Friendwork

Thoughts on having friends and being one as a writer

Happy weekend, everyone. I write this week’s post from Iowa City as a light rain falls in the late afternoon. I’m uncommonly sleepy, likely from the weather but perhaps also because my partner Zach and I ventured out on a short drive this morning to walk in an old cemetery between West Branch and Tipton. We saw magnificent ancient oaks there, several gravestones from the nineteenth century, and even a Baltimore oriole! I left with a small souvenir, a bug bite under my left eye. (The gnats were out in full force, and we neglected to bring bug spray.) I can feel my body fighting the swelling with the aid of antihistamine, and it’s making me feel a bit depleted. Luckily, I have no plans today.

This week has been fairly normal for me, but it ended with a strange plot twist: I’ve been invited to interview for another job I applied to recently, and I only found out about this job opening thanks to a close friend. This got me thinking a bit more about friendship—which sometimes I think should be called “friendwork”—and how it’s radically altered my life in the past decade.

I’ve touched on this before, but it’s worth repeating: Before I became an expat, I didn’t have many close friends. I was lucky enough to have one when my first marriage fell apart, and she convinced me to find the help I needed. When I relocated to Beijing in 2018, freshly divorced, I quickly learned that having friends wasn’t merely a luxury. They were necessary to my survival in a foreign country, not to mention a megacity. The friends I found in Beijing, both within and outside of work, became my second family. I learned how to be vulnerable and accountable with them. Some are featured in my memoir, and I hope I can get it published soon so that others can know how much these people meant to me. Their friendship made me a better person, which in turn made me a better writer.

Now, nearly a decade since my divorce and self-imposed exile from the U.S., I’m grateful to have cultivated better roots back in Iowa City. I’ve always loved this place, but it’s a lot more fun with a network of friends I prioritize time with. My brief expat era taught me that to have friends, I need to put in some effort and reach out, schedule coffee dates. This is why I like the idea of “friendwork” as a word…friendship sounds passive to me, like something you can take for granted. Some friends work with a comfortable passivity, but I don’t take that chance anymore. I text my people, and we gather when we can.

Yesterday, I had some spare time between two friend dates (how lucky am I??), so I wandered to the ICPL and perused the memoir section upstairs. I came across one of Vivian Gornick’s books from over thirty years ago: Approaching Eye Level. I’ve only read the first few pages so far, but already I feel deeply connected to this spirited New Yorker and what she has to say about friendship in the city:

“There are two categories of friendship: those in which people are enlivened by each other and those in which people must be enlivened to be with each other. In the first category one clears the decks to be together. In the second one looks for an empty space in the schedule.

…To be responsive is to feel expressive. I value the expressiveness above all else. Or so I say. But there are moments, even days, when any disinterested observer might justly conclude that I…seem awash in my own melancholy, swamped by the invading instability, suffering a failure of nerve to which I seem devoted.

New York friendship is an education in the struggle between devotion to the melancholy and attraction to the expressive. I had thought it would be different in friendship than it generally is in marriage: attaining to a higher level of equilibrium somehow. But how foolish to have thought that. We are all the formerly married, are we not. Most of us spend our lives fighting an inner battle that is never won, in a war concluded only by death. In each life, however, one element or the other has the edge. The city reels beneath the impact of this dynamic. Why, exactly, it’s hard to say” (p. 10-11).

I identify with all of this, even though I’ve never been to New York. I think what Gornick seems to assume is unique to a New Yorker’s life is actually quite universal. I struggle with my own melancholy-demons and the desire to be alone constantly. Perhaps this is unique, but only to writers. We seem to want to be left alone and in the middle of a room of loved ones simultaneously.

I think of another iconic New Yorker when I read Vivian Gornick: Fran Lebowitz. When she was here in Iowa City a couple of weeks ago, she said during her lecture at the Englert that friends are the only people you truly choose in your life. Family is family, and lovers, she argues, are not a choice—they’re chemical attractions. (We all laughed when she said, “Every time I started dating someone new, I said to myself, ‘This will be horrible,’ but what could I do? My brain was hijacked.”) I think she’s right, and I also think to have friends at all is a choice that must be made, over and over again. It’s a commitment not all that different from commitment to one’s art. Both require significant time and energy to be any good. And they seem to feed off of each other.

Now that I’m getting older, having good friends feels even more important. I need people in my corner to weather the storms of aging parents, my own aging body, and whatever else might come along. Just last week, I was talking with a friend over coffee about perimenopause, and she loaned me a book about it! Having connections like that is a wonderful gift. It’s also wonderful, I know now, to have people to share good news with. As soon as I found out about my writing residency, I told my closest friends first.

My interview is next week, and whether I get the job or not, I’ll have something to talk about and people to talk with. I wouldn’t even have this opportunity without the help of a friend.

There should be a version of a family tree for friends. I’m not sure what that would look like or how you would organize it, but it’s nice to think about. Those big oaks that Zach and I saw this morning probably didn’t get that big without significant support and nourishment from their surrounding tree-neighbors—not to mention the fungal networks growing beneath them. I like to think of my own life as something like a tree, expanding through connection in all directions.

Image description: A huge old oak reaching up into a blue sky on a grassy hill in an old cemetery. A few small white headstones stand at attention in the background and are miniscule in comparison.