everyone in my demographic is a stranger

“Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.” — Marcel Proust

This is a tribute of sorts to one of my favorite books: All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers, the second of Larry McMurtry’s trilogy of novels with intertwining characters that also includes Terms of Endearment and Moving On. Why do I love these early books of his so much? Well first, all of the main characters are girls, the setting is mostly Texas in the sixties and, as his better critics observe, he writes about women so well. Denise Dwinnells describes Larry McMurtry’s essential trademarks as “a deep understanding of feminine strength” and “a man who writes as well about women as any American male ever had.” And that is exactly why I love his books and why I particularly love this essentially urban Texas trilogy about love and family, dislocation and loss.

Emma, Patsy, Aurora, Rosie, Jill, Sally — all strong female characters, formidable even, but with hearts of gold. And All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers contains, for me, one of the great lines of modern fiction from the long-suffering Danny Deck. He is the archetype of “that guy,” the one we all wish we’d never met.

“My fate seemed to be to meet women it was impossible not to love, but whom it was impossible to love right.”

Yeah, we all hear you, and most of us wish we hadn’t. When I set out to write about my peer group, my generation, my demographic, I didn’t intend it to be just about women, but really, how could I not, particularly now? For me, the characters in these three books inform my understanding of who we are as women in a generation that started out a little lost and is still discovering itself in the most remarkable ways. What follows are four examples containing girls who have each made their imprint on me in complex ways; how we are all at once such kindred spirits and how we are, inevitably, such strangers.

Example 1. best friends forever
“Exactly what is it about old friends that makes them seem so important, so relentlessly vital?” I once asked my ex-boyfriend (who had since become my real friend) this very question. “It’s because they know everything, they know all your stuff; and they still love you anyway.” I wonder how different I would be if I had never met my three best friends. I’ve known them for almost half a century, which means they’ve occupied a place in my heart for most of my life. We fancied ourselves to be uncommon women sharing common ground in a cookie cutter suburban neighborhood that we called space city because all the streets were named for the NASA program: Canaveral, John Glenn, Satellite, Gemini. We walked to our high school, and in those years, we were connected by our secrets, our clothes, the record albums, the books, and the boyfriends.

In just as many ways, we’ve always been disconnected, and as different as four people can be, taking separate paths, living in places that have distanced us from one other. Even as teenagers, we were clearly four very different girls; and yet, even now, when we are together, or when I read their letters or hear their voices, no time has passed and I am transported to a space filled with books and music and adventure. I cannot really imagine a life without them. We married men who have little in common other than that they are all loved by all of us. Between us we have six children, who are all smart and great looking; but more important, they are kind, and exactly the people we knew they would be.

I still see the four of us convening in my room, the house with one child and two parents; thus, the fewest people to disturb us. One, simultaneously orchestrating our plans for the day, drawing in her sketchbook, directing the quiet pretty one tuning her guitar to play another Joni Mitchell song, the other one, launching into a long compelling discourse on something she’s reading, explaining how it relates to the five other things she’s also reading; and me, pretending to listen to all of them, the others, taking notice, stopping to exchange tolerant looks, rolling their eyes at my detachment. Me, stationed in front of the dresser mirror, staring at my 16 year-old self, silently making a 100 plans, endlessly scrutinizing my hair, finally turning my attention back to these three perfect girls laughing at me. “WHAT!? I’m listening! So what are we doing now?” Me, keeping them close and happy we’re together, always.

Example 2. working girls
Scott Adams devotes one of his central characters in the Dilbert cartoons to the oft misunderstood and perpetually under-valued Tina the Technical Writer. She calls team meetings on Friday evenings, she corrects the punctuation in software code, and she mocks the engineers. She can be pretty mean but she can also be endearing when she stands up to the clueless manager and gags when anyone utters the word “synergy.” It would all be pretty funny were it not so familiar.

I’ve been working and writing in some capacity for almost 30 years. I started writing copy for public television, which is probably the hardest I’ve ever worked for the least amount of money. I worked for about five years as an advertising copywriter. What I remember most about that was a lot of people yelling and smoking. I won a lot of awards for my copy and made about the same salary I could’ve made waiting tables at Pizza Hut. I worked right up to the weekend before my daughter was born under a woman who chained smoked and despised employees with children. At nine months pregnant, standing in her office to discuss my ads watching two or three cigarettes going amid the mountain of butts in her giant aqua ashtray made me whoozy. When I left for “maternity leave’” I was told they would hold my job for exactly two weeks. I said thank you, but no, I don’t think so. A few years later, when I ran into my copy chief in a bookstore, my daughter shook her nicotine-stained hand and politely asked her if she was Cruella de Vil. She was clearly not amused.

She was a horrible woman to work for who today would probably be fired for abusing the employees. But when I remember her now and I see how much has changed for working women, I think about what the early years of her career must’ve been like. Her job was pretty awful and she lived alone. She had probably worked at the same job for at least 30 years, never moving forward. How irritating someone young and not long out of college with a family and a whole life ahead must’ve seemed to her. I wonder now, what happened to her along the way to make her so mean and what I imagine is that someone or many someones mistreated her. I used to think there was no excuse, particularly for women, who seemed to think an abrasive exterior was an essential requirement at work. It has taken almost an entire career to stop judging them.

Acting out at work because your needs are not met elsewhere spans all genders; but I see the impact on women as slightly more acute simply because even now, many women are still trying to figure out how to define themselves. There are the women, much like Tina, who are determined to prove their worth because they feel undervalued. If in fact, work is a woman’s central or even sole focus, which is suddenly coupled with a coworker who appears to be gracefully balancing work and family, this can be a recipe for disaster. If a woman is trying to do it all, literally: raise the children, manage the work, keep her head above water, it can be just entirely too hard. All of those women are cranky and tired and scared, and who wouldn’t be?

For a thankfully brief period I worked with a woman who had a pattern of destroying everyone who was hired to work with her. Even the engineers were a little afraid of her. The writing task was to take the engineers’ analysis and, through a convoluted process she had developed, generate customer presentations. I was the third or fourth in a revolving door of writers hired to support this work. Each candidate had to take a writing test she had devised. The manager told me I was their last hope. All the other candidates had flunked her test, and he congratulated me for passing with a score of 85%. I always wondered what I missed. My first and last major mistake with her was two-part: First, I cheerfully told her that I thought we could do some things to streamline her process to make the work less labor-intensive. It was the second earnest question that sealed my fate, which was “How can I help you?”

From that moment, she set about the task of getting rid of me. When my manager told me, I felt blind-sided. He began with, “look, this is clearly not your fault, but she hates you. There’s a pattern here — she keeps finding something wrong with everyone we hire to help her. I wouldn’t blame you if you quit, but I hope you’ll consider staying.” Then he showed me a plethora of my emails she had doctored and assembled as evidence of my incompetence. Maybe the most disturbing aspect was the timestamps on her emails copied to multiple managers. It appeared she had worked on this project through most of the night and into the morning. Before this, I don’t think any coworker had ever actually hated me. She also made a point of sending this out on my birthday. In a word, it was creepy.

These are of course isolated incidents, but we all have them. I’ve been lucky enough to work with some of the greatest people, men and women. They are all funny, smart, and people you want to know long after you’ve moved to another job. I’ve learned from all of them and I have to say the thing I wish we could all put on our resumes: I’ve learned that I can work with and for people and form lasting bonds with those whose demographic profiles would never intersect with mine. People who I didn’t think I was going like at first, and people who surprised me with what they had overcome just to show up every day. It’s my own personal bias, but it’s those great girls I met at work who became my friends and that have helped me so much, just knowing their stories. My friend who juggles four children including twin girls and a demanding job (and she also bakes); the three friends who all work in social services who care for family members, teach classes, volunteer, and work thankless jobs, and are of course, under paid; and my dear friend who flew back and forth across the country to visit her parents at the end of their lives, while still caring for her family, keeping a full-time job and a sense of humor. I have friends who survived cancer, including one who also took care of her mother, worked full time, and is still one of the funniest people I know. Another friend pulled up stakes and accepted a job far from home but she made it her home, and in her fifties she rows crew. I hear these stories all the time and what astounds me most is that I don’t hear a lot of complaining. Instead they want to know how I’m doing. I tell them I’m doing just fine, and I think about how lucky I am to count myself as one of their friends, these working girls.

Example 3. ladies who lunch
As a young mother, I was completely unprepared for navigating the landscape of elementary school. I imagined it would be so fun. My memories of elementary school were happy and carefree. My mom was the room mother who brought beautifully decorated pink heart-shaped cookies to my class, spreading cheer in her wake. She was also one of the RNs who volunteered to administer the polio vaccine. I remember standing in line in the cafeteria, proudly waving at her. My mom, in her white uniform with her starched white hat perfectly bobby pinned on her head, consoling my frightened schoolmates, telling them not to be afraid, making them laugh before they knew the vaccination had occurred.

This was my idea of a mom: someone who made cookies in the morning and worked the evening shift at the hospital. My parents shared the responsibilities of family life equally. We ate out a lot, moved frequently, and because one of them was always working, celebrated most holidays in an Army hospital cafeteria with a hundred other families. This was no place for June Cleaver.

Taking my daughter to kindergarten in a large elementary school, I expected to form lasting friendships with the other moms. We would bond over the ups and downs of parenthood, the tribulations of balancing work and family. I was surprised to meet a regime of stay-at-home moms and even more surprised to find myself in the role of outcast. For these women, elementary school was serious business. This was not merriment and crafts, it was all about gifted and talented programs, PTA line items, and bringing your assigned cookies that had better be made from scratch. There were kindergarten moms who seemed like they had been living at my child’s school for years. It was like a foreign land, a place where all the moms got their copies of the script but mine got lost in the mail.

Much later, we moved to a quaint little blue house in a cute little neighborhood, largely because of the really cute little elementary school that was only a few blocks away. It was here that I ran into my peers, an unlikely group of moms, all of us with children about the same age, but different enough that I might have missed the connection. Yet almost immediately, I recognized them and that one common thread that ought to bind all of us in parenting: a sense of humor. I can’t remember exactly how or when it began, just that there were four of us who met for lunch on a more or less quarterly basis. Early on, lunch seemed to naturally extend late into the afternoon. We had many line items to cover too.

By the time we began meeting for lunch, we were novice high school parents. Initially it was all about the kids, their schools and their lives. Then it was college plans and moving them to college, and college graduations, and navigating life after college, weddings and grandchildren, aging parents, medical issues, job issues, remodeling, all the stuff of life. But it’s always been about so much more because these women are really smart. I listen to them, recounting their travels, what they are reading, what they believe in, what troubles them, and I know something profound and moving about the arc of each of their lives; their successes, their failures, what they learned along the way, and our collective hope. I think we’ve been doing this for more than 15 years.

We meet and disperse, each of us returning to our lives, but I think about them often, particularly their wise counsel and often hilarious observations, like during the high school years, “Remember when you’re concerned about her hanging out with that girl, her parents are probably thinking the exact same thing about your kid;” or “I just want everyone to be happy but not excessively happy because that’s just not normal;” and of me: “You’re that earnest volunteer mom who is always offering yourself up, hating every minute of it, and wondering why you ever thought this was going to be fun.” My new favorite: “Now that they’re adults, we don’t have to set a good example anymore.” Their levity is so grounding, each inspiring me by her own example to be my best self. In this time we live in, with so many uncertainties and so few guarantees, it’s always such a treat; same time, same place, I know we will meet again to lunch.

Example 4. well-read girls In the mid eighties, I was in a wonderful bookstore that no longer exists. Larry McMurtry was there for a book signing. I must’ve been about 30 with a toddler daughter in tow. I waited patiently in line, a little nervous because instead of the new book he was promoting, I was carrying my dog-eared copy of All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers for him to sign. When my turn came, he looked at my book and smiled, first at me, then at my daughter, who smiled back; and he asked our names and seemed thoroughly pleased at the sight of us. And you can bet that I remember this conversation.

“I know it’s corny but I love this book so much.” I said. “So much! So much! So much!” chirped my daughter who at three liked to turn all that she heard into a cheer.

“And what is it you like about it so much?” he said.

“Oh, Emma, Jill, Sally, all the women characters, the uncle reminds me of my father and Texas.” He nodded and I started to ask him a question but a reporter from the crappy local newspaper interrupted me, telling him she was there to interview him and frowning at us.

My daughter, sensing an infraction, mimicked her, “excuse me, excuse me, excuse me.”

The author was laughing now, and paused for at least a minute, still smiling at my daughter, then at me, and finally he said most emphatically,

“Well ma’am I guess you’re going to have to wait your turn because I’m talking to these young ladies right now,” then turning back to me saying, “now what was it you were just about to ask me?”

I adjusted my rosy child on my hip, stood up straight, took a breath, and said,

“I was just wondering what you thought of Ken Kesey’s new collection of essays (this was Demon Box). I love the part where he talks about y’all horsing around in Wallace Stegner’s creative writing program at Stanford back in the sixties.”

“Yeah well that was quite a time, lots of shenanigans. I do like those stories.”

“Me too. I really do. Thank you so much for talking with me. It really means a lot.”

“Thank YOU. It sure is a pleasure to meet you, ladies.” My daughter giggled and we said our good byes. It was thrilling and no wonder he writes so well about women. And there I was, talking to one of my heroes, hoping for my daughter that this great moment in our shared literary history would stick.

Before she was born, I put my favorite quotes in a baby book. Later, when she went away to college, I gave her the list.

The most daring physical feat she attempted was scaling the giant bookshelf her grandfather had built before she could even walk. She held onto the spines of the hardcover books with her long fingers and kept herself from falling. When I think about this now, it seems like a metaphor for the person she was destined to become.

When she was a toddler, I taught her to recite great poetry.

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T S Eliot: ‘In the room the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo’,” she would say at three, so pleased with herself and her near perfect diction.

I read to her almost every night, often falling asleep in the middle of books. She would jar me awake when the words began to slur; “ok where was I?” and I continued to read. I read her favorites so many times that even now, I can replay them in my head. Madeleine, A Chair for My Mother, Perfect the Pig, Horton Hears a Who, The Teeny Tiny Woman, The Catalog, Owl Moon, Number the Stars, Strega Nona, The Runaway Bunny, Where the Wild Things Are, and Woogie Norple.

In the upper grades she started reading all the books I love, which I would jubilantly point out to her at every opportunity. Finally, during one of my moments of literary nostalgia discovering her love for On the Road and Nine Stories, or how taken she was with Sylvia Plath’s Aerial, she said, exasperated,“Is there ANY book you HAVEN’T read?” to which I retorted, quietly, “no.” And that’s what’s supposed to happen. She was moving on.

In college, she often sent me her papers and that’s when I knew my work was done. I had to concentrate really hard and even look up some of the words. It was an unfamiliar and expansive landscape of knowledge, beyond my reach, and very much her own. She was moving away from me and into foreign scholarly territory. It was exhilarating to watch from a distance.

Someday, maybe she’ll read the old picture books to her children, and with any luck, she’ll even tell them to read Larry McMurtry, because those were some of her mother’s favorites. She will tell them about all the strong, brave girls in those books, and how the stories reminded her mother of her own father, their great grandfather, and of Texas.