Best Friends

Some books about friend breakups have just been published, reaping a review in the Times, and an article in Salon. The Salon article, as is so often the case with Salon's 'life' features, tries to make grand historical statements about why female friendships are more important these days than they were in the past -- a ridiculous argument that any first year women's studies major would snort at. Hasn't the author heard of Lillian Faderman? Surpassing the Love of Men ? Anyone, anyone? Salon's editors should have just cut the entire last three paragraphs of the article:

Perhaps severing our female bonds and then getting over them is so difficult because it's still hard for us to articulate how important we are to each other in the first place. But it's high time we figured out how to get over our self-consciousness about the intensity of our female alliances. Because while friendship may have always existed as a shaping force in women's lives, it has never been so integral to so many.

As our biological and professional horizons change, we are freer to make our associations with women the center of our lives for longer periods of time -- not simply refuges from our dealings with men, though certainly those kinds of camaraderies still exist and are as valuable as ever.

Our friendships -- their beginnings, their durations and their ends -- have become as crucial to the timelines of our lives and to the shape of our selves as the traditional family structures we have long revered and respected. A couple of new books that take the pains of female love seriously are exactly what we need to begin to develop a vocabulary of female loss.

Historically inaccurate filler. Breaking up with a best friend is painful enough, we do not need to justify our interest in the phenomenon by insisting that it is a newly important societal trend.

But really, I'm snarking at the Salon article because I'm coming up on the anniversary of my divorce from my own best friend, and it hurts, hurts, hurts. We broke up after fifteen years of passionate love, on the basis of a brief comment I made while standing in line at a Victoria's Secret waiting for her to buy a strapless bra to wear under her wedding dress. I made the comment ("I've recently discovered that shopping gives me migraines," I said), and she gave me a look. Just a look. And then we went back to my house for lunch, and I asked her about the look she'd given me. And then, at my dining room table, our friendship simply unravelled. All the loose threads of it, years of loose threads, got pulled all at once, and we sat there in a pile of bitterness and yarn. Three emails and two brief telephone calls later, we said goodbye to one another. "Let's do it cleanly," I said to her. "We don't want to drag this out for years and years more, and torment one another, do we?" "No," she said, "you're right." And so it ended. She went and got married without me. She had been my maid of honor. She had made my wedding dress. She had been present at the birth of my son. And she went and got married without me, in a dress I'd helped her choose, and a menu I'd organized for her with a caterer I'd found, and wearing, I suppose, the strapless bra whose purchase was our tipping point.

I can't breathe, thinking of it. This is a rare kind of entry for me to put on Biscuit, as it's not about politics at all. I don't know why I'm posting it at all, in fact. Perhaps I simply feel the need for some public mourning. There's no grave to stand at, no wake to attend, no papers to sign. What else can I do with the wide and silent lake of my grief?