Everybody Talks About How Nobody Talks About Friend Breakups

My second novel, Gallstones¹, is due to the publisher in June, so I’m deep in the notes-and-noodling stage, where I write helpful little notes to myself like “make sure total spiritual transformation in this chapter” and “Paprika — you can’t bloom it for goulash” (I posted part of the first chapter here last year, before I’d managed to sell the proposal, and you can also see me performing it here). Whenever I write notes like this I invariably think it’s more than enough information for my future self to work with, and then whenever I come across them later I feel baffled and furious, like a chimpanzee who has been given a page of the Voynich Manuscript to translate.

Women’s Hotel, my first novel, is primarily concerned with a group of polite and decent women, most of whom have polite and decent problems. Those problems can and of course do include numerous forms of cruelty and aggression, but of a very particular kind and expressed in very prescribed ways. Gallstones is concerned with a single woman who is neither.

Barbara Foerster is sixty-two years old and hasn’t had a best friend in over fifteen years, not since Therese Dumont took Barbara’s name off the casserole list during chemo treatments without explanation. Between the ages of five and fifty Barbara had nine best friends (only two of which overlapped with one another), ending with a woman named Susan Montgomery who read aloud from a list of what she considered to be Barbara’s most troublesome faults during their last fight, and no longer speaks to any of them. Barbara is single, on reasonably friendly terms with her second ex-husband, slightly less friendly terms with her son, and on no terms at all with her first ex-husband. She has no desire to get married a third time, and even admires her son for politely disliking her, but she does want a best friend again, badly.