The Games Women Play: Part 1
A conversation with memoirist Susanna Sonnenberg about female friendship beyond the sandbox
The word “intense” is a positive descriptor for chocolate, or the hue of the sky just before nightfall. When the subject turns to friendship between women, intense becomes a synonym for scary-explosive-delightful, or toxic-codependent-painful. Either way, there is probably some arm tickling involved.
Friendship is a deceptively tricky subject, one that Susanna Sonnenberg isn’t afraid to take head on in She Matters: A Life in Friendships. Each of the memoir’s twenty, heady portraits of various friendships is written in candid, liquid prose. There’s the camp friend, the semester abroad friend, the older friend who has children before the author does; so, too, you have the new mom friends, the couple friends, the work friends. Reading these tales, one can’t help questioning one’s own relationship history, and the mistakes made therein.
She Matters explores every single crack, crevice, and blocked off cellar of women’s interactions with each other. These places can be dark and cramped, spilling over with slights and shared confidences. They can also be more beautiful than anything you’ll see if you keep your head down and your exchanges limited to 140 characters and occasional run-ins at Whole Foods. “Women are like this: fierce, supreme, capable. And devious and cunning,” Sonnenberg writes. “We lie, we win. And we’re this: alluring, witchy. Women make throaty appeals, rant purely, persuade. We are right, but don’t trust us. Pride loyalty, but don’t count on me.”
Sonnenberg lives in Missoula, Montana with her twelve- and sixteen-year-old sons and their cat, Hermione. On a recent Saturday, after dropping her older son off to take the SATs, she spoke to me by video chat about the nature of friendship. Our chat was intense, in the best possible way.
LM: Why is it that people tend to write memoirs about their families or their lovers, but not their friends?
SS: I think when it comes to memoir, we are trained to believe in origin stories, looking at where we came from to explain why we are. When you write memoir, you are revealing yourself — or a carefully constructed version of yourself — and letting the reader know where you come from. I think there isn’t a great deal of literature about friendship or about friends. That suggests there’s something taboo in it. I’m not sure where that comes from.
LM: I recently went through a painful separation with a friend. I wrote a piece about it — not for publication, just to help myself understand what was happening, and where things went wrong. I shared it with a few people and they were pretty horrified. The response from all of them was, “You’re not going to show this to anyone, are you?”
SS: Why do you think they said that?
LM: It’s as you said — there is a taboo attached to getting into the nuance and texture of friendships. It’s also very self-exposing to look at your friendships and consider how you are as reflected in them. You don’t come out pretty.
SS: Right, and as a memoir writer I’m going to expose and tell on myself way, way, way more than the other person in that relationship, partly because I can’t speak for that other person — I can only speak for the experience of engaging with that person. Also, I can’t speak for who I am to them. I think that’s really fascinating in friendship. It has its uses and its purposes, and its agenda that’s very specific to who you are in that moment of your life. And that’s true for her too, you represent something to her, it’s just something totally different. But those two things we never share with each other. We never talk about those things.
LM: Female friendship is more complicated than I’ll ever understand, and yet we can treat it so superficially. Most of my friends live on my Facebook feed. I rarely speak to any of them. We’re not used to the idea that friendship is something that we need to nourish. It seems to me that you put work into your friendships.
SS: I try. Sometimes that work backfires or sometimes it’s not enough work. It’s taken me years to learn the true rewards of true work. When we’re in our early twenties, we have no conception of that at all. We just like hanging out together. We have the same taste in movies, but we don’t yet know how to tend a relationship. I think that’s a reason that a lot of those friendships fall away. When you have a friend from your early twenties, you had a routine together, you had a way of being. It’s difficult to break out of that together. It’s difficult to break out of that dynamic no matter where your lives take you. That’s my experience.
LM: Your book is organized into three larger sections. How did you conceive of these three divisions?
SS: The first era was the discovery of different people outside of myself, outside of my family. The second era was starting to articulate the patterns and the dynamics that I myself got into. And the third era is about accountability, and who I am and what I’m responsible for, and what I want and need.
LM: How old were you when you entered your second phase?
SS: It was probably in my early twenties. Right toward the end of college, when you’re called upon to be accounted for as as an adult in a new way. I had my first boyfriend, my first apartment. Developmentally this is the early stages of adulthood.
LM: And that’s when you became more aware of the fact that friendships take work?
SS: I was always attracted to strong personalities for my friendships. I wanted that charge and electricity. Toward the end of that phase [in my twenties], I realized that it’s not sustainable. And the third stage started with motherhood and I’m sure that this is part of what you’re going through. You have changed deeply neurologically, and you have really new concerns and needs out of your friendships. I’m guessing anyway.
LM: For sure, but it’s interesting to see how some of my friendships with women who don’t have babies have become richer because these friends have risen to the occasion and been happy to accept me for who I am now. And some of the the friendships that I thought were the strongest are the ones that have withered. It’s been incredibly difficult. I’ve been talking to other, mostly older, wiser seeming people and asking them what is friendship and how do you do it and how do you not fuck it up.Because I’m finding it’s really hard.
SS: It is really hard, and sometimes we don’t take it seriously. We take for granted that it’s just there. Because we’re told we have to work on our primary relationships, and we have to work on our relationships with our kids. But what I’m really learning now, at the age of 47 — one of my kids is about to go to college, one is about to enter high school — is that the relationships that are principal in my life are my relationships with other women. I recently separated, so even more than the one with my husband, it’s these friendships that are the structure that have replaced family. Not just my family of origin but the family that I’ve made as well. In another five years, nobody will be home, and then what?
LM: So looking ahead, what’s your fantasy friendship life over the next couple of decades?
SS: That I maintain and deepen bonds with really smart, frank women. And that doesn’t mean just women my own age. But those are the things: frankness, candor. I value that so much in my friends. I recognize, as I say that, there’s a part of me that would never want my friends to tell me what they really think of me — we need our fantasy selves, too. But I’d like a community of women, not in the woo-woo “let’s go found a farm” way, but just a group of different women with different strengths from different arenas.
To be continued (stay tuned for how men are wired, the trouble with intimacy, and my burning friendship desire)…
