for decades. They meet regularly for lunch, where they tell each other everything. “We are the people to whom we tell our stories,” one of them tells the others. And so, when they can no longer meet in person, they talk on the phone and over Zoom—they persevere. As Lore Segal did.