About a year ago, a convoluted situation resulted, in a very roundabout way, in the rekindling of a friendship I thought had died. Since then, we’ve tried to get back up to speed in each other’s lives, including some health problems on my end and the unexpected death of a parent on hers. It was this friendship, which began over twenty-five years ago at this point, that I kept thinking about as I read Lilly Dancyger’s latest, First Love: Essays on Friendship.
From recalling her first friend—her cousin—to the girl who was practically attached at her hip during her days as a high school dropout to the friends encircling her in her married-and-thinking-about-starting-a-family present, Dancyger’s constellation of buds and besties are proof of that old saying about some friends being forever and some being for a season. This rings particularly true in how Dancyger clearly cherishes each one, regardless of how long or intense that friendship was or is.
First Love is not a collection of rah-rah moments proving female friendship is the most magical of all relationships or anything; for starters, Dancyger has an air of transparency, at least, over some of the growing pains in these friendships, and does obviously appreciate other types of relationships (familial, romantic, etc.), too. The friends she writes about aren’t necessarily avatars of some facet of friendship, either, though many of the essays do skew somewhat in that direction. Her cousin is murdered at a young age, pushing Dancyger into years of uncomfortable musing about grief and love and how true crime too often victimizes its victims all over again. A friendship with a photographer illustrates the relationship between art and artist, and how dynamics of power can exist and shift in even the most amicable of relationships. The friend to whom she was practically glued during her teenage years prompts reflection about how intense any kind of feelings can be between two people, and how in some cases the combination of that intensity and half-baked teenage ideas has led to violence.
My life and friendships have looked pretty different than what Dancyger lays out on the page. I’ve never taken recreational drugs; I’ve never had a problem with alcohol; I’ve never been a cool girl in New York; I frankly don’t feel I have the kind of knack for friendship that Dancyger obviously does. But while her takes on friendship may come from places of personal specificity, they nonetheless find broad resonance in how I think most of us have thought of friendship, even if unconsciously. How the love you have for your parents or siblings and the love you have for friends are different kinds of love, but that doesn’t make one inferior to the other, or more or less impactful. How some friendships sustain us for decades, while others find us when we need them and then leave us—and that’s okay, too.
I don’t know if I’ll directly recommend this collection to the friend I’ve reconnected with. I don’t know if we’ve regained enough understanding for her to know how much of it I was pointing to directly because of us, and how much just made me think of her as one of my oldest friends. (If Dancyger had written about reconnecting with an old friend, perhaps I’d have a blueprint to follow.) Maybe when more time has gone by. Regardless, it’s made me think about the friends who sustain me in fresh appreciation, and I hope that’s not a passing thing.
Ring Reads 