Gayle Forman on friendship and her new novel, I Was Here

Gayle Forman is the bestselling author of If I Stay, now a Major Motion Picture. Here she talks about friendship, something that is central to Gayle’s fantastic and heartbreaking new novel, I Was Here.

The thing with hearts is that it takes time to know if they’re truly broken. I once thought that the boys who dumped me, the ones who inspired notebooks full of overwrought poetry, broke my heart. But age, distance and perspective have all shifted those boys to the top of the bookshelf, where their memories have grown dusty, faded, and robbed of any power. Clearly, whatever I felt for them was not love so much as infatuation and lust. And while they hurt me – my feelings, my pride – they did not break my heart.

Which is not to say I have not had my heart broken. I have. Several times in fact. But by girlfriends – not girlfriends, women with whom I’ve been romantically involved. I’m talking about girl friends.

It started when I was twelve with a girl from school, with whom I quickly bonded over horses, only to have her dump me with no explanation a few months later. I was left bereft for months. It happened again in my twenties, when my best friend and I got a flat together, and after a few months, she got a new boyfriend, dumped me, and kicked me out of the flat to move in with the boyfriend. I was torn up over her, I had to run away and go travelling to lick my wounds. In my thirties another good friend dumped me weeks after she had her first baby. I wrote the requisite angry emails (never sent them) and stewed for months.

These breakups felt oddly like breakups with guys I’d been romantically involved with: that same sense of anger/sadness/confusion/betrayal/and lots of whywhywhy? And they took just as long, if not longer, to get over.

But they were different from the guy breakups, in a couple of significant ways. First of all, years later, with all that age and wisdom and perspective, the friend breakups still sting. Unlike the boys, these were people I truly loved. When they removed themselves from my life, they took a chunk of my heart with them. The other difference is that unlike a guy breakup, which I could spend hours deconstructing with friends, the girlfriend breakups felt shameful, something I shouldn’t talk about, let alone cry over. After all, who gets dumped by a friend? And who gets so upset about it?

I used to think there was something wrong with me to make me so dumpable, so oversensitive. But another perk of age and wisdom and perspective is that you realise it’s rarely just you, and that there’s nothing wrong with you that’s not wrong with everyone else, too. Because as I’ve talked about this more, it turns out most of my female friends have had their heart broken by platonic friends, too. And like me, they didn’t talk about it either.

I’m not sure why this rite of female passage is such a secret. Maybe it’s because while the girl friendship is something you see celebrated in popular culture in extremes – Female Bonding or Girls Behaving Badly – it’s rare to see a spikier, more complicated (and, I’d argue, truer) version represented. (At least that’s how it is in the U.S. Maybe you Brits are more enlightened.)

There are exceptions, of course: movies like Beaches and Bridesmaids, the book and musical Wicked, the television show Girls. And perhaps most notably, in young-adult books, which tend to give friendship-romance if not as much oxygen as romantic love, at least a decent second.

Maybe I’m just as guilty of this omission. Though nearly all of my books circle around themes of female friendship, I’ve yet to write a book in which a friendship affair commands centre stage. Although my newest book, I Was Here, gets pretty close. The story chronicles Cody and Meg, who have been not just best friends, but each other’s most important people since childhood. As the book opens, Cody’s heart is broken because Meg, who already left her once by leaving their dead-end small town to attend a prestigious college, has taken her own life. The book is about guilt and resilience and redemption. And yes, there’s a guy-love interest in it as well. But it’s the friendship love-affair between Cody and Meg that is the book’s heart.

At the age of forty-four, I like to think that I’m past the age of dumpability. I’ve been with my husband for over two decades and my two best friends – both of whom swear that only a brain-changing lightning strike could cause them to dump me – have been around for years. But if occasional heartbreak is the price for such deep intimate relationships, then I suppose it’s one I’m willing to pay.

—

You can Click & Collect I Was Here from your local Waterstones bookshop or buy it online at Waterstones.com