Writer "Friendships" in the Real World

Acknowledging the allure of parasocial relationships

Four years ago, after stumbling through writer group after writer chat after mastermind after whatever nome de plume we were assigning ourselves at that particular juncture, I finally found myself in a safe little group of women writers.

For me, safe and women has never been a given. I recognize now that I am probably somewhere along the spectrum and it is no longer a surprise to me that while other girls seemed to float around one another, sharing clothing and gossip, lipstick and advice, I always felt like a spectator in a museum or sometimes circus. How did they move like that? How did they shine like that? How did they contort like that? It wasn’t so much that I wanted to move or shine like that, but that I wanted to understand so much how they did.

With this little group of writers finally, I found myself unfolding, not contorting myself, not needing to shine or move or become anything other than myself. I found myself not feeling extracted from or even transacted with, but simply being. There was no trace of envy or jealousy, no words of hierarchy or sense of superiority. There were just four women in a room blowing on the tiny flame of fullness we could see each one becoming in her own right. You’ve heard me use Wirzba’s language of “liberating the other into their life,” and this has been one the few spaces in my life where that liberation has felt so palpable.

René Magritte, The Blank Signature, 1965

This past week, there have been a few pieces circulating about writer friendships and I braced myself reading them. In addition to women and friendship, friendship + writers is also not an equation I have found to have a safe sum. In recent years I began to recognize my own complicity in this when the mentoring some pursued me for in their writing turned into what

Katherine May

helpfully named today as extraction. By the end of these relationships (I struggle to call them friendships now), I was milked dry by talk of follower numbers, book advance numbers, endorsements, not to mention the ways my own work had been entirely co-opted and copied for their gain, my words showing up in their books and on their social media accounts and attributed to them.

I say complicity because a honest person (and I hope I am one) needs to admit these relationships often begin with a particular boost to one’s ego. I loved being a mentor. I loved it for a lot of good reasons, but I recognize now that one of the primary (as in early in the interactions) reasons is that it made me feel important or at least wise. Extraction in writer relationships is not a one-way street, it’s still transactional, it just shows up as a little more sneaky in the one who is being extracted from.

I don’t fault myself (or the others) in our fumbling attempts at creating relationships.

Daisy Buchanan

writes about the craving of intimacy among journalists, which reminds me of a recent podcast from The Daily where Ed Yong spoke about empathy being an essential ingredient for journalists. To feel, or at least to want to feel or pretend to feel in relationships is a natural human thing, but as writers, we can often experience faux feeling in order to gain the confidence of others or the endorsement we want for our own work. Writing is often very solitary work and we don’t work in one big building together, so we find our co-workers online, in parasocial relationships, where the word friend is thrown out so quickly and easily that years, decades even, can go by without meeting one another in the flesh. No wonder these relationships become more extractive or transactional.

I think many of those friendships can become real, and have delighted when the flesh finally does meet, but the work it takes to cultivate them in real ways is truly work and not easy. It takes a stalwart refusal to see the one you might call friend and hardly know as more than just the squares they show you on Instagram or the fears they express about their works-in-progress or the hopes they have for their latest manuscript. It takes also knowing the names of their kids, the intricacies of their spouse’s jobs, the results of their mammograms, their concerns about mental health in their families, and so much more. That is friendship. We can’t bring one another a pot-roast or casserole from across the country, but in some limited ways we can still bear witness to the non-writerly things that assault our lives, families, and health.

Over the past four years, I’ve mostly stopped cultivating “friendships” with those I meet online. Or, if I do, I close the gap that exists between us as quickly as I can by being in person with one another where the avatar of my writer self becomes conjoined with my morning self and uncaffeinated self, awed self and tired self, angry self and eating self, and all the many parts of who I am are all combined into one full[er] person. I have learned, finally, to offer myself in friendship, not as a mentor—older or wiser—or as a mentee—here to suck the teats of my latest unicorn¹ —but simply as I am, such as I am, and such as I am not.

I have a little secret to share and that is that I am working on a novel.

I don’t want to say too much about the novel right now, except that I love these characters so much I want to know them in real life and I want to squeeze them and tell them it’s all going to be okay. But also, a central theme in the novel is that real love is not transactional. It never is. Love is directional.

Sometimes love flows between two people in somewhat equal ways but rarely at equal degrees and to equal measures, but mostly it is one person moving toward the other with all they have within them to give and giving it, without the promise of receiving it back in turn. Love is faith. It is saying, “I choose to bear witness to the fullness of who you are and I choose not to take anything from you that you do not freely offer to me.” Love is the hardest and most beautiful work we do in the world.

I have just come back from a weekend with some of the fellow writers I love most in the world. We all had a chance to read our works-in-progress and receive feedback, encouragement in the form of Wows and You nailed it, but also encouragement in the form of Have you considered? and Maybe omit this whole section? Love among writers can be a fraught thing, tinged, as I said above, with envy or pride or a scavenging kind of voyeurism, licking at the newly formed bones of another’s project for meat for one’s own. But here in this room, and in just a few other rooms, I’ve found real love. I’ve found people who look at someone who is becoming themselves by writing the words they have to write, who fills up their lungs, puckers up their lips, and blows life across the room, blows liberation across the room, blows love across the room, asking for nothing in return.

1. Yes, I’m aware that the fictitious unicorn is male and therefore does not have milkable teats. Let me have my fiction!