When my children were very young I read an article about female friendship, which gushed about the unique blessing of small circles of besties, and interviewed a number of mothers who said they had only made it through those early years thanks to late night Whatsapps with ‘the girls’. I remember wondering what was wrong with me, that there I was in my early forties, not belonging to any such WhatsApp groups or having a tight knit group of girl friends to call my own. Later that same day, my youngest daughter came up to me, caught hold of my arm, looked up with big innocent eyes and asked, “Mummy, you have friends?”
We had moved back to my hometown when she was a few weeks old. I only knew a couple of people, and was worn thin with the dual demands of parenting small children and building a business. My mum lived round the corner and did all the toddler classes while I worked on my second book. I did have friends but most of them were people I had collected on my travels and various iterations of my life overseas, and they lived hundreds – if not thousands – of miles away. Even here in the UK, my husband and I have been itinerant, moving house once every three years or so ever since we met. It’s a strange habit we have, which is great for variety, not so great for building bonds, or staying in the lives of those we move away from.
My daughter’s question stung, not so much because of my lack of local friends – I had become numb to that – but more because I worried what I was modelling for her. I was a work-obsessed hermit and she could see it. I wondered whether that was how it would always be, whether I had reached an age where I had met my quota of potential friends and not done such a good job of making the most of them. Sometimes it made me sad but mostly I didn’t have time to think about it.
Not long after that we moved (again!) to Devon, near the sea where the community is strong, people have more time for each other and I am in a slightly different life phase. I am still slow to form friendships but am grateful for each one that has come into my life these past few years. I have also been stunned by the deep connections that have been forged through the world of writing, and I would love to go back and tell my younger doubting self that there is no need to worry, some very special people will soon arrive carrying armfuls of books and joy.
One of those people is Holly Ringland, who you might know as the award winning author of two of my favourite novels, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart and The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding. Holly isn’t local to me. She lives in Australia. But she friends like someone who lives down the road and getting to know her has been a revelation. I shared one of her books on social media about five years ago, and have recommended them many times over since. That led to us striking up a conversation via Instagram DMs, and last year, when she was heading back to her second home of Manchester she dropped me a friendly note suggesting we meet up for a coffee if I was ever in town.
We ended up meeting last August. It was the strangest thing – all week I had been horizontal on my hotel room floor, or hobbling around the city with terrible back pain, and could not sit for more than a few minutes. But then I met Holly in the bar at my hotel, ordered a mocktail, started snorting with laughter at one of the hilarious things she said, sat down and stayed there for hours, absolutely fine. I see this as evidence that Holly is a magical being. I would go so far as to say I was bedazzled by her, in that her light landed on me like a sticky jewel, and never left. It was the most joyous meeting, and soon after she came down to visit us in Devon. I’ll never forget watching her sitting on a deckchair holding up a beach pebble and explaining the essence of storytelling in the simplest, most beautiful of terms to my youngest daughter, who went straight back home, started writing and didn’t stop until months later when she held in her own small hands three hardback copies of her first book, which she got printed on Snapfish with her own money.
Holly has returned to Australia now, but we text often, marvelling at all kinds of coincidences and serendipitous overlaps that seem to happen in our lives, and I am so grateful, not just for our Whatsapp group of two but for her stories, her authenticity, her hilarity and magic and for her generosity as a human being. I want you to know her too, so I have invited her to share some words here with us today. As it happens, without knowing what I was going to write about to introduce her, she wrote us an essay called ‘The Language of Strangers’ – it’s a love letter to the weirdo in each of us, and it makes me wonder whether it isn’t those inner weirdos seeing and knowing each other that is the foundation of a true friendship, and the stories that we exchange weirdo to weirdo which bind us together.
As for making friends in later life, I’ll share what my mother told me in her last days, when I asked her for friendship advice. I remember, because I wrote it down. She said, We have different friends for different life stages, and different kinds of friendships in each one. Good friendship takes work. You have to keep up with it. Going for coffee. Calling them up. Spending time. There are some times in your life when you just don’t have as much time for that as you want. If you can make the time, great, but if you can’t, don’t worry too much. Just do the best you can. If it’s just you doing the work, it’s OK to let the friendship go. More friends will come. And right now you are in a really busy life stage. I want you to have as many lovely friends as you want, but I also want you to know that when the children are older and you have more time, different people will arrive and you will be glad for them. There is no rush.
How right she was.
Click here to read the full essay including Holly Ringland’s piece ‘The Language of Strangers: a love letter to weirdos and our stories that connect us‘.
