A Conversation with the Author
Why are female friendships so important in life?
Women are intense and honest and emotional. Men can be, too, of course, yet these are not the traits immediately prized in our friend-ships with them, not the traits encouraged in men by our culture. Women will go to the most difficult and dangerous places, I think. We are compelled to. Your women friends will soothe you, protect you, nurture you, disappoint you, challenge you. All relationships do this to one degree or another, but with women—who are about relationship—it’s exponentially fraught, which makes it very rich to write about.
When you started thinking about friendship, was there a core story or particular friend you wanted to write about?
Claire was my best friend ten years ago, and she dumped me. We’d been terribly close, because we shared the first years of motherhood together, and our kids were best friends, too. Without warning, she broke up with me, and when she explained why—briefly—she described me as someone I couldn’t even begin to recognize. How had I been so sure of us? I wondered. How could I believe myself as one thing and she see someone so utterly different? Had we even been having the same friendship, for the same reasons? These questions got me started, and writing that story was a way to come to terms with the hurt and confusion. Our breakup also broke up our children.
Please tell us about some of the friendships you describe in the book.
The book begins with Patricia, a woman I’m close with almost twenty years into our friendship. When we met, we encouraged each other as writers, and that was important. Later we had babies at the same time, and Patricia, who came from a stable family whereas I did not, really guided me in those first crucial years, taught me a lot about being a mother. Now that our kids are teen-agers we’ve discovered a whole new relationship, something layered and mature, something complicated by all we know of each other. And we know everything! I love how there can be many identities to a single friendship.
I write about girlhood friendships, when you’re just starting to feel your way beyond the world of your parents. A very important high school friendship—when girls cling to each other—I betrayed, even though I loved Claudia; I tried to pretend that my betrayal didn’t matter. Of course it mattered. I was eleven when I knew Jessica, a camp friend who’d been hugely important to me one summer. I’d never forgotten her, and we found each other again on Facebook. I was so excited. We both were. But, then, under Facebook’s insistence, we tried to reconnect and found we’d outgrown the selves who had needed the friendship. I write about Jessica because I’m interested in the ways a friendship itself retains power even when the friend has faded away.
I write about a fellow artist, Mary, who inspired me to render pain as art; an acquaintance, Connie, who inadvertently became crucial when she saw me through the death of my father; April, a wonderful, expressive, tender friend whom I disapproved of—some choices she made—and stopped talking to, only to reunite eight years later with much greater understanding and compassion, for her and for myself. We’ve been friends for twenty-five years.
Even in the closest and most passionate friendships you describe, there remains an undercurrent of ambivalence—an ambivalence you acknowledge in the book.
In my work I try to inhabit the place of ambivalence, an in-between state. We are often pushed into proclamations and announcements, whether it’s about sex or parenting or work, whatever it is, but really that doesn’t feel true to our natures. We end up betraying ourselves when we pretend we’re not ambivalent.
You say of one friend, “[She] assured me of a way to be the right woman and right friend. She didn’t demand more or prepare for less. She gave me a closeness I hadn’t known how to have without its being awful” (page 17). Please tell us why this kind of un-awful closeness was previously impossible for you.
We look to our mothers to teach us how to be women, but in some cases—in mine—we don’t have a good model. My mother—whom I wrote about in Her Last Death, so it’s difficult to put this in one sentence—was a pathological liar, a heavy drug user, a seductress of men to the exclusion of almost all else. She was very competitive with me, which isn’t an uncommon aspect of the mother-daughter relationship, especially as the girl enters adolescence, but my mother in the course of this competition was destructive and vicious and scary. I didn’t learn healthy closeness. My early lessons of womanhood were: lie, seduce, compete, betray.
What was the greatest challenge as you wrote about your friends?
Confidences and confidentiality are the bedrocks of friendship, and I could not figure out at first how to tell the story of what mattered between me and these friends without giving away confidences. Finally, I just had to tell the reader that some things stay private.
You explore so many themes of women’s intimacy with one another. Do you feel there’s anything you left out?
Weight. I made a decision to leave weight out of the book. It’s undeniably a ready topic among women, but I’ve never been comfortable with the way our attention is forced there. Endlessly. My mother told me I was a fat kid, and she sent me to Weight Watchers, and later I struggled to shift my thinking so that I could simply enjoy my body, be at home and alive in it. I feel sad when that’s what women—marvelous, complicated, powerful, talented, loving women!—feel they have to comment on in each other and themselves.
Are you in touch with every woman in the book?
I am not. Some of these are ancient friendships, some outgrown, some ruined. Yet each woman here has taught me something essential, shown me some way through, helped me feel a family when my sense of family was shaky. When I started writing She Matters I was startled to see how many people had mattered this deeply, how crucial they were to who I am. I was startled, too, to realize that sometimes a woman had had only a moment’s appearance, yet her influence had endured. I’d often wondered why I didn’t have friendships with women that conformed to a certain notion of women’s friendships—you and your four best friends from college rent a lake cabin every Labor Day weekend for decades, that kind of thing. I thought, Oh, I don’t have continuity like that in my life, and I was envious and sad. But writing She Matters I saw another kind of continuity I had not defined before, strands of relationships running through my whole life, ways I had carried every friendship with me. Even though I’m interested in what’s tricky and difficult in all of these friendships, even though I no longer know some of these people, this book is a declaration of gratitude.
Click through to read the excerpt “Famous Names” from Susanna Sonnenberg’s memoir
Her Last Death
Available from Scribner
Famous Names
When my mother was born, her father was famous. They lived in Santa Monica, where he composed Hollywood film scores, had novelty cameos alongside George Burns, Vivien Leigh. He played the harmonica brilliantly. My grandmother Patsy gave soirees and sent her three children to the birthday parties of movie stars’ children. She was a noted beauty, first as a model (of hats), then as a ringer for Carole Lombard. “After the plane crash Clark Gable stopped at her table at the Stork Club, mute with grief,” my mother said. “Daddy had an affair with Ingrid Bergman!” she told us about him. “Imagine if she’d been your grandmother!”
Blacklisted, my grandfather moved the family to England, and his name was expunged from his Oscar-nominated credit. He achieved fresh fame, and my mother counted on the reaction when she mentioned him. She taught me to pick the people who would be impressed. “If they’re American, they have to be over forty,” she said. “Of course, in England, everyone has heard of him.” I told some of my friends’ parents, and she was right.
She grew up in London in the sixties, and her absolute best friend dated Paul McCartney. In restaurants, girls climbed crying and screaming through the windows to get to Paul and John, who always had to leave out the back way. I felt like she was there, it seemed like she was. At school I repeated for Marcy and Elise her story of
warning John that “Strawberry Fields” would never be a hit. In high school, I told it less frequently because I began to recognize its unlikely quality. Not impossible, but unlikely.
When her father played concerts in New York, she took us to see him. “He’s sold out Carnegie Hall. Isaac Stern is coming.” She’d sit between us and squeeze my hand so I couldn’t let go, tears on her face as he played “Rhapsody in Blue” and “Summertime.” I watched her. Although she hardly mentioned him when he wasn’t in town, she was overcome during the performances. “Isn’t Daddy the most extraordinary musician in the world? Gershwin wrote for him, you know.” Our grandfather still lived in London, married to a different wife. They had a daughter born in 1966, one year after me. This fascinated me, that I was older than my own aunt, although I only met her once or twice and don’t remember visiting his flat. In New York, he didn’t stay at our apartment, didn’t take us out to dinner. Shyly we talked to him backstage and stood at attention for his renowned comic anecdotes. He gave me and Penelope tiny harmonicas, his autograph etched on the top. On the way home our mother told us he’d had them made for us.
Patsy lived in New York at the Osborne. She was also married again. “He’s the love of her life,” my mother said, though she didn’t get on with her stepfather, who disapproved of her behavior. “Oh, fuck off!” she’d yell when they fought. Patsy took us to Bonwit’s for velvet party dresses and Mary Janes, to Broadway musicals. She was proud of her own applause. “I can clap louder than anyone else!” I loved her fur coat. “I don’t feel the wind at all,” she’d say as we waited for her town car after the performance. “I could leave this to you in my will, if you like it. Although I think Penelope wants it.” When she and her husband bought their flat in London, an entire floor of a former embassy, we went. Our mother bought us matching hats at Biba. The chauffeur took me and Penelope to Hyde Park. My grandmother and her husband bought an apartment in Monte Carlo. We went. “Stand on the balcony, darlings. You can look right down on the route of the Grand Prix.” Patsy took us to the Ballets Russes and for dinner to the Hotel de Paris on the Place du Casino. “Won’t they even try a taste of caviar?” she’d ask my mother fretfully.
• • •
My mother visited John Cheever where he was “drying out.” We knew the family. My mother taught reading to inmates at Sing Sing, and she gave some of them our phone number “to cheer them up.” When we went to the movies she always knew somebody in the credits, people she’d grown up with or known in England. As the movie started, she’d give a satisfied laugh and then say, “Old Jenny!” or “Caw! It’s Richard!”
My mother said, “Children, this is a detective with the narcotics division of the New York Police Department. Remember yesterday, the brown paper bag from the Optimo, all those little blue pills that spilled out? I had to involve the police. Imagine what could have happened had Penelope eaten them—you thought they were candy, didn’t you?—she’d have died! This man is going to help us arrest the drug dealers.”
She dated a New York Giants quarterback. “You should see the way he’s battered from the game,” she told us. “Every inch of him.” We asked him to show us scars, and he did. A director, a writer from The New Yorker, a big executive at the BBC, the head of a Times desk. A Broadway actor appeared from under her covers as we brought in coffee one morning. One of her men made documentaries, heir to the something fortune; another one ghostwrote political memoirs. “If anyone knew the truth about Kissinger!” At a party at our house, a TV actor wandered into my room and saw my prized photograph of Farrah Fawcett, black-and-white and unpublished, a present from the photographer boyfriend, the one who did the top magazine covers. The actor said, “I’m doing a movie with her. I could get you her autograph.” When the oversized envelope came, I pulled out my picture. Farrah had written in immense ballpoint loops, “Susy, Can’t wait to meet you!” I believed her.
• • •
My mother needed painkillers. It was because of that mean boy at her boarding school, she always said. He pulled the chair out from under her as she was sitting down, and she landed on her tailbone, and that was that, the reason she had slipped disks, the reason she had to have back surgeries. “Blame him,” she said. “And that’s why you must never play that joke, not ever. Look what can happen.” She pointed out that I had the same tailbone as she did, an extra long one. “Your coccyx,” she said. “Right here.” I was at risk, too.
She lay in bed. “Don’t bump the bed,” she warned as we entered her room. Don’t bump the bed. Don’t bump the bed. While we told her about school, sometimes her face contorted, and we had to stop talking. Then she’d say, “I’m all right, just a spasm.” I was shocked the first time I heard someone else use “spasm,” her frequent word. She went to the hospital. She came back with narcotics. “If the pain weren’t so bad I wouldn’t have to take so much,” she said. With a needle she sucked the clear liquid out of a glass vial into the body of the syringe and showed me how she’d been taught to give herself injections. “This way we don’t need to hire an expensive nurse.” She was proud she could do it. “In spite of my fear of needles,” she said.
The household adapted. I was ten and got used to her bottomless sleeps, the uncapped needles in her washbag, the tiny bottles of Demerol lined up on the black glass shelf in her bathroom. I felt sort of friendly toward them, little soldiers helping her fight off pain.
One day from the kitchen I heard a faint, thin name, over and over. My name, or something like it. I went to her, and she lay naked on her side, her hips oddly raised, arms extended.
“Sh-shwip-sh-sh,” she whispered.
I came nearer and saw the syringe planted in her thigh. “What? Can you say it again?”
With great effort she pointed to the needle. “I need—need— push it in.” Her eyes rolled up. “You. Push.” I couldn’t. Then I grabbed the syringe and used my thumb to press down the plunger. Her body didn’t resist. Almost immediately she opened her eyes. “Thank you, darling.”
One morning she wafted into the kitchen, the nightgown a sliver on her. Her hands reached for the table. I was deciding about breakfast in front of the open fridge.
“Hi,” I said. It was a giddy surprise to see her upright, to have her come in, but I didn’t want to make a fuss in case that sent her back to bed. I just wanted her to stay. I could feed her. “I told Penelope to get dressed,” I said, school mornings my responsibility. My mother stood next to me, the fridge casting light on her nightgown. The two of us looked at the shelves, sharing a concern. We were out of milk.
“Well, there isn’t much,” I said. “There’s Jell-O. I made it last night. You just pour boiling water in. The mandarin oranges sank to the bottom, though. How about Jell-O for breakfast?” I wanted to make her laugh. She made up voices for turned-down TV commercials, and I hoped never to be sent to bed, never to stop laughing like that. I wanted to be funny the way she was.
I pulled out the platter and started to jiggle the green mound. “Jell-O for breakfast,” I sang. I held the plate up to her face, making the Jell-O dance. Her eyes fixed on it. She started to quiver and jiggle, too. I thought she was playing, and I was still laughing when I realized something was not right. Her jiggling was not like the Jell-O’s. Violent convulsions shot down her body, and as I watched her I couldn’t stop shaking the Jell-O, unable to break the live current between me, her and the plate. She sputtered for a few steps until she seized. Then she dropped, and I let the plate drop, too.
Her tongue was swelling where her teeth had snapped together, and blood pooled in her mouth and ran down her chin. I wiped the floor with a paper towel and her chin with my hand, listening for my sister’s approach. I didn’t want her to see our mother with her face slack or smell the dead smell of her breath. This was our intimacy, me so necessary.
“Get up, get up, get up,” I said, and forced her to answer me. I’d done that before, other times she’d passed out. She focused her eyes and gripped my arm as I stood her up.
“Go get into bed,” I said, and made sure she went. She limped across the living room.
“I’m sorry, Sue,” she said.
“It’s okay,” I said, but I was afraid. Her pain ruled us. “Don’t be scared,” I told Penelope. “She’ll be okay.” We were late to school. My hand still vibrated. When I looked at it, the scene replayed. If only I hadn’t. My teacher asked if I was okay, and I said no, my mummy’s sick. I pictured a caricature of the plate, the frantic shoving, my grotesque hand, and I didn’t say more. I didn’t want to surrender my crucial knowledge of crisis, and I was on top of it.
Throughout the day, each time memory roused the image, the picture grew stranger and uglier. When school ended I hurried Penelope to the subway entrance. We’d be home soon. Our mother would be in her bed, safe under blankets. If she was awake I’d bring her coffee.
I listened for her voice as we unlocked our big door and swung it open. We left our coats on the antique chair in the hall. We wanted that sound, her voice like a bird caught in the apartment, bright, wings beating. She was on the phone, and we stood in her doorway and waved, and she waved and put her hand over the mouthpiece and said, “Your father,” and kept chatting. Things were okay. She needed nothing from me. Penelope and I settled in the brown love seat with frozen yogurt bars and tried not to shed chocolate on our clothes as we watched The Partridge Family.
• • •
She could pull herself together. And she was very beautiful. Everyone said that.
In restaurants. In airports. On Madison Avenue. At Sotheby auctions. During her marriage to Colin she developed the habit of attending the big sales, and I went with her sometimes and sat straight and solemn on the chair, listening to the murmur of faintly English voices, to the approving hum as a painting or sculpture sold. She’d write the prices down feverishly in the catalog. Sotheby Parke Bernet. The auction house. We scoffed at Christie’s. We often ate at Les Pleiades, where a lot of Sotheby’s people went. She hugged and kissed the maître d’ after we’d given our coats to the coat check girl.
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