"Any friendship that comes together over a mutual dislike of a third person is the best kind. Don’t let anybody tell you different"

an excerpt from Meeting New People and what happens in a world without designated smoking areas

I’ve been smoking cigarettes again lately. A friend recently brought me back a few packs of Scandinavian menthols after a trip to Japan, so I’ve been smoking those. I love menthols and they’re very difficult to get in California now, unless you know somebody who is willing to bend the rules for you. I don’t know anybody who is willing to bend the rules for me, which is a real shame because I would dearly love to walk into a corner store, exchange a knowing look with the proprietor, and buy something under the counter.

One of the most interesting things about smoking nowadays, as opposed to twenty years ago, is how few designated smoking areas remain in the world, even outdoors. No one used to like smoking areas, exactly, and they were not as a general rule beautiful, but they were at least designated, and one knew whether one belonged in them or not. Now, with no corrals to be herded into, one drifts towards increasingly unlovely and out-of-the-way places, which I quite like, because I prefer to smoke cigarettes when I want to feel persecuted, selfish, vile, unwholesome, disappointing, and out of place.¹ Of course I am none of those things. I am a fellow with a regular job, pleasant coworkers, a two-year-old son of great personal charisma, lovely partners, and library cards in at least three major metropolitan areas, but sometimes it’s fun to dress up and play pretend.

No one is excited to see you smoking a cigarette on the street, unless they want to smoke one too and hope you’ll give them one of yours. People who might ordinarily be pleased to see me will avoid saying hello if they see me smoking; this is doubly pleasurable, first because it enhances my sense of being a dangerous and misunderstood loner, and second because it makes me feel reasonable, even generous, as I think, Of course, it smells bad, it’s unhealthy, it’s no good for you to linger here…go on, get out of here, I release you…I forgive you, in an attitude of gratified derangement, like an astronaut who sacrifices himself to save the world in an ultimately life-affirming disaster film, rather than an ordinary person committing an entirely mundane, if lightly anti-social act.

I was moved to read an early review of my next book, Meeting New People, that took seriously the main character Barbara’s unpleasantness. I wanted to write a light novel about a tiresome person who was nevertheless sincere in her desire for genuine friendship, someone who has a meaningful attachment to her own bad temper and fears being ground down into likability:

I really adore a book that has affection for its difficult characters. I recently read Daniel M. Lavery’s forthcoming novel, Meeting New People, about an older woman named Barbara—and Barbara is a pill. Yet you can tell that Lavery likes her despite everything, and you can imagine why someone (someone with the same personality traits, perhaps) might like her too.

At least Barbara hopes so. She’s on the hunt for a new best friend, having burned through nine different ones over the course of her life thus far. We can see, from the first chapter, why Barbara’s most recent bestie, Susan Montgomery, is done with her: Barbara is deeply opinionated about petty things. She can be brusque and grating, especially with her son and her young co-workers. At the same time, her discernment (especially when it comes to the culinary arts—she is a talented home cook who works at a deli) is frequently sharp and delightful; her judgments render her unique and robust.

I have often described Meeting New People as a pastiche of Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, only without the justification of marital infidelity to excuse its cruelty and self-righteous judgment. I sincerely admire Ephron’s cruelty as a writer, particularly her cruelty about appearance:

“I can’t begin to tell you how it sent me up the wall…this affair between my husband, a fairly short person, and Thelma Rice, a fairly tall person with a neck as long as an arm and a nose as long as a thumb and you should see her legs, never mind her feet, which are sort of splayed.”

But of course Heartburn’s Rachel has a long lead to justify her cruelty; she has been cuckolded, while seven months pregnant, by her famous husband with another member of their social circle, and if ever there were license for cruelty, that is certainly it. Barbara has no such license, having been recently dumped by her best friend Susan Montgomery for what are almost certainly excellent reasons. She has in fact been dumped by a number of best friends over the course of her fifty-seven years, but is not yet prepared to knuckle under and say, “I was wrong about everything.”

I wanted to write about someone who was completely alone, not without justification and yet not merely because they were an as-yet-reconstructed Scrooge who was about to burst into spiritual perfection, either. Barbara is experiencing the social and interpersonal squeeze that comes when “designated smoking areas” are replaced with “guesswork and nothing.” I think of her as the sort of person whose life was made more difficult when, for example, diet talk went from being a generally-accepted topic of discussion with new acquaintances and coworkers to something profoundly personal and potentially damaging. This is not to say that diet talk has been anything like banished from polite society, only that the rules have changed pretty significantly in the last thirty years. On balance I think this has been a good thing, but it interests me to consider what sort of friction and discomfort accompanies it, and what begrudging, unwilling compliance to new norms does to intimate relationships.

It’s perfectly fine in your forties to start to buying the expensive sunscreen instead of just whatever’s on sale at the drugstore and generally looking after your skin, but it’s absolute death to start conspicuously and unnecessarily dropping your age into general conversations, where it’s clear that you’re looking to nudge people into a very particular and outsized response: “Are you telling me that you’re forty-five? You’ve got to be kidding me, your skin looks like a baby peach, I never would have guessed, et cetera,” which of course they’re going to say, because people can usually tell when they’re being prompted.

And now you’ve got the ammunition you wanted, which is a chance to say, “People are always shocked when I tell them I’m forty-five!” Or whatever age you are. I don’t like it when anybody makes jokes about being old, or if they make the acquaintance of someone much younger than themselves, jokes about how lucky the young person is to still be young–it’s all so embarrassing.

It also means that nobody in your life is willing to tell you that you’re embarrassing yourself, which is doubly embarrassing, because it means either nobody cares about you enough to be honest, or nobody who cares about you is smart enough to see what’s going on. Youth is the one thing you can never get back once it’s gone, and the only attitude worth having towards lost youth is a matter-of-fact one. I don’t mean anything like getting old “gracefully” or “with dignity,” which I’ll admit are two clichés I particularly dislike.

Aging is the one thing that happens to everyone, and that no one can do anything about. If there’s any single foundation that underlies all polite behavior, I think it’s got something to do with not drawing unnecessary attention to inevitabilities and trying to smooth over whatever necessary roughness everybody has got to endure. People ought to just get old, full stop, and not complain about it or make cute little jokes, either. Maybe I feel this way because of Stephanie what’s-her-name, but I don’t think of her as having been especially important, except for how she brought me and Ann-Preston together, since before that I hadn’t had a best friend since the ninth grade, when Iliona Lukic purposefully picked a fight two weeks before her stable party just so she could uninvite me. (My best friend at the time, Kimberly G., went without me.) There were horses.

I just think that it’s one thing to want to generally look young for your age, or to occasionally enjoy the company of someone younger than yourself, but it’s ridiculous to sprint after it, or to try to clutch it to your chest, and that it’s better not to be ridiculous if you can help it. That’s mostly what other people are for, I think, to tell you when you’re looking ridiculous, so you can knock it off. When you’re alone, you can’t always tell what’s ridiculous, and that’s one of the reasons I never feel really comfortable when I’m in between best friends.

Something I know now, that I didn’t know then, is that any friendship that first comes together over a mutual dislike of a third person is the best kind. Don’t let anybody tell you different. Yes, when the wheels come off, they really come off, and if you two got together over a shared meanness, you’re probably going to be very mean to each other at the end of things. But so what? Whenever a friendship dies, it feels like a bolt across your life, even if you’re both polite about it. In the meantime, you’ve had a hell of a lot of fun. I can’t think of anything that feels quite like being mean together with someone who’s really good at it, who knows what she’s doing, who knows when to dig in and when to back off, and has a nice sense of scale about the whole thing.

I don’t know if that’s exactly true. Sometimes I say things just to find out whether I really believe them. Those kinds of friendships are wonderful, I will say that, because so few people are prepared to defend meanness, but of course, they can be awful, too. Certainly, I sometimes wish that I just naturally thought kind things about people. That seems very peaceful. And I do want people to like me, and usually being kind helps with that. It’s hard to be unkind and sensitive, I mean. So sometimes—usually after I’ve had a big bust-up with someone—I wish I was naturally very kind, and that when I looked at people I just saw their inner luminous spirits, or their better selves, or whatever it is that kind people see when they look at other people, but I don’t really know how to generate those thoughts, and if I try to, I end up feeling flat and insipid and, frankly, like a liar.

It’s not a mystery to me, why I have trouble keeping people around. I know I’m difficult, and at my age, I’m unlikely to change substantially before I die. I just want to find someone I can be difficult with, without turning on each other.

It was also important to me that Barbara should be desperately lonely. I think feeling beleaguered and lonely at the same time is a dangerous and interesting combination, one that often produces wildly contradictory impulses towards change, retreat, domination, and defiance.

Barbara is not, I don’t think, my mother. Among other things, my mother is a very popular woman, and aside from me I don’t think has ever lost a single friend in her life. Nor is she quite my sister, nor any of my other relatives, and yet if you were to put my mother and ten of her closest friends in the same room as my sister, cousins, and grandmothers, Barbara would surely be gathered together with them. And none of them smoke, either.

1. And, I suppose, when I want to feel good, too.