Writing Friendship

My protagonist has met her first friend in chapter 4 and she can’t quite believe her luck. Writing about loneliness has been a cathartic process; I often read novels where the friendships are strong and interesting, but in our modern day world, perhaps a tad unrealistic. Maddie, my central character is without a best friend or sidekick, not because she’s not a nice person, but because she doesn’t quite fit into the dynamics of the office, breaking unwritten rules in fashion and showcasing a chaotic approach to interior design and home cleanliness (which regularly feature on Zoom calls resulting in her colleagues leaving leaflets for cleaning companies on her desk). She’s more than slightly socially awkward and her parents have both died, they being all the friends she needed for much of her life. The challenge for me as an author is to present this new chapter in Maddie’s life in a way that feels authentic; I am not Maddie - although I won’t be showing off my house on Zoom calls any time soon - but writing about her has caused me to reflect on my own friendships and the disparity between what I had in my early twenties and what I have now at nearly 40.

In my early twenties, friendship was something to be taken for granted. I could call upon a plethora of friends on a Friday night and someone would be around to join me for a few drinks, which would most likely result in a whole group of us going out and waking up with hangovers the following morning. Nights out were preceded by group chats about what everyone was wearing, what the theme was(?) and round whose house the pre-drinks would be happening. On Sundays we’d hang out together eating anything we could lay our hands on that would take away the feeling of existential dread that resulted from a weekend of binge drinking, already forming our excuses for work on Monday. It was exhausting, but we felt unstoppable. At 25 I still had most of the friends I had at school and was smug in my belief that this would always be the case.

At nearly 40, things are very different. I was one of the first to have a child in my friendship group and he changed everything. While my world was full of nappies, sleep routines and breast feeding, my friends were still very much in the world of group chats and all nighters. My group chats now consisted of 2am emails back and forth with my NCT group as I panicked that my baby (and by default, me) would never sleep again.

It's a tale as old as time, but a tale, nonetheless, that has caused me real pain over the years. I refused to let friendships go, even when the only thing I felt in their company was pure anxiety. I clung onto the safety of ‘the friendship group’ even when it no longer felt like a safe place to be.

‘3 Eyed Blonde’, Ian Healy, 2022.

It's a theme that is reflected beautifully in Claire Hennessy’s At the Still Point, a short story which painfully documents the decline of a a friendship between housemates, inexplicably forced into suffocating closeness during the Covid-19 pandemic. First published in The Moth Magazine in 2023, the story jumps back and forth along an imagined timeline as the friendship drifts into conflict. The beauty of this piece is the lack of drama in the finality of their friendship’s demise. They simply drift into silence, a fate perhaps worse than death.

Writing about friendship is tricky in a decade where “49.63% of adults (25.99 million people) in the UK reported feeling lonely occasionally, sometimes, often or always”. These statistics can sometimes feel remote, as if loneliness affects only people of a certain age, living alone in a neighbourhood of people too busy to notice them. But I have to remember that I have felt at my most lonely in a room full of friends, all of whom were discussing a dinner party that I wasn’t invited to. In creating the character of Maddie, I have tried not to isolate her. Her loneliness is conveyed through her social awkwardness, inspired in part by Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine whose protagonist feels so refreshingly fragile in the harshness of social pungency. Her fragility adds depth to her friendship with Raymond, which by the end of the novel, as The Independent notes, provides us with a “friendship that has served its ultimate purpose – to provide companionship, empathy and a shoulder to lean on.”

More stories of humans finding friendships difficult to navigate please!

Of course one of the most successful portrayals of friendship in my generation is the TV show Friends. In a fascinating deep dive into the making of the show, I came across the character descriptions from the first pilot episode. While some characters have changed, you can already see the iconic personalities in their raw form that made the show such a success. Because on paper, these 5 people should not be friends - but they are, and it works.

You can read the pilot script and dive into the character archetypes that drove their conception here.

My novel has a happy ending and I think my own story does too. Last week I took a 10 mile walk with my best friend round the Kentish coast. Over the course of a few hours, we opened our hearts to one another, talking about our worries, our deepest desires and our weird thoughts that we would never share with anyone else. A week later and I’m still living off the interest of the oxytocin that surged through my body that day.

If you have made it to the end of my little exploration of friendship, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart for staying with me if you have, I leave you with one request: Phone your friends, write them a letter, go for a long walk. Trust me, it’s worth it.