envy friendship essay

Numéro Cinq

“his word against mine”: envy, friendship and the novel: an essay by darryl whetter.

Jacques Callot's "The Seven Deadly Sins:Envy"

1. “When Writers Hate”

Morrissey is right, we hate it when our friends become successful. Gore Vidal is even more honest, confessing, “Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.” Near the end of the film Sideways , the rivalrous friendship of Jack and Miles is echoed by the novel Miles has assigned one of his young pupils to read aloud, John Knowle’s 1959 A Separate Peace , a tale of envy , perhaps even murderous envy, between schoolboy friends. Shakespeare’s Iago is envy on two legs. Adrift in a life before talking cures, support groups or good yoga, Cain walked alone with envy.

A fifteenth-century image of Cain and Abel

In life and art, friendship often oscillates between admiration and envy. Two recent shows at New York’s Museum of Modern Art showcased the reciprocal rivalry between Picasso and Matisse , as well as Cézanne and Pissarro . The 2004 documentary DiG! , chronicles the not-so-friendly rivalry between the bands The Brian Jonestown Massacre and The Dandy Warhols. When envy worms its way into writing, particularly into the novel, subject and medium collide. Writing is envy’s preferred medium.

Hiroshighe's "Great Bridge, Sudden Shower at Atake" and Van Gogh's (Later) "The Bridge in the Rain""

Writing slides someone else’s thoughts through our brain, and those thoughts come through the public medium of language. In the incomplete neuroscience of thought, writers and visual artists can admire and envy each other: humans may think more quickly through images, but, some contend, we think more specifically through language. And when we do think visually, we don’t necessarily see another artist’s brushstrokes, another photographer’s composition. When we think verbally, however, we think through the shared property of words and the evolving codes of language. Words are only made by humans, whereas the stuff of visual art—color, texture, scale, shape, line, etc.—partially pre-exist in the world. When this latent alterity of language is combined with the novel, which many regard as the ideal genre of the self, we hold in our laps the perfect testing ground for one of life’s dirty little secrets. We hate it when our friends become successful. We do, at least a little.

Abraham Ortelius's 1570 "Theatrum Orbis Terrarum"

2. The Envy Map

Jon Canter’s recent novel Seeds of Greatness is a new variation on the ancient theme of friends who complement and compliment each other in public while seething with envy in private. But unlike envy in life, envy in writing needn’t be silent and doesn’t remain unconfessed until the friends are too old to care. In The Information , Martin Amis, that high priest of envy, concludes, “When writers hate, it all comes down to something very simple. His word against mine.” In each of these British novels, two men in their forties reminisce about their youth with a friend from whom they are now separated by different income brackets and social spheres, with the smarter one underemployed and unheard of and the talentless oaf a rich celebrity. Worse, in each case the less successful and poor character is offered money to write about his celebrity friend.

Writing is also the largest facet of envy’s green jewel in Sir Vidia’s Shadow , Paul Theroux’s revealing memoir about his apprenticeship to, friendship with, and eventual rejection by Nobel laureate, V.S. Naipaul. Where envy and writing are shaped into plots of money, sex and fame in the fiction of Canter, Amis and Mordecai Richler (see below), their treatment in the non-fiction of Theroux and also of Amis (in his memoir Experience ) moves the philosophical aspects of language and property into the courtroom and the archive, with spurned writers denied access to their own writing and ex-friends suddenly invoking copyright (the writerly equivalent of a divorce lawyer) over yesterday’s affectionate letters.

Mordecai Richler’s two best novels, St. Urbain’s Horseman and his swan song Barney’s Version , lay envy down as one of the boundaries between self and other. In the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre or Jacques Lacan, the formative influence that one’s identity has on another’s, the mutual influence that I have on you and that you have on me, is referred to as alterity . In Richler’s novels, the border guards of alterity are trigger happy. In St. Urbain’s Horseman , the film director Jake Hersh is torn between two friendships soured by envy, an old friendship which finds him envious and a new one which finds him enviable. Three novels later, in Barney’s Version , friendly rivalry possibly becomes murderous as the TV producer Barney Panofsky reconciles himself to a maturing life which may no longer include the arguably immature writer Boogie Moscovitch.

3. The Art of Anxiety

In The Anxiety of Influence , Harold Bloom argues that great writing creates a double-edged respect as it both inspires us to write and simultaneously reminds us—no, shows us—that others write better than we do. Among the arts, perhaps only music shares such an easily traceable anxiety of influence. Thomas Bernhard’s novel The Loser (a story of pianist envy theory) imagines two pianists meeting Glenn Gould : “Glenn destroyed our piano virtuosity at a time when we still frimly believed in our piano virtuosity …. it was dead from the moment we met Glenn”). Kathryn Harrisons’s title Envy: a Novel is redundant by two words. The novel is envy’s homeland.

In The Art of the Novel , Milan Kundera argues that the novel, almost every novel, is not simply the portrait of a character or characters, but rather a portrait of the self, of capital-I Identity. Writing of mind, heart and, crucially, genre, he says, “What is the self? How can the self be grasped? It’s one of those questions on which the novel, as novel, is based.” True, and in the innumerable variations of narrative this portraiture is often rendered by the contrast of two comparable but distinct characters: Hamlet and Horatio, Achilles and Patroclus, the good cop and the bad. In The Enamoured Knight , Douglas Glover ’s loving examination of fiction in general and Cervantes’ Don Quixote in particular, he catches this notion of variations on one identity within a single novel with the lovely phrase “character gradation.” Characters are often versions of each other.

Othello and Iago

4. Schadenfreunds

Whereas the other novels under discussion depict friends drawn to each other in their twenties before being wedged apart by success as they approach forty, Jon Canter ’s Seeds of Greatness forges its paired friends in boyhood. The novel’s opening sequence finds them aged eight, with the extrovert Jack (a future TV talk show host) somehow conning free chips from an immigrant worker at a fish-n-chips restaurant. The fries are free, and Jack’s charm is partially stolen from the introverted David, a self-confessed “parent pleaser” and A-student. Of course David the introvert is our narrator:

After three weeks, Jack asks the moustachioed man his name. It’s George…. Six weeks later, a joke: ‘That’s a big moustache, George. What do you keep in there? Haven’t got any chips in there, have you?’…. Jack smiles at the cleverness of his joke. I say nothing. On the way to the window, not two minutes earlier, I’d wondered out loud if George had any chips in his moustache.I’m not asking you to feel sorry for me. I’m just saying. I understand that I made my remark to Jack off camera, as it were. I didn’t say it to George, under the lights, where fame is won.

This episode encapsulates their near and distant futures. As teenagers, when they fall into a brief love triangle with the same woman (with David’s side of the triangle clearly the shortest) she says that the two of them together “make the perfect man.” They need each other, personally and then professionally. And need ratchets up the envy.

As they approach mid-life, with its crises and cramps, as their friends begin to die, the successful Jack finally envies the under-employed David: “But Jack, cruelly, is now convinced that mine is the life he should have led.…My book-lined cottage, my roadside vegetables, my sea, my freedom from the pressures of success: he wants what I’ve got. Doesn’t he understand how desperately I want what he’s got?” But of course David only envies Jack his successes, not his failures: “The more Jack tells me, the more excited I get. I enjoy Jack’s disaster, as any friend would. All friends, surely, are schadenfreunds . But there’s admiration too. I’m remembering why I like him.” Consciously, David has trouble admitting that his envy-driven schadenfreude extends to appreciating Jack’s early death, yet Jack’s death affords the bright and Cambridge-educated David his one and only career advancement in life, namely the chance to write Jack’s official biography.

Matisse and PIcasso Self-Portraits

The conceit of the nested biography shifts Canter’s debut novel from the wide genre of the envy novel to the sub-genre of the envy-and-writing novel, the exposed envy novel, the envy-gone-public novel. David is not simply the first-person narrator of the book we read; he’s also the first-person narrator of the book he’s writing. Naturally, David writes about himself as well: “For this book, as is already plain, is as much about me as Jack. This is the story of Jack and me. There’ll be bits about me but all those bits will lead to bits about him.” More so than manuscripts or journals, books involve ownership and legal rights. Each of these issues—alterity, envy, and ownership—are revealed in the novel’s opening lines: “I’ve got a life but it’s not my own. It belongs to Jack Harris.” Until given a contract to write about his celebrity friend, David’s writing to-date had all been almost exclusively private, by preference. He describes the limited circulation and appeal of the four articles he has written for a Bob Dylan fanzine: “Maybe two hundred people have read them. And that makes me happy. I only want them read by the few who love Dylan as much as me. Success would be a failure.” Before his death it is Jack, not David, who tries to draw David out with his other private writing project, a play about Matisse and Picasso. Work on this play, which is largely a fantasy for the author but is of course a resonant intertext for the reader (concerning as it does the famous Matisse-Picasso rivalry ), sits stalled in David’s imagination until wealthy Jack books David off work, installs him poolside at his mansion and thrusts a laptop into his hands.

5. “Poor Character and the Fear of Desertion”

[ Cool image of an Amis reader]

Publicity and privacy are also the contested spheres in Martin Amis ’s masterpiece The Information . All of Amis’s life-long themes are brought to a sustained boil in this alternately hilarious and piteous story of envy, friendship and failure: the rivalry of his earlier Success , the public ambitions of London Fields , and the vengeance of Money . The Information involves the collision of the failed writer Richard Tull and the internationally successful writer Gwyn Barry, so the information is mostly about writing (and money, and influence and self-worth) and just a bit about sex. When Richard calls on “his oldest friend,” he must “present himself to the security cameras” and then is “always flattened” by “Gwyn’s setup…. The pressure of all that Gwyn had….everything had been so much nicer, he thought, in the old days, when Gwyn was poor.” Gwyn’s wife is as chiding as his house, a “celebrated knockout of limitless fortune and imperial blood whom Richard knew and admired and had recently taken to thinking about every time he came.” But worse, far worse, than Gwyn’s titled wife, his staff domestic and literary or his house and its perpetual improvement by one “knighted architect” or another are Gwyn’s successful (but dull) books: “Gwyn in Spanish (sashed with quotes and reprint updates) or an American book-club or supermarket paperback, or something in Hebrew or Mandarin.” Gwyn’s books taunt Richard with more than just their remuneration: “Gwyn’s world was partly public. And Richard’s world was dangerously and increasingly private.” For the plot’s shift into second gear, these public and private realms intersect. Because he needs money and exposure (hoping the latter will help him sell his own books), Richard accepts an assignment to write a long profile of Gwyn, a “long in-depth piece about what it’s like to be a very successful novelist.” Urging him to take the piece, Richard’s agent cajoles him by saying, “It’ll show everybody how unenvious you are.”

Illustration from The Repetition of Love and the Art of Playing Chess by Luis Ramirez de Lucena, 1497

In The Information , envy is not a flaw in one character, but rather a universal ill. Even the landscape, Amis’s beloved London, is a jealous one: “London traffic lights are the brightest in the world, beneath their meshed glass: the anger of their red, the jaundice of their amber, the jealousy of their green.” Richard’s reduced life—his self-induced ill-health, his crumbling marriage, his besieged finances—even leave him envious of the inanimate world. Revisiting a train station he remembers for its chronic cheerlessness and ambitiously grey Britishness, Richard is revolted to see its new cappuccino bars and chic boutiques: “Richard didn’t like it. He wanted everything to stay down in the world—with him. Envy and schadenfreude and invidiousness: they arise from poor character, but also from a fear of desertion.” And of course this urban landscape includes people, and Richard’s career of dedicated writing and near-silent publication leave him vulnerable to contrast and envy: Richard “would not mind being poor if no one was rich, who would not mind looking rough if no one looked smooth, who would not mind being old if no one was young.” Sadly, disastrously, Richard minds very much that his old friend is doing so well.

The combination of malice and friendship is not unique to Richard. Part of Richard’s inadequate living is earned at a vanity press with an admiring boss who, Richard suspects, “curiously… loved him but wanted to destroy him.” The commingled feelings that Richard has for his rival Gwyn are similarly amorous and annhilatory: “Not for the first time he wondered if—thanks to an impossibly humiliating complication—he was queer for Gwyn in some way.” Their competition, like their possible union, is not limited to writing or even to romance, as the duo regularly compete at tennis, billiards and chess. When they roll all three events into a triathlon of humiliation, a surprised Richard claims, “It’s strange. Whatever happens, we balance each other out. We’re like Henchard and Farfrae . You’re part of me and I’m part of you.” Pointedly, Gwyn does not agree.

Martin Amis

6. Envy Gets Experienced

Early in Amis’s 2000 memoir Experience, riding prominently in the book’s plump substrate of footnotes, we meet an abstract disquisition on envy and writing long before Amis recounts his public falling out with long-term friend and fellow writer Julian Barnes. Reacting to the envy which many saw directed at him for his lucrative sale of The Information , Amis argues:

Actually there’s a good reason, a structural reason, why novelists should excite corrosiveness in the press….When you write about a painter, you do not produce a sketch. When you write about a composer, you do not reach for your violin…. But when you write about a novelist, an exponent of prose narrative, then you write a prose narrative. And was that the extent of your hopes for your prose—bookchat, interviews, gossip? Valued reader, it is not for me to say this is envy. It is for you to say that this is envy. And envy never comes to the ball dressed as Envy. It comes dressed as something else: Ascetism, High Standards, Common Sense.

Later in the same book, Amis echoes his fictional Richard Tull even more directly, theorizing that envy “sounds like a vice of sophistication, but I think there’s something primitive in it. It has to do with fear of desertion.” Desertion and its opposite scenarios—acceptance, invitation, communion—are in fact part of Amis’s family trade. Before Booker Prize winner Kiran Desai’s recent ascent under the shadow of her mother, (Booker-nominee) Anita Desai, Martin and his father Kingsley Amis offered the almost unique combination of a parent and adult child publishing regularly and in tandem. Here was not the one-off novelty novels (those publisher’s safe bets) of David Updike or several of Mordecai Richler’s children. Martin and papa Kingsley spent decades publishing books and articles alongside each other, enduring some of the same reviewers, working for the same magazine editors and even sharing the shame agent (more on that below). Kingsley’s recently published letters occasionally find him admiringly envious of his son’s rising fame and money. In a 10 May, 1979 letter to his chief interlocutor and “Inner Audience” [see below] Philip Larkin, Kingsley writes, “Did I tell you Martin is spending a year abroad as a TAX EXILE? Last year he earned £38,000. Little shit. 29, he is. Little shit.” Five years later, writing again to Larkin on 8 February, 1984 (after his longest silence between books), Kingsley confesses, “Of course Martin Amis is more famous than I am now.” But, crucially, this envy is one side of a coin with admiration on its reverse. In a 1993 letter to Paul Fussell (author of the important The Great War and Modern Memory and the incisive Class ), Kingsley pays Martin one of this highest compliments imaginable, naming him as part of his “inner audience”: “My Inner Audience did I think consist chiefly of [Philip] Larkin and [Robert] Conquest, especially Larkin. More lately I have added Martin.” Son and father managed to temper their envy with admiration over the years, but not son and friend Julian Barnes.

Julian Barnes

In the fictional The Information , Martin Amis suggests “writers who hate” pit “his word against mine.” The publication of The Information put Martin Amis in exactly that kind of battle with his ex-friend Julian Barnes. Before placing the novel, Martin left his long-time agent Pat Kavanagh, who happens to have been Julian Barnes’ wife. Writing of that departure in Experience , Amis resigns himself to one of the most devastating compound adjectives imaginable for a letter: “I have in front of me Julian Barnes’s friendship-ending letter.” Continuing, he confesses, “The letter made me question the substance, let alone the value, of the friendship it cancelled.” This tone of desertion, however, is quickly replaced by a litigiousness that finds angry writers quick to assert ownership. Bringing the reader in as close as can be permitted legally, Amis says, “I have before me Julian Barnes’s letter of 12 January 1995. Technically this piece of paper is my property, but the text is Julian’s copyright.” Legally unable to give us both sides of the story, Amis publicizes his originally private reply: “The letter I wrote to Julian is his property but my copyright.” If he bothered to read Experience , at least Julian Barnes would be able to see this public snubbing in a book. Paul Theroux only found his in a (used) book catalogue. Skirmishing, Amis and Barnes lobbed harsh words then publicly quarantined them with copyright. In the fall-out between V.S. Naipaul and Theroux, Naipaul actually sold their textual records of private envy and public affection.

7. Envy for Sale

Unlike the literary friendship of Amis and Barnes, two writers of similar ages who enjoyed comparably successful careers, the friendship of Paul Theroux and V.S. Naipaul began as a clear apprenticeship, with the unpublished Theroux seeking advice, encouragement and recognition from the already successful Naipaul. The two met in Uganda in 1966 where Theroux, 23, was teaching university and Naipaul, nominally aged 34 but in temperament much older, arrived as a vaguely defined visiting professor. Naipaul gave opinions, not classes or lectures, and Theroux was one of the very few who withstood and even sought his harsh judgements. Quite simply, Naipaul—his presence, his advice and the wilful gravity he commanded—helped Theroux become a writer. Simultaneously, Theroux generalizes and recollects: “Friendship is plainer but deeper than love. A friend knows your faults and forgives them, but more than that, a friend is a witness. I needed Vidia as a friend, because he saw something in me I did not see. He said I was a writer.” Ultimately, but finitely, their friendship would span three decades, five continents and more than three-dozen books between them.

Their friendship advanced through phases of “mutual rescue” and into genuine generosity. Early on, Theroux wrote a critical book to introduce and promote Naipaul’s work. Naipaul helped Theroux through a divorce. In England, Naipaul admitted Theroux into his most intimate of rituals, inviting him to proofread the final copy of his novel The Mimic Men , and, even more delicately, allowing him to listen as he edited by reading a draft aloud to his first wife, Patricia Hale . This sitting room threesome is suggestive of a love triangle to at least one of them, as well as to the reader. The young Theroux would, over the decades, travel an arc of lusting after Naipaul’s wife then pitying her her husband’s publicized affairs to writing her obituary in the Daily Telegraph (at Naipaul’s request). That last touch illustrates how routinely and how naturally theirs was a friendship of texts, of words exchanged and kept. Over the years their letters and manuscript critiques brought them together until, shortly after Theroux’s invited obituary, a book seller’s catalogue finally and irrevocably tore them apart.

In the light of this comparison, Theroux shares some of the passive qualities of Jon Canter’s David Lewin, accommodating his more authoritarian friend. Naipaul’s singularity of vision guided Theroux’s writing, establishing him early on as the “inner audience” discussed by Paul Fussell and Kingsley Amis. Affectionately, Theroux recounts, “The push of his dignity, the force of his friendship, made me think of him vividly whenever I wrote anything. He hovered over my desk; he was the reader over my shoulder.” So when the friendship began to sour, when Theroux began to see Naipaul’s deceptions and manipulations, his greed and pettiness, he found himself unable to vent secret misgivings in print, even privately: “That was why I never contemplated writing about him, because writing meant scrutinizing character and giving voice to feelings of disappointment and being truthful.” Yet each is a writer, and theirs is the business of letting genies out of bottles.

Perhaps if Theroux had been a playwright as well as a novelist and non-fiction writer he’d have better predicted his excommunication by Naipaul and the book seller’s catalogue that would reveal it. If only he’d paid attention to the props, he might have caught a whiff of his own hubris and glimpsed the eventual snub that awaited him. Famously, the two exchanged sustaining letters from year to year, country to country, job to job. Speaking of his time in Africa and Singapore, Theroux describes how he hung on Naipaul’s letters: “During this period I had no telephone, I had no other close friends…. The mail was everything. Face to face, anyone can say he is your friend and can promise to write faithfully, but the test of friendship is the letters themselves, the fondest proof that you are remembered.” Praising the ascendant Theroux for finishing The Mosquito Coast , Naipaul writes, “Your energy is amazing; you seem vitalized by all your many successes. I run across your name and your books everywhere and I always feel slightly proprietorial.” With the heat of envy, its open flame or smouldering coal or rogue spark, that proprietariness would engulf the friendship, the voluntarily public friendship.

If nothing else, Sir Vidia’s Shadow is, save its masturbatory opening chapter, an excellent portrait of not just one but two writing lives, their successes and failures. Those few young writers who toss off a bestseller before graduation needn’t bother reading of two different writers constantly chasing money, recognition or contemplative time and space, but the majority of us can take solace in these rare confessions of fear, injustice, and despair. Theroux accurately charts the differences that rural and urban poverty make to a writer (space and quiet for the former, smaller rooms but better dating for the latter). The poorly paid stimulation of book reviewing is examined repeatedly by Naipaul and Theroux. Journalism and teaching are honestly described as financially sustaining but creatively draining. And here, at last, there’s honest talk about writing and money. Always in search of a sustaining buck and some empowering fame, the two writers didn’t just exchange fortifying and confessional letters; they rented them out for reproduction in The New Yorker .

If they were willing to rent, surely the right price would have them sell. Eventually Naipaul moved from “proprietary” pride to proprietary profit. Naipaul saved Theroux’s letters to him and they were eventually sold with his papers to the University of Oklahoma at Tulsa. For his writing of Sir Vidia’s Shadow , Theroux was denied permission to see his own letters! That fact, added in a footnote, would surface after Naipaul’s killing blow. After more than thirty years of friendship, not long after the death of Naipaul’s first wife, the two friends met once to share the stage at a writer’s festival. Otherwise Naipaul stopped returning letters, messages and invitations. Theroux could tell himself that their friendship was in a cold spot, not an ice age, until he happened to glance through the catalogue of a book seller who specialized in first editions.

#366 THEROUX, Paul. Fong and the Indians ….This copy is inscribed by Theroux to writer V. S. Naipaul: “For Vidia/ & Pat/ with love/ Paul….$1500.

#337 THEROUX, Paul. Sinning with Annie ….His first collection of stories. This copy is inscribed by Theroux to V. S. Naipaul in the month of publication: “To Vidia & Pat/ with love/ Paul.”….$1500.

One can’t be certain that envy was the only mortal threat to the friendship. However, everyone can see that the friendship was more than just killed; its corpse was ransomed off. Naipaul, profitably clearing house of letters and inscribed first editions, and then Theroux in the writing and publishing of Sir Vidia’s Shadow— each sold their old friendship. Amending Amis, they know that “when writers hate” it isn’t just “his word against mine;” it’s “his word against mine” on the auction block and in the bookstore.

Rembrandt's Cain

8. Crimes of Envy

Mordecai Richler’s two best novels, the courageously honest St. Urbain’s Horseman and the tear-jerking Barney’s Version, each use envy in their sustained, consoling and varied examinations of alterity and adult life. Released in 1971, St. Urbain’s Horseman is nothing short of a case study in alterity (although alterity in the classic you-make-me-I-make-you mode of Sartre, not the anthropological othering of Emmanuel Levinas and company). The story begins with the wealthy and successful filmmaker Jake Hersh awakening in the middle of the night to wonder where Dr. Mengele is hiding. Not wanting to disturb his young family, Jake retreats to his attic aerie with its “wall clock that had been adjusted to show the time in Paraguay—the Doktor ’s time.” Simpler matters than vengeance keep Jake involved in overlapping spheres and liminal borders. He may keep a clock set to the Doktor ’s time, but he needs no clock to remind him of the time difference between his adopted country of England and his native Canada. This dualistic geography is populated by characters influencing one another overtly. Rising in the morning, Jake’s wife Nancy is introduced in a contest “between bassinet and toilet—the baby’s needs, hers.” The newspapers that arrive to the family doorstep carry news of Jake’s court trial (on charges of indecent assault) with his co-accused Harry Stein, “the fall guy.”

Each of Jake’s principal relationships in the novel repositions the borders he has around himself, and no force shifts that border more than envy. In a flashback to his Montreal youth, Jake and others meet by chance for “an absolutely marvelous afternoon, maybe one of the most enjoyable of Jake’s life. No longer boys they were but, mercifully, not yet full-grown men either, envy-ridden….In the years to come expectations would contract, success or failure would divide them.” And indeed success divides Jake from Luke Scott, the playwright with whom Jake had moved from Canada to England to conquer stage and screen: “When the summons from on high finally came it wasn’t from Columbia…Neither was it Jake they wanted, but Luke….It was then that the two friends, seemingly inseparable partners, came unstuck.” On the opening night of a play of Luke’s that succeeds in part because of unacknowledged help from Jake, Jake stands back, “Sullen and envy-ridden, but stimulating pleasure.” At dawn, when phone calls start arriving from the press, Luke invites Jake to impersonate him for one interview. By that point, however, Jake “doesn’t feel like playing.”

Years later, as Jake makes a good living and Luke makes a fortune, admiration and envy fuel Jake’s imprudent friendship with Harry Stein, a misanthropic but highly intelligent bookkeeper. When Harry comes to Jake’s expensive house to extort payment for a debt of Jake’s cousin’s, he surreptitiously burns a cigarette scar into the chair he’s offered: “Why, the bastard, Jake thought, with sneaking admiration, he did it on purpose.” When Jake tries to expand this admiration into friendship, Harry originally rebuffs his advances, saying “Come off it. I amuse you. You enjoy hearing my prison stories. I’ve got the courage to do things you only dream of.” Harry’s pranks and schemes extend and augment Jake’s. Where Jake makes an obscene phone call to scare off another suitor interested in Nancy, Harry disrupts a plane flight with a telephone bomb threat. When Jake is a houseguest he peeks in a laundry hamper to see a woman’s lingerie; when Harry is a houseguest at Jake’s, he reads Nancy’s love letters. Just as Jake’s departure from Luke occurs during Luke’s prankish invitation for Jake to imitate Luke, so too does Harry’s friendship-ending crime hinge on his impersonation of Jake. When Jake is away for his father’s funeral (another influence dying), Harry asks to borrow Jake’s house to impress women.

"Envy" from "The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things" by Hieronymus Bosch, 1485

For Richler, envy is the pry bar with which a character tries to lever his identity closer to that of another. The novel’s eponymous horseman is Jake’s older cousin Joey, an itinerant and mysterious man whom Jake idolizes: “he realized that ever since he had turned down the film in Israel because, to his mind, it was an offense against everything his cousin stood for, the Horseman had become his moral editor.” Fittingly, Richler dramatizes this moral inquiry with legal trials. In St. Urbain’s Horseman , Jake stands accused with Harry, who is both alter ego and antagonist. In Barney’s Version , the hero Barney Panofsky stands accused of murdering his own alter ego and antagonist.

Where Canter’s Seeds of Greatness is a novel masquerading as a biography, Richler’s novel Barney’s Version pretends to be an autobiography in which Barney, a self-confessed “impenitent rotter” attempts to “rewind the spool of his wasted life.” Central to that life are his three wives, his three children and Bernard ‘Boogie’ Moscovitch, a writer friend from Barney’s bohemian Parisian youth. Boogie remains Barney’s “anointed one” and “the most cherished friend I ever had. I adored him.” Comments of Boogie’s would “propel” Barney “to a library, educating me.” To others, both in the impecunious Paris set of their youth and then later back in North America, Barney’s adoration is too extreme, too envious. Barney is accused of “trailing after Boogie like a poodle,” of “worshipping” him, of “acquiring some of his gestures” and of being “like the player piano. Always playing somebody else’ music because you have none of your own.” Twenty years later, Barney’s wife Miriam will accuse him of “still trying to please Boogie.”

Mordecai Richler

Barney, for all his faults, at least recognizes that his moral infidelity, his vulnerability to the gravity of another, is not limited to Boogie, but extends also to the woman he loves. Richler, updating his phrase “moral editor” of twenty-five years prior, depicts Barney, “Rereading this old letter of mine recently, I suffered one of my frequent attacks of spiritual voice-mail: Miriam, my conscience, tripping me up again.” Barney recognizes (if a little too late), that his self is stranded without his love’s: “O, Miriam, Miriam, my heart’s desire. Without her, I am not only alone but also incomplete.” Envy can be the cry of incompletion.

Albrecht Dürer's "Cain Killing Abel" 1511

The central trial in St. Urbain’s is a trial of union: is Jake like the accused Harry and unlike his family and the law-abiding citizens of his native Canada or his adopted London? In Barney’s Version , the envious but self-honest Richler protagonist stands on trial alone, accused, in this case, of murdering the friend he so envies. Crucially, almost comically, no corpse is ever found: Barney’s murder is so much a murder of himself that his trial proceeds despite the absence of a murdered body. While this may make for a weak legal case, it makes for good suspense as we enjoy the double question of Barney’s murderousness and Boogie’s loyalty. When Barney finally claims to “get down on paper what I’ve been avoiding until now” he clarifies “I didn’t lie about those last two days with Boogie, but neither did I tell everything. The truth is, the Boogieman who came to me to kick his habit was no longer the friend I revered.” He also isn’t so friendly. In the novel’s possibly murderous climax, Boogie challenges Barney: “I’ll tell you what’s pathetic. Pathetic is a man so empty that he needs somebody else’s achievements to justify his own life.” By then Barney is financially successful and Boogie has not attained the artistic success he promised in his youth. Each of them hates the other for his success and his failures.

Stained Glass Window at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge

9. The Anxiety of Envy

According to Milan Kundera, the novel is one illustration of the self. The Venn diagram is another. With Sartre or Lacan or Jung, friendship or enmity or love can be neatly mapped by a Venn diagram, with its overlapping circles, its neat depiction of inclusivity and exclusivity, similarity and difference. As Jon Canter’s David says of his romantic relationship, “When I love her, I don’t know where I end and she begins.” With envy, one certainly knows where one ends and the envied begin, precisely because we want to be shifting ourselves more their way. When we envy we enact a proxy theory of friendship, as if each friend is an advance scout or research lab or drawing board for the kind of self we could and maybe even should be, and yet simultaneously we are reminded of how certain the borders are between who we are and who we want to be. Beware the anxiety of envy.

Darryl Whetter

www.darrylwhetter.ca

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8 Responses to ““His Word against Mine”: Envy, Friendship and the Novel: an Essay by Darryl Whetter”

I really enjoyed this.

Thanks, Brad. Each of these novels is impressive, but so is Theroux’s _Sir Vidia’s Shadow_ (aside from the first chapter). I’m generally not as fulfilled by non-fiction, but it’s fascinating.

Fascinating read. The Amis family presents a particularly interesting insight into envy, I think; you’re supposed to wish for the success of your children but what happens when they actually achieve it, and then go on to outshine you?

And what about the reverse – the children of well-regarded writers who themselves went on to unremarkable writing careers? Envy of the old man you can never top is an old story, I suppose, but I wonder if anyone has ever written about it. I can’t think of any off the top of my head.

I enjoyed your attention to the span of time and the variety of form in regards to a theme that appears perennially in art as a means to tell story.

In case anyone is interested, in 2007, The Great Books Foundation issued a story anthology titled The Seven Deadly Sins Sampler. Edith Wharton’s “Roman Fever”and Tobias Wolff’s “Smokers” are the two shorts that represent envy in their estination. Even Deadlier, the follow-up collection, includes Krakatau, by Jim Shepard and Weekend, by Fay Weldon.

As I grew up I regularly atended confession to tell the priest my sins. As we drove to the church, my mother would “help” me remember my misdemeanors. Envy was a big one!

Later, a wise person told me that envy was simply a human response to desire, an expression of what a person wants more of in their life, that envy was entirely for this purpose.

The notion of envy is intrigues me to say the least. Thank you for this post. I have much more to consider.

So sharp, so much extension. I like the world the essay creates even though I don’t know many of the novels. The insight in #9 is especially striking.

I’m jealous.

Fascinating piece! For some reason, as I read this, I thought of the Enneagram, a system of looking at personality types. The Enneagram has its roots in Sufi writings, but was further developed by Jesuits and is now used in some schools of counseling thought. According to the Enneagram, the type 4, the “Artistic” personality (which includes many writers) is thought to be most prone to Envy. Jodi, I like your comment about envy being “simply a human response to desire.”

For the past few days, I keep coming back to this piece. I love how you discuss envy and anxiety separately, then bring them together in closing. Though I mainly write poetry, writing for me is in any form an act of transference. I find all of us tend to compartmentalize different moments of transference, whether we write or not. We may realize such things as when at work, I am a cynic and voice of subterfuge in the back of the room; in the evenings at the bar, I am a friend and listen through sips and smiles; at home alone with my wife, I am a forgetful fool. As you discuss, when writing and particularly in novels, each of these characters can be established individually, and interact with one another. The same way I might say that I wish I was more like I am around my wife when I’m at work, the characters as parts of self develop desire or envy for the actions of the others. Again, this is vital to any type of writing as it creates at least an underlying sense of conflict. I enjoy that you establish a definition for anxiety here too, as nothing disconnects a person or character more than the feeling of anxiety. It can be the very base of a character’s hubris, or even the source that drives a character to take a specific action. In writing and when useful, anxiety allows us to turn off the outside world and focus on the work before us. There is of course a balance to maintain, too much of the emotion and the work fails, the self shuts down. Coming from a poetic standpoint, I find there are many corollaries to what you discuss in this essay and persona based collections of poetry. I feel there is a growing trend in modern day poetry to speak through a persona or character, or several personae. The main difference I find though is that the poet eventually lets the mask slip between self and persona, i.e. John Berryman’s Dream Songs, or more recently Shahid Reads His own Palm by Dwanye Reginald Betts. Thank you for sharing this piece.

Thanks, Ian. Excellent comment.

Ask an Expert: I’m Jealous of My Friends’ Successes. How Do I Cope?

Shasta Nelson

Remind yourself: Envy makes you human.

Cheering for your friends as you cope with setbacks can be challenging. The feelings of envy and rejection can make it hard to fully be present in our friendships and support each other. But know that envy isn’t a “bad” emotion. Envy makes you human.

The first step is to acknowledge your envy and label your feelings. Identifying your emotions will help you replace your negative self-talk with a more realistic assessment of your feelings (and the situation).
Ask yourself what about your setback hurts you the most. This self-reflection may help you understand what really matters to you and inform your next steps.
Once you identify your needs, look for other healthy and meaningful ways to pursue them.
Finally, try to feel inspired by your friends’ successes, look for ways to learn from each other, and strengthen your relationship.

Dear Ascend,

Shasta Nelson is a friendship expert and a leading voice on loneliness and creating healthy relationships. Her research is found in her 3 books, including her newest one published by HarperCollins Leadership in August 2020: The Business of Friendship: Making the Most of the Relationships Where We Spend Most of Our Time on why we need to foster better relationships in our jobs. Her interviews have been featured on TEDx, The New York Times, The Harvard Business Review podcast, and The Steve Harvey Show. For more information, visit www.TheBusinessofFriendship.com .

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Envy in Friendship

Friendship is often hailed as one of life’s greatest treasures, a bond built on trust, support, and mutual respect. However, beneath the surface of these seemingly idyllic relationships can lurk darker emotions, chief among them envy in friendship. While envy is commonly associated with competition and rivalry, its presence within friendships can be equally insidious and damaging. This article delves into the complexities of envy within friendships, exploring its origins, manifestations, and consequences.

While friendship is often celebrated as a source of joy and companionship, it is not immune to the darker aspects of human nature. Envy arises from a perceived lack of something desirable possessed by another. In the context of toxic friendship , this can manifest in various ways. A friend might envy another’s achievements, possessions, relationships, or even personality traits. The root of envy within friendships often lies in insecurity and low self-esteem. When individuals feel inadequate or insecure about their own lives, they may resent the success or happiness of their friends, viewing it as a reflection of their own shortcomings. Envy, with its roots in insecurity and comparison, can poison even the strongest bonds if left unchecked.

Manifestations of Envy

Envy within friendships can manifest in subtle or overt ways. Some individuals may harbor silent envy, masking their true feelings with outward displays of support and encouragement. They may offer praise to their friends while secretly seething with jealousy beneath the surface. Others may display more overt signs of envy, such as making snide remarks, belittling their friend’s achievements, or engaging in actively harmful or passive-aggressive behavior.

Look Out for These Common Manifestations of Envy:

Envy can manifest itself behaviorally in various ways, often depending on the individual’s personality, coping mechanisms, and the context of the situation.

1. Passive-aggressive Behavior: Envious individuals may express their feelings indirectly through passive-aggressive behavior. This can include subtle put-downs, backhanded compliments, or sabotaging their friend’s success behind their back.

2. Excessive Criticism: Envy may lead individuals to excessively criticize or downplay the achievements or possessions of others. They may undermine their friend’s accomplishments in an attempt to diminish their success and bolster their own self-esteem.

3. Competitiveness: Envy often fuels a sense of competitiveness, driving individuals to constantly compare themselves to their friends and strive to outperform them. This competitive mindset can lead to unhealthy behaviors such as one-upmanship or seeking validation through external achievements.

4. Sabotage: Envious individuals may actively sabotage their friend’s efforts or opportunities out of a desire to maintain a sense of superiority or control. This can include spreading rumors, withholding information, or violating their friend’s confidence.

5. Copying Behavior: In some cases, envy may prompt individuals to emulate or copy the behaviors, possessions, or lifestyles of their friends in an attempt to bridge the perceived gap between them. This can result in inauthenticity and a lack of genuine self-expression.

6. Rumormongering or Gossip: Envious individuals may engage in rumormongering or gossip as a means of undermining their friend’s reputation or success. By spreading negative rumors or gossip, they may seek to tarnish their friend’s image and diminish their social standing.

7. Scapegoating: Envy can lead individuals to scapegoat their friends for their own feelings of inadequacy or unhappiness. They may blame their friend’s success or good fortune for their own shortcomings, refusing to take responsibility for their own emotions.

8. Coveting: Envious individuals may covet the possessions, achievements, or relationships of their friends, fostering feelings of resentment and longing. This may lead to a preoccupation with what others have, fueling a cycle of comparison and dissatisfaction.

9. Selective Empathy: Envious individuals often first show signs by using selective empathy. They will have empathy for others in similar situations but not for you; or they will make light of serious situations in your life through humor to put you down in order to feel superior.

Overall, envy manifests behaviorally in a myriad of ways, often driven by underlying feelings of insecurity, inadequacy, and comparison. Recognizing these behaviors and addressing the root causes of envy is essential for fostering healthy, supportive friendships built on trust and mutual respect.

The Toxic Cycle of Comparison

In the age of social media, the temptation to compare oneself to others is ever-present. Platforms like Facebook and Instagram serve as breeding grounds for envy, as individuals curate and showcase the highlights of their lives while concealing their struggles and setbacks. Friends who constantly compare themselves to one another may find themselves trapped in a toxic cycle of envy, constantly measuring their worth against the perceived success of their peers.

Envy often arises from a distorted perception of reality, where individuals incorrectly assume that others possess something desirable that they lack.

Key Components Leading to Envy:

1. Image Driven: Humans have a natural tendency to compare themselves to others, but this comparison is often flawed. Envious individuals may inaccurately assess their own worth and abilities, leading them to feel inadequate when comparing themselves to others who may not actually be as successful or fulfilled as they appear.

2. Materialism: Envy can be fueled by an overemphasis on external factors such as material possessions, social status, or achievements. Envious individuals may mistakenly believe that these external markers of success are the sole determinants of happiness and fulfillment, overlooking the importance of internal factors such as personal values, relationships, and inner contentment.

3. Misattribution of Causes: Envious individuals may incorrectly attribute others’ success or advantages to factors such as luck, privilege, or unfair advantages, while downplaying the role of hard work, perseverance, and personal agency. This misattribution can lead to feelings of resentment and envy towards those who are perceived as having achieved success through undeserved means.

4. Inaccurate Perceptions of Injustice: Envy often stems from perceptions of injustice or unfairness, but these perceptions may be skewed or exaggerated. Envious individuals may overlook their own privileges or opportunities, focusing solely on what they perceive as disadvantages or obstacles in comparison to others.

5. Low Self-Worth: Envious individuals may selectively focus on the achievements or possessions of others that trigger feelings of inadequacy, while disregarding their own strengths, accomplishments, and blessings. This selective attention reinforces a negative self-image and perpetuates feelings of envy and resentment.

6. Faulty Beliefs about Happiness: Envy is often fueled by the mistaken belief that happiness and fulfillment are scarce resources, attainable only by a select few. Envious individuals may falsely believe that others’ success diminishes their own chances of happiness, failing to recognize that happiness is not a zero-sum game and that there are multiple paths to fulfillment.

7. Lack of Perspective and Gratitude: Envious individuals may lack perspective and gratitude for their own blessings and accomplishments. They may fail to recognize the inherent value in their own lives and experiences, instead focusing solely on what they perceive as lacking in comparison to others.

Overall envy is a misguided emotion rooted in faulty assumptions and distorted perceptions of reality. Recognizing and challenging these incorrect assumptions can help individuals cultivate a more balanced and positive perspective, fostering greater self-awareness, gratitude, and contentment in their own lives.

THE EFFECTS:

The erosion of trust and intimacy.

Envy can erode the trust and intimacy that form the foundation of a healthy friendship. When one friend feels envious of another, it creates a barrier between them, preventing genuine connection and vulnerability. The envious friend may withhold their true thoughts and feelings, afraid that their friend will judge or reject them if they reveal their insecurities. Over time, this lack of authenticity can lead to feelings of isolation and resentment on both sides. Furthermore, the victim of the envy experiences bullying through the lack of friendly support, the frequent nit-picking, sabotaging or rumor engagement which are all serious breaches of trust.

Overcoming Envy in Friendship

Overcoming envy within friendships requires self-awareness, empathy, and open communication. Friends must be willing to confront their feelings of envy openly and honestly, acknowledging the root causes of their insecurity. By fostering a supportive and non-judgmental environment, friends can create space for vulnerability and authenticity, allowing them to navigate their feelings of envy with compassion and understanding. However, it’s important to realize some people may be pathologically envious and it’s best to keep a distance. There is even research that suggests that envy is partially genetic .

But, in normal circumstances with low-envy individuals (temperamentally), it’s possible to overcome small issues. By recognizing the signs of envy within friendships and cultivating empathy and open communication, friends can navigate these challenges and strengthen their relationships in the process. Ultimately, by confronting the dark side of friendship with honesty and compassion, friends can forge deeper connections built on trust, mutual respect, and genuine support.

jealousy Relationships

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The Effects of Envy in Our Lives

Seven Essays on Friendships

A reading list....

Earlier this month, as I tried to tuck my unwell mother into bed, I turned on the TV to watch Notting Hill for the nth time. My mother doesn’t fully understand English, but over the years has grown familiar with the visuals of some movies that make me endlessly happy. Drugged, and sleepy, she nestled in with me and watched the movie, our friendship quietly blossoming from a cliched love-hate mother-daughter relationship to a meaningful connection that’s refreshing and constantly evolving. In the last handful of years, the bond between us has transcended into a more congenial one. We are now more interested in each other’s well-being — always concocting a new recipe for the other, thinking of a better joke to crack the other one up.

As I’ve pondered over this new, unexpected friendship I had so strongly yearned for as a child, I’ve also contemplated my friendships growing up: The childhood best friend for whom I was never enough. The junior in my high school who went from being a best friend to a friend with benefits. The college roommate who I, admittedly, didn’t think was cool enough to be friends with. Over time, I’ve lost more friends than I’ve managed to make. I’ve realized that over the last three decades, my friendships have all been so different that “friendship” has become hard to define.

A reading list of seven essays that I have found myself going back to over and over again in the last few years…

The last two decades I spent on social media have also changed the way I’ve made friends. Whether I met people on MySpace or through Facebook, or stumbled on new friends by accident — I once dialed a person by mistake and started SMSing with her, thinking she was my cousin — I’ve kept busy creating and maintaining my own tribe of friends online. People at home, however — from family members with former boyfriends — tend to be suspicious of friends I’ve met on the internet. How do you know her? Did you go to college together? She’s in Mumbai and you’re in Delhi, so how did you meet? Then there are those clutch of valued work friendships that have evolved to hold so much more meaning over time. Trans-continental friendships with someone I merely went to college with, or a guarded bond with a certain someone whom I might’ve only ever met once in person — I hold many of these virtual and non-internet(y) friendships close to the heart. That is not to say that I haven’t often times struggled to maintain them, to keep up with their moving rhythms and changing landscapes with shifting times.

It is with all this in mind that I share a reading list of seven essays that I have found myself going back to over and over again in the last few years.

What If Friendship, Not Marriage, Was at the Center of Life? (Rhaina Cohen, The Atlantic , October 2020)

Rhaina Cohen’s essay outlines society’s general lack of regard for platonic relationships. In a world where marriage and family are key currencies to living a socially agreed upon life, friendships have taken a backseat. As someone who has always pondered about the exclusion of even a mention of friends in Indian families like mine, I felt this piece in my bones. The essay cuts deep into the social codes that prohibit us from mentioning friends as our first choice of family, much like in my own life. When I was in school, weekends were pious brackets of time, reserved only for family. Even suggesting to hang out with friends was forbidden. It was different though, if I made an excuse of studies, an exam, or a group presentation.

Cohen also underlines the importance of approaching friendship as the foundation for every meaningful relationship in one’s life — be it familial or romantic. Conditioned to think only one way, in the first few adult years of my life I hardly had the knack to allow friendships the room they required in my life. I was quick to close them off into specific segments of my world that didn’t directly interfere with my regular activities. Little did I understand then that friendships, as Cohen emphasizes, could be my whole life.

She challenges the norm in which our partners are expected to be our priorities and points out how this notion doesn’t seem to be questioned, except in queer circles.

“Just in the past several months, experts and public intellectuals from disparate ideological persuasions have encouraged heterosexual couples to look to the queer and immigrant communities for healthy models of marriage and family. The coronavirus pandemic, by underscoring human vulnerability and interdependence, has inspired people to imagine networks of care beyond the nuclear family. Polyamory and asexuality, both of which push back against the notion that a monogamous sexual relationship is the key to a fulfilling adult life, are rapidly gaining visibility. Expanding the possible roles that friends can play in one another’s lives could be the next frontier.”

My Buddy (Patti Smith, The New Yorker , August 2017)

When I first stumbled upon Patti Smith’s essay, I let out a deep sigh of joy. I’ve devoured each of Smith’s books, read all of her poetry, and listened to her music, and I knew her piece about her friend and fellow creator, the late playwright and actor Sam Shepard, would be as beautiful as her other work. Shepard was a multi-hyphenate whose work outlived him, and there couldn’t have been anyone better than Smith to pen this ode to his life and their friendship. The essay, much like Smith’s poetry, sings with an ease that worms its way into my heart each time I reread it. There are surprises too, but the writing carries a charm — perhaps an offshoot of Smith’s deeply lived and enjoyed life — and leaves me asking for more.

Just a late-night phone call out of a blue, as startling as a canvas by Yves Klein; a blue to get lost in, a blue that might lead anywhere. I’d happily awake, stir up some Nescafé and we’d talk about anything. About the emeralds of Cortez, or the white crosses in Flanders Fields, about our kids, or the history of the Kentucky Derby. But mostly we talked about writers and their books. Latin writers. Rudy Wurlitzer. Nabokov. Bruno Schulz.

There I Almost Am: On Envy and Twinship (Jean Garnett, The Yale Review , May 2021)

Jean Garnett’s essay is, at the surface level, about twinship. But it goes beyond this, delving deep into topics of sisterhood, envy, and self-destruction. Though Garnett writes about her relationship with her twin sister from both a personal and professional perspective, the nature of their relationship echoes one of friendship. Garnett ruminates about being in constant competition with her sister, and how that has evolved into an uglier feeling of envy — what Socrates called the “ulcer of the soul.”

She writes:

“I remember how, in our early twenties when my sister was at her thinnest, I was always angling for a view of her, using barback mirrors and public bathrooms and shop windows to catch secret glimpses. I remember how perverted I felt whenever our eyes met in the reflection and she caught me in the act of envy. I am never more disgusted with myself than when I am engaged in this covert looking and assessing, treating her body as a human mirror. But I still do it. I spy on her. She’ll be walking or crying or dancing or getting dressed or trying to tell me something important, and I’ll become aware that my eyes are scanning her as though she were a bar code.”

This is How a Friendship Ends: A Recipe for Miso Ginger Carrot Bisque (Nina Coomes, Catapult , March 2022)

In this hybrid essay that’s part of Nina Coome’s narrative recipe series, Half Recipes , she comes to adult friendships with a new, encouraging language. She writes specifically about severing a friendship that was no longer meaningful to her and the other person — one that she writes was not built to transition, and had to end. There is an immediacy, and a strong sense of self-empathy in Coomes' writing. In letting this friend go, she is not only allowing herself to grow, but also making room for both of them to accommodate newer versions of themselves. The recipe format of this essay makes it even more endearing.

“In retrospect, we both were growing out of our old selves, slowly becoming adults. I can’t give you an exact date or dramatic dinner where we stopped being friends. I can only say that it was a slow fading, a gradual and at times painful transition from being in communication every day, to every week, to every few months, to once a year and, now, not at all.”

Friendships Have Never Been Harder to Maintain (Jo Piazza, The Cut , March 2022)

In this essay, Jo Piazza meditates on the joy and beauty of friendship in our lives. She writes about contemporary friendship from the perspective of someone who knows firsthand what it’s like to be lonely, having lived in San Francisco in her mid-30s with no friends. Piazza highlights how crucial it is to find one's tribe and how maintaining that is also ongoing, intentional work. During the pandemic, these responsibilities became even more complicated, leaving people without friends, or in unbalanced friendships.

“A friend is often seen as less important than a husband or a wife and definitely ranks lower than blood relations. So despite legions of studies proving they are essential to long-term mental and physical health, friendships are often the first relationships to fall by the wayside when life gets crazy. It seems so easy to make friends in college and your early 20s, when you’re more carefree and have the hours to dedicate to the groundwork.”

Friendship (Devon Brody, The Paris Review, July 2023)

It doesn't happen too often in life that we find ourselves in a friendship that leans more towards being a romance. Out of nowhere you are drawn towards a person you know little about. They might be a neighbor, a coworker, a bookshop checkout person. You want to know everything about them, the thoughts that circle inside their heads, the dreams and hopes they nurture, who they call family. Something like this, if felt in the context of a romance, might take a more heavy, underlined, nuanced meaning. But often we tend to slight these efforts in friendships.

In this essay, Brody writes along similar lines about a friendship that is so unthreatening, so slight, so simple it becomes the all-encompassing ultimate relationship of their life, and yet not. Through the essay Brody tries to capture the essence of such friendships that become more than the sum total of their parts, making us look at them from a new lens, and mine them for more than what they offer. In the essay, they parse the comfort of being there for each other, the shared knowledge of never betraying in any way, and that cocoon-like space that exists in the cervices of such fleeting relationships against the vast canvas of marriages, flings and familial ties.

Brody writes:

“On the phone I asked him if he was still there. He said he was, and I started crying a little, then stopped, I think. I asked him if he could meet me at the hospital. He said he would, still in the same tone.”

This sense of belonging is unique, ephemeral and also a touchstone of a matured way of looking at people. I feel this essay makes for an unmissable selection on this list, giving me the much-needed space, time and tenderness to regard these friendships with a love that is often denied to them, and by extension, us.

It’s Your Friends Who Break Your Heart (Jennifer Senior, The Atlantic , March 2022)

In this essay, Jennifer Senior focuses on how friendships sometimes exist vaguely during midlife. She delves deeply into the intersection of friendship and aging, and how friendships come to an end. At the start of the essay, Senior structures the piece as a connection between two women, Elisa and Rebecca, and how their friendship comes to a “painful dissolution.” She then blends socio-cultural commentary with her own personal narrative, writing about the friends she has lost over the years. This speaks to readers who have lost one too many friends and are now at the cusp of a kind of change.

I decided to close my reading list with Senior’s essay as it felt like a good place to let things be. Her essay left me with thoughts, feelings and ruminations that bordered on the pensive. The essay made me think deeply about the friendships I have lost, and how those losses sit within my current state of mind. As I enjoyed the repose of this serene essay, I felt other readers might also be able to find such moments for themselves.

“You lose friends to marriage, to parenthood, to politics—even when you share the same politics. (Political obsessions are a big, underdiscussed friendship-ender in my view, and they seem to only deepen with age.) You lose friends to success, to failure, to flukish strokes of good or ill luck. (Envy, dear God—it’s the mother of all unspeakables in a friendship, the lulu of all shames.) These life changes and upheavals don’t just consume your friends’ time and attention. They often reveal unseemly characterological truths about the people you love most, behaviors and traits you previously hadn’t imagined possible.”

Anandi Mishra is an essayist and policy professional, whose work has been published by the LA Review of Books, Aeon, The Atlantic, Electric Literature, among others. She has also worked as a reporter for The Times of India and The Hindu. She lives in Delhi and writes about it in her newsletter Scurf .

Memoir Land is a reader-supported publication that pays contributors. To support this work, become a paid subscriber.

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War. Envy. Friendship.

Is war a human choice an essay reflecting on friendships..

I lack a “hot take” on the Ukraine war itself. A tragedy for the people. I’m unsure even if long-time observers fully understand the character that makes Putin. There is complexity as Ukraine holds many minerals, pipelines and resources. Much more than people typically realise eg 20% of Europe’s potatoes and 25% of corn! And a top 5 titanium producer.

But, war itself I have made some observations on, as it comes up tangentially in Thinking Bigly. The last 80 years or so have shown a decline in mass conflicts, in contrast to the eg -500 BC to 1950 AD period which contained a great deal of war.

I draw attention to many slow-moving positive trends in Bigly, like life expectancy, over the last 100 years. Will our last 80 years be the blip? I truly hope not.

Yuval Noah Harari argues that war is a human choice.

“...Unlike gravity, war isn’t a fundamental force of nature. Its intensity and existence depend on underlying technological, economic and cultural factors. As these factors change, so does war.

Evidence of such change is all around us. Over the past few generations, nuclear weapons have turned war between superpowers into a mad act of collective suicide, forcing the most powerful nations on Earth to find less violent ways to resolve conflict. Whereas great-power wars, such as the second Punic war or the second world war, have been a salient feature for much of history, in the last seven decades there has been no direct war between superpowers”

And perhaps he over-stresses whether this is a pivot point in human history - but he might be right - and his prose on the call for better human choices I’ve found lingering in my mind. So I share it with you:

“...If you believe that historic change is impossible, and that humanity never left the jungle and never will, the only choice left is whether to play the part of predator or prey. Given such a choice, most leaders would prefer to go down in history as alpha predators, and add their names to the grim list of conquerors that unfortunate pupils are condemned to memorize for their history exams.

But maybe change is possible? Maybe the law of the jungle is a choice rather than an inevitability? If so, any leader who chooses to conquer a neighbour will get a special place in humanity’s memory, far worse than your run-of-the-mill Tamerlane. He will go down in history as the man who ruined our greatest achievement. Just when we thought we were out of the jungle, he pulled us back in.

I don’t know what will happen in Ukraine. But as a historian I do believe in the possibility of change. I don’t think this is naivety—it’s realism. The only constant of human history is change. And that’s something that perhaps we can learn from the Ukrainians. For many generations, Ukrainians knew little but tyranny and violence. They endured two centuries of tsarist autocracy (which finally collapsed amidst the cataclysm of the first world war). A brief attempt at independence was quickly crushed by the Red Army that re-established Russian rule. Ukrainians then lived through the terrible man-made famine of the Holodomor, Stalinist terror, Nazi occupation and decades of soul-crushing Communist dictatorship. When the Soviet Union collapsed, history seemed to guarantee that Ukrainians would again go down the path of brutal tyranny – what else did they know?

But they chose differently. Despite history, despite grinding poverty and despite seemingly insurmountable obstacles, Ukrainians established a democracy. In Ukraine, unlike in Russia and Belarus, opposition candidates repeatedly replaced incumbents. When faced with the threat of autocracy in 2004 and 2013, Ukrainians twice rose in revolt to defend their freedom. Their democracy is a new thing. So is the “new peace”. Both are fragile, and may not last long. But both are possible, and may strike deep roots. Every old thing was once new. It all comes down to human choices.”

My other tiny observation is that on the day of the invasion, gold rose, bitcoin fell, equities (US/global) fell; whereas the next day gold fell, bitcoin rose, equities rose. Equities rising on day 2 is potentially puzzling ( John Authers covers potential reasons , Bloomberg) but gold and bitcoin moving inversely also suggest bitcoin does not act like “digital gold” (although others do argue for BTC as a potential currency reserve pillar).

For a slightly off-mainstream news commentator, I think Adam Tooze is likely to be interesting here. (He’s a mainstream progressive left thinker, but not journalist, more of a historian).

Finally, I can hardly believe the Ukraine president trained as a comedy actor. He won the presidency after appearing for 6 years as the fictional President in a TV show. (I guess cf Reagan).

His political party started off with the same name as the TV show one. “Servant of the People”.

In the UK, is that like Hugh Grant from ‘Love, Actually’ becoming Prime Minister?

Envy. Friendship. I read an essay on friendship, a conversation with Margaret Atwood and commentary from Charlie Munger that thread together some thoughts I’ve been having.

Why do so many humans not appreciate how much better life is now than 50 years ago or 100 years ago ? Why is there so little work on the making, blaring and maintaining of friendships ?

This is what Charlie Munger had to say:

Question: What worries you most about our economy and the stock market? And on the other hand, what makes you optimistic?

Charlie Munger: You have to be optimistic about the competency of our technical civilization. But there again, it’s an interesting thing. If you take the last 100 years, 1922 to 2022, most of modernity came in in that 100 years. And then the previous 100 years, that got another big chunk of modernity. Before that, things were pretty much the same for the previous thousands of years. Life was pretty brutal, short, limited, and what have you. No printing press, no air conditioning, no modern medicine. I don’t think we’re going to get things that are in what I call the ‘real human needs’. Think of what it meant to get the steam engine, the steamship, the railroad, a little bit of improvement in farming, and a little bit of improvement in plumbing. That’s what you got in the 100 years that ended in 1922. The next 100 years gave us widely distributed electricity, modern medicine, the automobile, the airplane, the records, the movies, the air conditioning in the south. Think what a blessing it was. If you wanted three children, you had to have six, because three died in infancy. That was our ancestors. Think of the agony of having to watch half your children die. It’s amazing how much achievement there has been in civilization in these last 200 years and most of it in the last 100 years. Now, the trouble with that is that the basic needs are pretty well filled. In the United States, the principal problem of the poor people is that they’re too fat. That is a very different place from what happened in the past. In the past, they were on the edge of starving. It’s really interesting. With all this enormous increase in living standards, freedom, diminishment of racial inequities, and all the huge progress that has come, people are less happy about the state of affairs than they were when things were way tougher. That has a very simple explanation. The world is not driven by greed; it’s driven by envy. So the fact that everybody’s five times better off than they used to be, they take that for granted. All they think about is somebody else having more now and it’s not fair that he should have it and they don’t. That’s the reason that God came down and told Moses that he couldn’t envy his neighbor’s wife or even his donkey. I mean, even the old Jews were having trouble with envy. So it’s built into the nature of things. It’s weird for somebody at my age because I was in the middle of the Great Depression and the hardship was unbelievable. I was safer walking around Omaha in the evening than I am in my own neighborhood in Los Angeles after all this great wealth and so forth. So and I have no way of doing anything about it. I can’t change the fact that a lot of people are very unhappy and feel very abused after everything’s improved by about 600% because there’s still somebody else who has more. I have conquered envy in my own life. I don’t envy anybody. I don’t give a damn what somebody else has. But other people are going crazy by it. And other people play to the envy in order to advance their own political careers. We have whole networks now that want to pour gasoline on the flames of envy. I like the religion of the old Jews. I like the people who were against envy, not the people who were trying to profit from it. Think of the pretentious expenditures of the rich. Who in the hell needs a Rolex watch so you can get mugged for it? Yet, everybody wants to have a pretentious expenditure. That helps drive demand in our modern capitalist society. My advice to the young people is: don’t go there. To hell with the pretentious expenditure. I don’t think there’s much happiness in it. But it does drive the civilization we actually have. And it drives the dissatisfaction. Steven Pinker of Harvard is a smart academic. He constantly points out that everything’s gotten way, way better, but the general feeling about how fair it is has gotten way more hostile. As it gets better and better, people are less and less satisfied. That is weird but that’s what’s happened.

Margaret Atwood had this to say on envy and friendship after Jen Senior’s essay:

Many of Senior’s observations in her essay on friendships resonated with me.

This long passage on envy…

Whenever I mentioned to people that I was working on a story about friendship in midlife, questions about envy invariably followed. It’s an irresistible subject, this thing that Socrates called “the ulcer of the soul.” Paul Bloom, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto, told me that many years ago, he taught a seminar at Yale about the seven deadly sins. “Envy,” he said dryly, “was the one sin students never boasted about.” He’s right. With the exception of envy, all of the deadly sins can be pleasurable in some way. Rage can be righteous; lust can be thrilling; greed gets you all the good toys. But nothing feels good about envy, nor is there any clear way to slake it. You can work out anger with boxing gloves, sate your gluttony by feasting on a cake, boast your way through cocktail hour, or sleep your way through lunch. But envy—what are you to do with that? Die of it, as the expression goes. No one ever says they’re dying of pride or sloth. Yet social science has surprisingly little to say about envy in friendship. For that, you need to consult artists, writers, musicians.

But the whole essay reflects on the making and breaking of friendships, how vital they are, how understudied; how they drive all types of creative partnerships, how they are in today’s age…

I highly recommend the essay.

One of her points is:

It is amazing how the death of someone you love exposes this lie you tell yourself, that there’ll always be time.

I think of Nora Ephron, whose death caught virtually all of her friends by surprise . Had they known, they all said afterward—had they only known that she was ill—they’d have savored the dinners they were having, and they certainly wouldn’t have taken for granted that more of them would stretch forever into the future. Her sudden disappearance from the world revealed the fragility of our bonds, and how presumptuous we all are, how careless, how naive. But shouldn’t this fragility always be top of mind? Surely the pandemic has taught us that?

This is one point I take up in my Thinking Bigly show. If you are thinking of coming, please do - March 11 - and you can book tickets here:

Time does run out and if you have things left unsaid - you should really think about correcting that.

Matt Clancy suggesting (at least for incremental innovation) that policy such as raising emissions standards might work.

Price decline of solar. (If Germany and Italy / world / Europe) need to rely less on Russian gas…. then do they need to invest more in renewables?

Climate strategy. Buy coal mines. Close them early.

Viral causal link to MS - much suggested previously, this study provides evidence for this.

Ready for more?

The Danger of Envy in Friendship

Today’s friendship topic is all about envy, which is a bad element to have in a friendship . As in the past, the situation may seem to apply to writers, but I know that writers are not the only creatures who feel envy towards their friends and colleagues.

The essence of the letter writer’s question is this: Should friends in the same industry help each other get ahead even if it means one friend may far “outshine” the other? And what do you do when you’re jealous of your closest friend?

Dear Nina,

I’ve been blogging for three years. About 18 months ago I started submitting to larger websites and have been somewhat successful. My close friend started a blog recently, and while I want to help her, I’m jealous of the success she’s already achieved in a short time.

In high school we were inseparable. We were on the same sports team and competed in the same events. She was social and well-liked. I was (and still am) shy and difficult to get to know. She was a year behind me and ended up attending the same small liberal arts college. She introduced me to my husband because she had a major crush on him. (I only pursued the relationship with her blessing.)

Throughout our friendship, she has been one of the few people who I can really be myself with. She is loyal and supportive and makes me laugh. We can talk for hours and it feels like minutes. We live far apart and I miss her.

About a year ago, she began blogging when her mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Her mother’s illness was swift and brutal. After my friend’s first blog posted to her Facebook page, she texted me to say she’d had 500 page views. That’s more than I ever had on a single post in the three years since I’d been blogging. Her mother was dying of brain cancer and I was getting jealous of page views. I felt like a horrible friend.

My friend has now begun submitting to many of the same sites I submit to. She asked if I could share my “secrets” to getting published. I am reluctant and again feeling horrible about it.

I am reluctant because I’ve gotten where I am through hard work. There is no secret. It’s countless hours of researching sites and other writers and writing and revising and writing and revising and researching some more. It’s making yourself completely vulnerable and getting rejected. It’s about getting accepted but still not feeling very accomplished.

I am reluctant because I am jealous and petty and scared. I’m afraid she’ll be more successful. I’m afraid I’ll be watching her live out my dream. I’m jealous that she gets more likes and comments on her posts than I ever do. I don’t feel this way about other writers I don’t know. So why can’t I support my best friend?

I am working on my jealousy. (It’s the unflattering emotion I wrestle with far too often.) I’ve been reading a lot about Buddhism and looking inward. I feel better every time I let go and give more than I get. I know what the right thing to do is. I know there is enough for both of us, and for us all.

I guess what I want to know is, can you understand my reluctance? Or am I really just being a complete jerk about this? And why am I more threatened by her success than by complete strangers’ successes?

I’m feeling like the worst friend in the world.

Signed, Struggling With Envy

Dear Struggling With Envy ,

Your letter was admirably honest and probably more relatable than you suspect. One time when I was feeling especially envious about another writer, a wise relative told me that envy is like a wrecking ball destroying everything in its path. She helped me imagine the strength of envy ruining everything it touches then swinging back around to ruin the person who released it first. Your letter shows that you’re still on the safe side of the wrecking ball because you have mostly held back its potential to ruin your friendship. However, I do suspect that your friend has felt your hesitation to help so it’s time to decide how you’re going to handle her future requests.

In April I received a letter that reminded me of yours, but the issue was flipped. It was from a writer who felt supported and applauded by the bloggers she’d connected with online, but she felt discouraged and dismissed by a close friend of hers in town who is also a writer.

Many commenters told the April letter writer (let’s call her “April”) that her friend was flat-out jealous. I agreed, but I told April to forget about what was keeping her friend from applauding her work. Instead, April needed to focus solely on her own goals and her own writing because obsessing about her friend’s jealousy was getting in the way of her writing. Similarly, I believe that your focus on your friend’s success is getting in the way of your writing.

WHERE ENVY CAN BE USEFUL

In A Writer’s Guide To Persistence: How to Create a Lasting and Productive Writing Practice , author Jordan Rosenfeld dedicates an entire chapter to envy. She says, “Focusing on what others have is a form of procrastination and distraction from your own writing.” She suggests that when you’re feeling jealous of someone it helps to write down five steps it would take to get in a similar position to that person. We’re usually more jealous of the achievement than the person. I especially like her advice to reframe the envy into something useful. She writes, “Envy is a signpost pointing you toward what you really want.”

BUT WHAT DO YOU REALLY WANT?

It sounds like your friend’s writing motivation, for now, comes from her desire to share the tragic experience of losing her mother. Perhaps the writing process is helping her work through her grief. Perhaps she wants to help others who are experiencing the mourning process. Either way, I suspect that your friend’s success comes from the passion in her message as opposed to a clamoring for more likes and shares. I suspect that readers share her work because her story feels authentic and because her story helps others.

You said, “I’m afraid [my friend will be] living out my dream.” But then you mention that she gets more likes and comments than you do. I wonder if rather than envy about the likes and shares, you’re jealous of your friend’s underlying passion and clear motivation. Maybe it’s time to go back to the roots of your writing dreams. Were those roots based on likes, shares, and comments? I bet the dream did not start there. What do you enjoy and crave about writing as opposed to the publishing side of it all? If you can spend some time answering that question, you might point yourself in the right direction.

WHAT YOU ALREADY KNOW

Some of the advice I want to give you has already been covered by YOU in your letter. As you know, your friend’s success has nothing to do with you. She did not become a blogger to spite you, and her success has no bearing on your abilities or career trajectory. I know that you know this already as evidenced by your astute and self-aware analysis of the irrational worries that come into play with envy. As you said, there is enough for everyone. As you said, if you would help a stranger then you ought to help your best friend. And as you said, in life, the more you give, the more you get. (Usually.)

You know what you should do, but something is still holding you back.

DON’T BE ASHAMED

Before we delve further, I’d like to alleviate whatever shame you’re feeling about the jealousy. I will answer some of your direction questions, all of which seem to come with a layer of shame.

Can you understand my reluctance [to provide contact information for editors, etc.]? Yes, I can. You worked hard to get your writing published and on some level you feel that your friend should “climb the ladder” at the same pace or that she should not benefit so easily just because she knows you and can piggy back on your contacts. And by the way, you can feel reluctant, but do the right thing anyway. Both can be true at the same time.

Or am I really just being a complete jerk about this? No, not yet, but you’re tempted and that’s what I hope to help you avoid.

And why am I more threatened by her success than by complete strangers’ successes? That is something I would need more information to answer, and I do think it’s worth you exploring that question with someone who can help. My goal here is to influence how you treat your best friend more than how you personally feel about her success.

SHOULD WRITERS HELP OTHER WRITERS?

I think you should help your very close friend and even acquaintances. I agree with you that there are no major secrets to getting published and it’s mostly hard work. However, many of us do find help along the way so why not fall into the camp of someone who is helpful?

Rosenfeld similarly warns writers not to hoard information. She points out that most information is available when writers look hard enough or ask around enough. Your friends and acquaintances will either get it from you or from someone else, but they will certainly remember that you were unwilling to share what you know.

Rosenfeld asks readers to consider this: Can you honestly say that you didn’t learn some helpful tidbits from other writers here and there? Can you say that hearing about another writer’s experience didn’t somehow inform the way you pitched pieces? Were you never given the email address of an editor in the position to publish your work? Were you never pointed towards sites where writers like Erika Dreifus and Trish Hopkinson share tons of resources? Even if you don’t always feel like “we’re all in this together,” acting that way may eventually change your perception. Which brings me to . . .

BEHAVIOR OVER FEELINGS

So “Struggling with Envy,” while I might not be able to help you alleviate the envy you’re feeling, I hope that I’ve kept you from doing any damage to your friendship. It is so natural to feel jealous when success seems to come easily to the next person. (And I’m willing to bet that your friend’s success was not really “easy” considering the tragic nature of her writing material. You also noted that truth in your letter.)

Be gentle with yourself for feeling envious, but be vigilant about keeping yourself from acting on it. Nobody, including your friend, can blame you for feeling jealous. It’s what you do with the envy that matters.

Wishing you much success in your writing journey and many more years of a close relationship with your friend,

ASK ME AN ANONYMOUS FRIENDSHIP ADVICE QUESTION ANY TIME!

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September 8, 2015

Hi, I'm Nina

Hi, I’m NINA BADZIN, host of the podcast, Dear Nina: Conversations About Friendship. Since 2014, I’ve been writing about the dynamics of adult friendship and answering anonymous questions on the topic. I’m also the co-founder of the writing studio at ModernWell in Minneapolis and an avid reader who reviews 30+ books a year. Welcome to my site!

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I send an email through Substack twice a month with the latest friendship letters, podcast episodes, book reviews, recipes, and more.

HI, I’M NINA BADZIN. I’m a writer fascinated by the dynamics of friendship, and I’ve been answering anonymous advice questions on the topic since 2014. I now also answer them on my podcast, Dear Nina! I’m a creative writing instructor at ModernWell in Minneapolis, a freelance writer and editor, and an avid reader who reviews 50 books a year. Welcome to my site!

I send an email once or twice a month with the latest friendship letters, podcast episodes, book reviews, recipes, and more.

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It’s Your Friends Who Break Your Heart

The older we get, the more we need our friends—and the harder it is to keep them.

two "Best Friend" necklaces, each with half a heart, hanging side by side with all text except "End" crossed out

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This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic , Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.

I t is an insolent cliché , almost, to note that our culture lacks the proper script for ending friendships. We have no rituals to observe, no paperwork to do, no boilerplate dialogue to crib from.

Yet when Elisa Albert and Rebecca Wolff were in the final throes of their friendship, they managed, entirely by accident, to leave behind just such a script. The problem was that it read like an Edward Albee play—tart, unsparing, fluorescent with rage.

Explore the March 2022 Issue

Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.

I met Elisa one evening in 2008, after an old friend’s book reading. She was such mesmerizing company that I rushed out to buy her debut novel, The Book of Dahlia , which had been published a few months earlier. I was instantly struck by how unafraid of darkness and emotional chaos she was. The same articulate fury suffused After Birth , her follow-up; her next book, Human Blues (her “monster,” as she likes to say), comes out in July.

Rebecca is someone I knew only by reputation until recently. She’s the founding editor of the literary magazine Fence , a haven for genre-resistant writing and writers that’s now almost 25 years old. She’s also the author of a novel and four poetry collections, including Manderley , selected by the National Poetry Series; she has a fifth coming out in the fall.

The two women became close more than a decade ago, spotting in each other the same traits that dazzled outsiders: talent, charisma, saber-tooth smarts. To Rebecca, Elisa was “impossibly vibrant” in a way that only a 30-year-old can be to someone who is 41. To Elisa, Rebecca was a glamorous and reassuring role model, a woman who through some miracle of alchemy had successfully combined motherhood, marriage, and a creative life.

It would be hard to overstate how much that mattered to Elisa. She was a new mother, all alone in a new city, Albany, where her husband was a tenured professor. (Albany! How does one find friends in Albany?) Yet here was Rebecca—the center of a lush social network, a pollinating bee—showing up on campus at Fence ’s office every day.

Read: Why making friends in midlife is so hard

The two entered an intense loop of contact. They took a class in New York City together. They sometimes joked about running away together. And, eventually, they decided to write a book together, a collection of their email and text correspondence about a topic with undeniably broad appeal: how to live in the world and be okay. They called this project The Wellness Letters .

I read the manuscript in one gulp. Their exchanges have real swing to them, a screwball quality with a punk twist. On page 1:

R: Anything you haven’t done? E: Affair. Acid. Shrooms. Second child. Death. Ayahuasca. R: “Bucket List.” E: “Efforts at Wellness.” R: I just started writing something called Trying to Stay Off My Meds … E: U R A STRONG WOMAN.

But over time, resentments flicker into view. Deep fissures in their belief systems begin to show. They start writing past each other, not hearing each other at all. By the end, the two women have taken every difficult truth they’ve ever learned about the other and fashioned it into a club. The final paragraphs are a mess of blood and bone and gray guts.

In real time, Elisa and Rebecca enact on the page something that almost all of us have gone through: the painful dissolution of a friendship.

The specifics of their disagreements may be unique to them, but the broad outlines have the ring and shape of the familiar; The Wellness Letters are almost impossible to read without seeing the corpse of one of your own doomed friendships floating by.

Elisa complains about failures in reciprocity.

Rebecca implies that Elisa is being insensitive, too quick to judge others.

Elisa implies that Rebecca is being too self-involved, too needy.

Rebecca implies: Now you’re too quick to judge me.

Elisa ultimately suggests that Rebecca’s unhappiness is at least partly of her own unlovely making.

To which Rebecca more or less replies: Who on earth would choose to be this unhappy?

To which Elisa basically says: Well, should that be an excuse for being a myopic and inconsiderate friend?

E: The truth is that I am wary of you … R: When you say that you are wary of me, it reminds me of something … oh yes, it’s when I told you that I was wary of you … wary of your clear pattern of forming mutually idolatrous relationships with women who you cast in a particular role in your life only to later castigate.

Their feelings were too hot to contain. What started as a deliberate, thoughtful meditation about wellness ended as an inadvertent chronicle of a friendship gone terribly awry.

The Wellness Letters , 18 months of electrifying correspondence, now sit mute on their laptops.

I first read The Wellness Letters in December 2019, with a different project in mind for them. The pandemic forced me to set it aside. But two years later, my mind kept returning to those letters, for reasons that at this point have also become a cliché: I was undergoing a Great Pandemic Friendship Reckoning, along with pretty much everyone else. All of those hours in isolation had amounted to one long spin of the centrifuge, separating the thickest friendships from the thinnest; the ambient threat of death and loss made me realize that if I wanted to renew or intensify my bonds with the people I loved most, the time was now, right now.

Want to explore more of the ideas and science behind well-being? Join Atlantic writers and other experts May 1–3 at The Atlantic ’s In Pursuit of Happiness event. Learn more about in-person and virtual registration here .

But truth be told, I’d already been mulling this subject for quite some time. When you’re in middle age, which I am (mid-middle age, to be precise—I’m now 52), you start to realize how very much you need your friends. They’re the flora and fauna in a life that hasn’t had much diversity, because you’ve been so busy— so relentlessly, stupidly busy —with middle-age things: kids, house, spouse, or some modern-day version of Zorba’s full catastrophe. Then one day you look up and discover that the ambition monkey has fallen off your back; the children into whom you’ve pumped thousands of kilowatt-hours are no longer partial to your company; your partner may or may not still be by your side. And what, then, remains?

a red and a pink flower, both with yellow centers, side by side with a few petals left on them, with petals falling from both like tears

With any luck, your friends. According to Laura Carstensen, the director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, I’ve aged out of the friendship-collecting business, which tends to peak in the tumbleweed stage of life, when you’re still young enough to spend Saturday evenings with random strangers and Sunday mornings nursing hangovers at brunch. Instead, I should be in the friendship-enjoying business, luxuriating in the relationships that survived as I put down roots.

And I am luxuriating in them. But those friendships are awfully hard-won. With midlife comes a number of significant upheavals and changes, ones that prove too much for many friendships to withstand. By middle age, some of the dearest people in your life have gently faded away.

You lose friends to marriage, to parenthood, to politics—even when you share the same politics. (Political obsessions are a big, underdiscussed friendship-ender in my view, and they seem to only deepen with age.) You lose friends to success, to failure, to flukish strokes of good or ill luck. (Envy, dear God—it’s the mother of all unspeakables in a friendship, the lulu of all shames.) These life changes and upheavals don’t just consume your friends’ time and attention. They often reveal unseemly characterological truths about the people you love most, behaviors and traits you previously hadn’t imagined possible.

Those are brutal.

And I’ve still left out three of the most common and dramatic friendship disrupters: moving, divorce, and death. Though only the last is irremediable.

The unhappy truth of the matter is that it is normal for friendships to fade, even under the best of circumstances. The real aberration is keeping them. In 2009, the Dutch sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst published an attention-grabber of a study that basically showed we replace half of our social network over the course of seven years, a reality we both do and don’t intuit.

R: I’m worried once we wrap up our dialogue our friendship will be useless, therefore done. E: Nope. We r deeply in dialogue for long run I think. Unless U want to not b. Does our friendship feel useless?? … R: No I want to be friends forever E: Then we will b

Were friendships always so fragile? I suspect not. But we now live in an era of radical individual freedoms. All of us may begin at the same starting line as young adults, but as soon as the gun goes off, we’re all running in different directions; there’s little synchrony to our lives. We have kids at different rates (or not at all); we pair off at different rates (or not at all); we move for love, for work, for opportunity and adventure and more affordable real estate and healthier lifestyles and better weather.

From the November 2019 issue: Why you never see your friends anymore

Yet it’s precisely because of the atomized, customized nature of our lives that we rely on our friends so very much. We are recruiting them into the roles of people who once simply coexisted with us—parents, aunts and uncles, cousins, fellow parishioners, fellow union members, fellow Rotarians.

It’s not wholly natural, this business of making our own tribes. And it hardly seems conducive to human thriving. The percentage of Americans who say they don’t have a single close friend has quadrupled since 1990, according to the Survey Center on American Life.

One could argue that modern life conspires against friendship, even as it requires the bonds of friendship all the more.

When I was younger, my friends had as much a hand in authoring my personality as any other force in my life. They advised me on what to read, how to dress, where to eat. But these days, many are showing me how to think, how to live .

It gets trickier as you age, living. More bad things happen. Your parents, if you’re lucky enough to still have them, have lives so different from your own that you’re looking horizontally, to your own cohort, for cues. And you’re dreading the days when an older generation will no longer be there for you—when you’ll have to rely on another ecosystem altogether for support.

Yet for the past decade or so, I’ve had a tacit, mutual understanding with many of the people I love most, particularly fellow working parents: Look, life’s crazy, the office has loaded me up like a pack animal, we’ll catch up when we catch up, love you in the meantime . This happens to suit a rotten tendency of mine, which is to work rather than play. I could give you all sorts of therapized reasons for why I do this, but honestly, at my age, it’s embarrassing. There comes a point when you have to wake up in the morning and decide that it doesn’t matter how you got to whatever sorry cul-de-sac you’re circling; you just have to find a way out.

I think of Nora Ephron, whose death caught virtually all of her friends by surprise . Had they known, they all said afterward—had they only known that she was ill—they’d have savored the dinners they were having, and they certainly wouldn’t have taken for granted that more of them would stretch forever into the future. Her sudden disappearance from the world revealed the fragility of our bonds, and how presumptuous we all are, how careless, how naive.

Read: Nora Ephron’s rules for middle-age happiness

But shouldn’t this fragility always be top of mind? Surely the pandemic has taught us that?

I mean, how long can we all keep postponing dinner?

When I began writing this story, my friend Nina warned me: Do not make this an occasion to rake through your own history and beat yourself up over the state of your own friendships . Which is something that only a dear friend, armed with protective instincts and a Spidey sense about her friend’s self-lacerating tendencies, would say.

Fair enough. But it’s hard to write a story about friendship in midlife without thinking about the friends you’ve lost. “When friendship exists in the background, it’s unremarkable but generally uncomplicated,” wrote B. D. McClay , an essayist and critic, in Lapham’s Quarterly last spring. “But when friendship becomes the plot, then the only story to tell is about how the friendship ended.”

Friendship is the plot of this article. So naturally I’m going to write at least a little about those I’ve lost—and my regrets, the choices I’ve made, the time I have and have not invested.

On the positive side of the ledger: I am a loyal friend. I am an empathetic friend. I seldom, if ever, judge. Tell me you murdered your mother and I’ll say, Gee, you must have been really mad at her . I am quick to remind my friends of their virtues, telling them that they are beautiful, they are brilliant, they are superstars. I spend money on them. I often express my love.

On the negative side: I’m oversensitive to slights and minor humiliations, which means I’m wrongly inclined to see them as intentional rather than pedestrian acts of thoughtlessness, and I get easily overwhelmed, engulfed. I can almost never mentally justify answering a spontaneous phone call from a friend, and I have to force myself to phone and email them when I’m hard at work on a project. I’m that prone to monomania, and that consumed by my own tension.

What both of these traits have in common is that I seem to live my life as if I’m under siege. I’m guessing my amygdala is the size of a cantaloupe.

Most of my withered friendships can be chalked up to this terrible tendency of mine not to reach out. I have pals in Washington, D.C., where I started my professional life, whom I haven’t seen in years, and friends from college I haven’t seen since practically graduation—people I once adored, shared my life with, couldn’t have imagined living for two seconds without.

And yet I do. I have.

This is, mind you, how most friendships die, according to the social psychologist Beverley Fehr: not in pyrotechnics, but a quiet, gray dissolve. It’s not that anything happens to either of you; it’s just that things stop happening between you. And so you drift.

It’s the friendships with more deliberate endings that torment. At best, those dead friendships merely hurt; at worst, they feel like personal failures, each one amounting to a little divorce. It doesn’t matter that most were undone by the hidden trip wires of midlife I talked about earlier: marriage, parenthood, life’s random slings and arrows. By midlife, you’ve invested enough in your relationships that every loss stings.

Read: The Friendship Files

You feel bereft, for one thing. As if someone has wandered off with a piece of your history.

And you fear for your reputation. Friends are the custodians of your secrets, the eyewitnesses to your weaknesses. Every confession you’ve made—all those naked moments—can be weaponized.

There was the friend I lost to parenthood, utterly, though I was also a parent. Her child shortly consumed her world, and she had many child-rearing opinions. These changes alone I could have handled; what I couldn’t handle was her obvious disapproval of my own parenting style (hands-off) and my lack of sentimentality about motherhood itself (if you don’t have something nice to say about raising kids, pull up a chair and sit next to me).

There was no operatic breakup. She moved away; I made zero effort to stay in touch. But whenever I think of her, my stomach chirps with a kind of longing. She showed me how cognitive behavioral therapy worked before I even knew it was a thing, rightsizing my perspective each time I turned a wispy cirrus into a thunderhead. And her conversation was tops, weird and unpredictable.

I miss her. Or who she was. Who we were.

I lost a male friend once to parenthood too, though that situation was different. In this instance, I was not yet a mother. But he was a dad, and on account of this, he testily informed me one day, he now had higher moral obligations in this world than to our friendship or to my feelings, which he’d just seriously hurt (over something that in hindsight I’ll confess was pretty trivial). While I knew on some level that what he said was true, I couldn’t quite believe he was saying it out loud, this person with whom I’d spent so many idle, gleeful hours. I miss him a lot, and wonder to this day whether I should have just let the comment go.

Yet whenever I think of him, a fiery asterisk still appears next to his name.

Mahzad Hojjat, a social-psychology professor at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, once told me that people may say that friendship betrayals aren’t as bad as romantic betrayals if they’re presented with hypothetical scenarios on a questionnaire. But that’s not how they experience friendship betrayals in real life . This doesn’t surprise me. I still have sense-memories of how sickened I was when this friend told me I’d been relegated to a lower league—my heart quickening, the blood thumping in my ears.

Then there was the friend who didn’t say anything hurtful to me per se; the problem was how little she said about herself at all. According to Hojjat, failures of reciprocity are a huge theme in broken friendships. That stands to reason—asymmetries of time and effort can continue for only so long before you feel like you’ve lost your dignity. (I myself have been criticized for neglect and laziness, and rightly. It’s shitty.) But there’s a subtler kind of asymmetry that I think is far more devastating, and that is a certain lopsidedness in self-disclosure. This friend and I would have long lunches, dinners, coffees, and I’d be frank, always, about my disappointments and travails. I consider this a form of currency between women: You trade confidences, small glass fragments of yourself.

But not with her. Her life was always fine, swell, just couldn’t be better, thanks. Talking with her was like playing strip poker with someone in a down parka.

Read: How friends become closer

I mentioned this problem to Hojjat. She ventured that perhaps women expect more of their female friends than men do of their male companions, given how intimate our friendships tend to be. In my small, unscientific personal sample of friends, that’s certainly true.

Which brings me to the subject of our Problem Friends. Most of us have them, though we may wish we could tweeze them from our lives. (I’ve had one for decades, and though on some level I’ll always love her, I resolved to be done with her during this pandemic—I’d grown weary of her volatility, her storms of anger.) Unfortunately, what the research says about these friends is depressing: It turns out that time in their company can be worse than time spent with people we actively dislike. That, at any rate, is what the psychologist Julianne Holt-Lunstad discovered in 2003, when she had the inspired idea to monitor her subjects’ blood pressure while in the presence of friends who generated conflicted feelings. It went up—even more than it did when her subjects were in the presence of people with whom they had “aversive” relationships. Didn’t matter if the conversation was pleasant or not.

You have to wonder whether our bodies have always known this on some level—and whether the pandemic, which for a long while turned every social interaction into a possible health risk, made all of our problem friends easier to give the slip. It’s not just that they’re potentially bad for you. They are bad for you. And—alas—always were.

A brief word here about the scholarship devoted to friendship: I know I’ve been citing it quite a bit, but the truth is, there’s surprisingly little of it, and even less that’s particularly good. A great deal is dime-store wisdom crowned in the laurels of peer review, dispatches from the Empire of the Obvious. (When I first wrote to Elisa about this topic, she replied with an implicit eye roll. “Lemme guess: Long term intimate relationships are good for u!”)

You have perhaps heard, for instance, of Holt-Lunstad’s 2010 meta-analysis showing that a robust social network is as beneficial to an individual’s health as giving up cigarettes. So yes: Relationships really are good for u.

Read: How friendships change in adulthood

But friendship, generally speaking, is the redheaded stepchild of the social sciences. Romantic relationships, marriage, family—that’s where the real grant money is. They’re a wormy mess of ties that bind, whether by blood, sex, or law, which makes them hotter topics in every sense—more seductive, more fraught.

But this lacuna in the literature is also a little odd, given that most Americans have more friends than they do spouses. And one wonders if, in the near future, this gap in quality scholarship may start to fill.

In a book published in the summer of 2020, Big Friendship , Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman, the hosts of the podcast Call Your Girlfriend , argued that some friendships are so important that we should consider assigning them the same priority we do our romantic partnerships. They certainly view their own friendship this way; when the two of them went through a rough patch, they went so far as to see a therapist together.

I mentioned this to Laura Carstensen. Her first reaction was one of utter bewilderment: “But … it’s the whole idea that friendships are voluntary that makes them positive.”

Practically everyone who studies friendship says this in some form or another: What makes friendship so fragile is also exactly what makes it so special. You have to continually opt in. That you choose it is what gives it its value.

But as American life reconfigures itself, we may find ourselves rethinking whether our spouses and children are the only ones who deserve our binding commitments. When Sow and Friedman went into counseling together in their 30s, Sow was unmarried, which hardly made her unusual. According to a 2020 survey by the Pew Research Center, nearly a quarter of American adults ages 30 to 49 are single —and single here doesn’t just mean unmarried; it means not dating anyone seriously. Neither woman had (or has) children, either, a fact that could of course change, but if it doesn’t, Sow and Friedman would scarcely be alone. Nearly 20 percent of American adults ages 55 to 64 have no children , and 44 percent of current nonparents ages 18 to 49 say they think it’s unlikely they ever will .

“I have been with family sociologists who think it’s crazy to think that friends could replace family when you realize you’re in real trouble,” Carstensen told me. “ Yeah , they say, they’ll bring you soup when you have the flu, but they’re unlikely to care for you when you have dementia . But we could reach a point where close friends do quit their jobs to care for you when you have dementia.”

Friendship is the rare kind of relationship that remains forever available to us as we age . It’s a bulwark against stasis, a potential source of creativity and renewal in lives that otherwise narrow with time.

“I’ve recently built a whole community of people half my age,” says Esther Perel, 63, the psychotherapist and host of the immensely popular podcast Where Should We Begin? , in which she conducts a one-off couples-therapy session with anonymous clients each episode. “It’s the most important shift in my life, friendship-wise. They’re at my dinner table. I have three friends having babies.” These intergenerational friendships, she told me, are one of the unexpected joys of middle age, giving her access to a new vocabulary, a new culture, a new set of mores—at just the moment when the culture seems to have passed her generation by.

When we spoke, Perel was also preparing for her very first couples-therapy session with two friends, suggesting that Sow and Friedman were onto something. “The pandemic has taught us the importance of mass mutual reliance,” Perel said. “Interdependence has to conquer the lonely, individualistic nature of Americans.” As a native of Belgium, Perel has always found this aspect of American life a little baffling, particularly when she was a new mother. “In my culture, you ask a friend to babysit,” she told me. “Here, first you try to hire someone; then you go and ‘impose.’ And I thought: This is warped. This has got to shift. ”

Might it now? Finally?

a hand-knotted friendship bracelet with yellow, pink, red, and black zigzags that has frayed and broken

Elisa and Rebecca nurtured each other as if they were family—and often in ways their own families did not. When they met, Elisa was a new mother, and her parents were 3,000 miles away. Rebecca became her proxy parent, coaching her through breastfeeding and keeping her company; she even smelled like Elisa’s mom. “I can’t describe the smell, but it’s YOU, and it’s HER; it’s no cosmetic,” Elisa later wrote in The Wellness Letters , adding,

and your birthdays are adjacent and you are very much like her in some deep, meaningful ways, it seems to me. There is no one I can talk to the way I can talk to her, and to you. Her intelligence is vast and curious and childlike and insatiable and transcendent, like yours.

When they met, Rebecca was still married. While Rebecca’s marriage was falling apart, it was Elisa who threw open her doors and gave Rebecca the run of her downstairs floor, providing a refuge where she could think, agonize, crash. “We were sort of in that thing where you’re like, ‘You’re my savior,’ ” Rebecca told me. “Like, you cling to each other, because you’ve found each other.”

So what, ultimately, undid these two spit sisters?

On one level, it appeared to be a significant difference in philosophy. Namely: how they each thought about depression.

Rebecca struggles with major depression. Elisa has had experiences with the black dog too, going through long spells of trying to bring it to heel. But she hates this word, depression , thinks it decanted of all meaning, and in her view, we have a choice about how to respond to it.

R: When I’m really depressed I feel, and therefore am, at a painful remove from “life” … Even as I was aware that I was doing it all the time, this thing called “being a human being” … it was not what I imagined living to feel like. And I have spent years essentially faking it, just reassuring myself that at least from the outside I look like I’m alive … E: Jesus Christ, dude, first thought: you must chill. You must CHILL. This is not particularly empathetic, I’m sorry. I just want to get you down on the floor for a while. I want to get you breathing. I want to get you out of your head and into your hips, into your feet. I want to loosen you up. That is all.

To Elisa, women have been sold a false story about the origins of their misery. Everyone talks about brain chemistry. What about trauma? Screwy families? The birth-control pills she took from the time she was 15, the junk food she gorged on as a kid?

E: THE BODY, dude. All I care about is THE BODY. The mind is a fucking joke … Remind me to tell you about the time they prescribed me Zoloft in college after my brother died. Pills for grief! I am endlessly amused by this now.

But pills for grief—that is, in fact, exactly what Rebecca would argue she needed.

Around and around the two went. The way Elisa saw it, Rebecca was using her depression as an excuse for bad choices, bad behavior. What Rebecca read in Elisa’s emails was a reproach, a failure to grasp her pain. “If there’s no such thing as depression,” she wrote in The Wellness Letters , “what is this duck sitting on my head?”

It’s a painfully familiar dynamic in a friendship: One friend says, Get a grip already . And the other one says, I’m trying. Can’t you see I’m trying? Neither party relishes her role.

Eventually, Rebecca started taking medication. And once she did, she pulled away, vanishing for weeks. Elisa had no idea where she’d gone.

E: Well, our dialogue has turned into a monologue, but I am undaunted. Are you unmoved to write to me because your meds have worked so well that you’re now perfectly functional, to the extent that you need not go searching for ways to narrate/make sense of your internal landscape?

Weirdly, this explanation was not far off. When Rebecca eventually did reply, the exchange did not end well. Elisa accused her of never apologizing, including for this moment. She accused Rebecca of political grandstanding in their most recent correspondence, rather than talking about wellness. But Elisa also confessed that perhaps Rebecca happened to be catching her on a bad day—Elisa’s mother had just phoned, and that call had driven her into a rage.

This last point gave Rebecca an opening to share something she’d clearly been wanting to say for a long time: Elisa was forever comparing her to her mother. But Elisa was also forever complaining about her mother, saying that she hated her mother. Her mother was, variously, “sadistic,” “untrustworthy,” and “a monster.” So finally Rebecca said:

In all the ways you’ve spoken about your mother, I don’t recall you ever describing to me the actual things she’s done, what makes you feel so destroyed by her.

To which Elisa replied that this was exactly the manipulative, hurtful type of gaslighting in which her mother would indulge.

It was at this moment that I, the reader, finally realized: This wasn’t just a fight over differences in philosophy.

If our friends become our substitute families, they pay for the failures of our families of origin. Elisa’s was such a mess—a brother long dead, parents long divorced—that her unconscious efforts to re-create it were always going to be fraught. And on some level, both women knew this. Elisa said it outright. When she first wrote in The Wellness Letters that Rebecca smelled like her mother, Elisa mused:

What’s my point? Something about mothers and children, and the unmothered, and human frailty, and imprinting. Something about friendship, which can and should provide support and understanding and company and a different sort of imprinting.

A different sort of imprinting. That’s what many of us, consciously or not, look for in friendships, isn’t it? And in our marriages too, at least if you believe Freud? Improved versions of those who raised us?

“I have no answers about how to ensure only good relationships,” Elisa concluded in one email to Rebecca. “But I guess practice? Trial and error? Revision?”

That really is the question. How do you ensure them?

Back in the 1980s, the Oxford psychologists Michael Argyle and Monika Henderson wrote a seminal paper titled “The Rules of Friendship.” Its six takeaways are obvious, but what the hell, they’re worth restating: In the most stable friendships, people tend to stand up for each other in each other’s absence; trust and confide in each other; support each other emotionally; offer help if it’s required; try to make each other happy; and keep each other up-to-date on positive life developments.

Read: Arthur C. Brooks on how to make your friendships deeper

It’s that last one where I’m always falling down. Keeping up contact, ideally embodied contact, though even semi-embodied contact—by voice, over the phone—would probably suffice. Only when reading Elisa and Rebecca in atom-splitting meltdown did I realize just how crucial this habit is. The two women had become theoretical to each other, the sum only of their ideas; their friendship had migrated almost exclusively to the page. “The writing took the place of our real-life relationship,” Elisa told me. “I felt like the writing was the friendship.”

In this way, Elisa and Rebecca were creating the conditions of a pandemic before there even was one. Had anyone read The Wellness Letters in 2019, they could have served as a cautionary tale: Our COVID year of lost embodied contact was not good for friendship . According to a September survey by Pew , 38 percent of Americans now say they feel less close to friends they know well.

The problem is that when it comes to friendship, we are ritual-deficient, nearly devoid of rites that force us together. Emily Langan, a Wheaton College professor of communication, argues that we need them. Friendship anniversaries. Regular road trips. Sunday-night phone calls, annual gatherings at the same rental house, whatever it takes. “We’re not in the habit of elevating the practices of friendship ,” she says. “But they should be similar to what we do for other relationships.”

When I consider the people I know with the greatest talent for friendship, I realize that they do just this. They make contact a priority. They jump in their cars. They appear at regular intervals in my inbox. One told me she clicks open her address book every now and then just to check which friends she hasn’t seen in a while—and then immediately makes a date to get together.

Laura Carstensen told me during our chat that good friends are for many people a key source of “unconditional positive regard,” a phrase I keep turning over and over in my mind. (Not hers, I should note—the term was popularized in the 1950s, to describe the ideal therapist-patient relationship. Carstensen had the good sense to repurpose it.) Her observation perfectly echoed something that Benjamin Taylor, the author of the lovely memoir Here We Are , said to me when I asked about his close friendship with Philip Roth . What, I wanted to know, made their relationship work? He thought for so long that I assumed the line had gone dead.

From the May 2020 issue: Benjamin Taylor on Philip Roth’s gift of empathy

“Philip made me feel that my best self was my real self,” he finally said. “I think that’s what happens when friendships succeed. The person is giving back to you the feelings you wish you could give to yourself. And seeing the person you wish to be in the world.”

I’m not the sampler-making sort. But if I were, I’d sew these words onto one.

Perhaps the best book about friendship I’ve read is The Undoing Project , by Michael Lewis. That might be a strange thing to say, because the book is not, on its face, about friendship at all, but about the birth of behavioral economics. Yet at its heart is the story of an exceptionally complicated relationship between two giants of the field. Amos Tversky was a buffalo of charisma and confidence; Daniel Kahneman was a sparrow of anxiety and neuroticism. The early years of their collaboration, spent at Hebrew University in the late 1960s, were giddy and all-consuming, almost like love. But as their fame grew, a rivalry developed between them, with Tversky ultimately emerging as the better-known of the two men. He was the one who got invited to fancy conferences—without Kahneman. He was the one who got the MacArthur genius grant—not Kahneman. When Kahneman told Tversky that Harvard had asked him to join its faculty, Tversky blurted out, “It’s me they want.” (He was at Stanford at the time; Kahneman, the University of British Columbia.)

“I am very much in his shadow in a way that is not representative of our interaction,” Kahneman told the psychiatrist Miles Shore, who interviewed him and Tversky for a project on creative pairs. “It induces a certain strain. There is envy! It’s just disturbing. I hate the feeling of envy.”

Whenever I mentioned to people that I was working on a story about friendship in midlife, questions about envy invariably followed. It’s an irresistible subject, this thing that Socrates called “the ulcer of the soul.” Paul Bloom, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto, told me that many years ago, he taught a seminar at Yale about the seven deadly sins. “Envy,” he said dryly, “was the one sin students never boasted about.”

He’s right. With the exception of envy, all of the deadly sins can be pleasurable in some way. Rage can be righteous; lust can be thrilling; greed gets you all the good toys. But nothing feels good about envy, nor is there any clear way to slake it. You can work out anger with boxing gloves, sate your gluttony by feasting on a cake, boast your way through cocktail hour, or sleep your way through lunch. But envy—what are you to do with that?

Die of it, as the expression goes. No one ever says they’re dying of pride or sloth.

Yet social science has surprisingly little to say about envy in friendship. For that, you need to consult artists, writers, musicians. Gore Vidal complained, “Every time a friend succeeds, something inside me dies”; Morrissey sang “We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful.” Envy is a ubiquitous theme in literature, spidering its way into characters as wide-ranging as Lenù and Lila, in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels , and pretty much every malevolent neurotic ever conjured by Martin Amis (the apotheosis being Richard Tull, the failed novelist and minor critic of The Information , who smacks his son when his rival lands on the best-seller list).

In the spring 2021 issue of The Yale Review , Jean Garnett, an editor at Little, Brown, wrote a terrific essay about envy and identical twinship that feels just as applicable to friendship. My favorite line, bar none: “I can be a very generous sister—maternal, even—as long as I am winning.”

With those 15 words, she exposes an uncomfortable truth. Many of our relationships are predicated on subtle differences in power. Rebalance the scales, and it’s anyone’s guess if our fragile egos survive. Underneath envy, Garnett notes, is the secret wish to shift those weights back in our favor, which really means the shameful wish to destroy what others have. Or as Vidal also (more or less) said: “It is not enough to succeed; a friend must also fail.”

At this point, pretty much everyone I know has been kicked in the head in some way. We’ve all got our satchel of disappointments to lug around.

But I did feel envy fairly acutely when I was younger—especially when it came to my girlfriends’ appearances and self-confidence. One friend in particular filled me with dread every time I introduced her to a boyfriend. She’s a knockout, turns heads everywhere; she both totally knows this and doesn’t have a clue. I have vivid memories of wandering a museum with her one afternoon and watching men silently trail her, finding all dopey manner of excuses to chat her up.

My tendency in such situations is to turn my role into shtick—I’m the wisecracking Daria, the mordant brunette, the one whose qualities will age well.

I hated pretending I was above it all.

What made this situation survivable was that this friend was—and still is—forever telling me how great I look, even though it’s perfectly apparent in any given situation that she’s Prada and I’m the knockoff on the street vendor’s blanket. Whatever. She means it when she tells me I look great. I love her for saying it, and saying it repeatedly.

In recent years, I have had one friend I could have badly envied. He was my office spouse for almost two decades—the other half of a two-headed vaudeville act now a quarter century old. We bounced every story idea off each other, edited each other, took our book leaves at the same time. Then I got a new job and he went off to work on his second book, which he phoned to tell me one day had been selected by … Oprah.

“You’re kidding!” I said. “That’s fucking amazing.”

Which, of course, it was. This wasn’t a lie.

But in the cramped quarters of my ego, crudely bound together with bubble gum and Popsicle sticks, was it all that fucking amazing?

No. It wasn’t. I wanted, briefly, to die.

Here’s the thing: I don’t allow myself too many silly, Walter Mitty–like fantasies of glory. I’m a pessimist by nature, and anyway, fame has never been my endgame in life.

But I did kinda sorta secretly hope to one day be interviewed from Oprah Winfrey’s yoga nook.

That our friendship hummed along in spite of this bolt of fortune and success in his life had absolutely nothing to do with me and everything to do with him, for the simple reason that he continued to be his vulnerable self. (It turns out that lucky, successful people still have problems, just different ones.) It helped that he never lost sight of my own strengths, either, even if I felt inadequate for a while by comparison. One day, while he was busy crushing it, I glumly confessed that I was miserable in my new job. Then go be awesome somewhere else , he said, as if awesomeness were some essential property of mine, how you’d define me if I were a metal or a stone. I think I started to cry.

It helped, too, that my friend genuinely deserved to be on Oprah . (His name is Bob Kolker, by the way; his book is Hidden Valley Road , and everyone should read it, because it is truly a marvel.)

It’s the almost-ness of envy that kills, as Garnett points out in her essay—the fact that it could have or should have been us. She quotes Aristotle’s Rhetoric : “We envy those who are near us in time, place, age, or reputation … those whose possession of or success in a thing is a reproach to us: these are our neighbors and equals; for it is clear that it is our own fault we have missed the good thing in question.”

And I have no clue what I would have done if Bob hadn’t handled his success with humility and tact. If he’d become monstrously boastful—or, okay, even just a little bit complacent—I honestly think I wouldn’t have been able to cope. Adam Smith noted how essential this restraint is in The Theory of Moral Sentiments . If a suddenly successful person has any judgment, he wrote, that man will be highly attuned to his friends’ envy, “and instead of appearing to be elated with his good fortune, he endeavours, as much as he can, to smother his joy, and keep down that elevation of mind with which his new circumstances naturally inspire him.”

This is, ultimately, what Amos Tversky failed to do with Daniel Kahneman, according to The Undoing Project . Worse, in fact: Tversky refused to address the imbalance in their relationship, which never should have existed in the first place. Kahneman tried, at first, to be philosophical about it. “The spoils of academic success, such as they are—eventually one person gets all of it, or gets a lot of it,” he told Shore, the psychiatrist studying creative pairs. “That’s an unkindness built in. Tversky cannot control this, though I wonder whether he does as much to control it as he should.”

But Kahneman wasn’t wondering, obviously. This was an accusation masquerading as a suspicion. In hindsight, the decisive moment in their friendship—what marked the beginning of the end—came when the two were invited to deliver a couple of lectures at the University of Michigan. At that point, they were working at separate institutions and collaborating far less frequently; the theory they presented that day was one almost entirely of Kahneman’s devising. But the two men still jointly presented it, as was their custom.

After their presentation, Tversky’s old mentor approached them both and asked, with genuine awe, where all those ideas came from. It was the perfect opportunity for Tversky to credit Kahneman—to right the scales, to correct the balance, to pull his friend out from his shadow and briefly into the sun.

Yet Tversky didn’t. “Danny and I don’t talk about these things” was all he said, according to Lewis.

And with that, the reader realizes: Kahneman’s second-class status—in both his own imagination and the public’s—was probably essential to the way Tversky conceived of their partnership. At the very least, it was something Tversky seemed to feel zero need to correct.

Kahneman continued to collaborate with Tversky. But he also took pains to distance himself from this man, with whom he’d once shared a typewriter in a small office in Jerusalem. The ill feelings wouldn’t ease up until Tversky told Kahneman he was dying of cancer in 1996.

So now I’m back to thinking about Nora Ephron’s friends, mourning all those dinners they never had. It’s the dying that does it, always. I started here; I end here (we all end here). It is amazing how the death of someone you love exposes this lie you tell yourself, that there’ll always be time. You can go months or even years without speaking to a dear old friend and feel fine about it, blundering along, living your life. But discover that this same friend is dead, and it’s devastating, even though your day-to-day life hasn’t changed one iota. You’re rudely reminded that this is a capricious, disordered cosmos we live in, one that suddenly has a friend-size hole in it, the air now puckered where this person used to be.

Last spring, an old friend of my friend David died by suicide. David had had no clue his friend was suffering. When David had last seen this man, in September 2020, he’d seemed more or less fine. January 6 had wound him up more than David’s other friends—he’d fulminate volcanically about the insurrection over the phone, practically burying David under mounds of words—but David certainly never interpreted this irritating development as a sign of despair.

But David did notice one curious thing. Before the 2020 election, he had bet this friend $10,000 that Donald Trump would win. David isn’t rich, but he figured the move was the ultimate hedge—if he won, at least he got 10 grand, and if he lost, hey, great, no more Trump. On November 7, when it became official—no more Trump!—David kept waiting for a phone call. It never came. He tried provoking his friend, sending him a check for only $15.99, pointing out that they’d never agreed on a payment schedule.

His friend wrote back a sharp rebuke, saying the bet was serious.

David sent him a check for $10,000.

His friend wordlessly cashed it.

David was stunned. No gloating phone call? Not even a gleeful email, a crowing text? This was a guy who loved winning a good bet.

Nothing. A few months later, he was found dead in a hotel.

The suicide became a kind of reckoning for David, as it would for anyone. Because he’s a well-adjusted, positive sort of fellow, he put his grief to what seemed like constructive use: He wrote an old friend from high school, once his closest friend, the only one who knew exactly how weird their adolescence was. David was blunt with this friend, telling him in his email that a good friend of his had just died by suicide, and there was nothing he could do about it, but he could reach out to those who were still alive, those he’d lost track of, people like him. Would he like to catch up sometime? And reminisce?

David never heard back. Distraught, he contacted someone the two men had in common. It turns out his friend’s life hadn’t worked out the way he’d wanted it to. He didn’t have a partner or kids; his job wasn’t one he was proud of; he lived in a backwater town. Even though David had made it clear he just wanted to talk about the old days, this man, for whatever reason, couldn’t bring himself to pick up the phone.

At which point David was contending with two friendship deaths—one literal, the other metaphorical. “You know what I realized?” he said to me. “At this age, if your romantic life is settled”—and David’s is—“it’s your friends who break your heart. Because they’re who’s left.”

What do you do with friendships that were, and aren’t any longer?

By a certain age, you find the optimal perspective on them, ideally, just as you do with so many of life’s other disappointments. If the heartbreak of midlife is realizing what you’ve lost—that sad inventory of dusty shelves—then the revelation is discovering that you can, with effort, get on with it and start enjoying what you have.

The psychoanalyst Erik Erikson made a point of emphasizing this idea in his stages of psychosocial development. The last one, “integrity versus despair,” is all about “the acceptance of one’s one and only life cycle and of the people who have become significant to it as something that had to be.”

An awfully tidy formulation, admittedly, and easier said than done. But worth striving for nonetheless.

Elisa recently wrote to me that what she misses about Rebecca is “the third thing that came from the two of us. the alchemy of our minds and hearts and (dare i say?) souls in conversation. what she brought out in me and what i brought out in her, and how those things don’t exist without our relationship.”

From the July/August 2014 issue: The power of creative pairs

And maybe this is what many creative partnerships look like—volatile, thrilling, supercharged. Some can’t withstand the intensity, and self-destruct. It’s what happened to Kahneman and Tversky. It’s famously what happens to many bands before they dissolve. It’s what happened to Elisa and Rebecca.

Elisa hopes to now make art of that third thing. To write about it. Rebecca remains close in her mind, if far away in real life.

Of course, as Elisa points out (with a hat-tip to Audre Lorde), all deep friendships generate something outside of themselves, some special and totally other third thing. Whether that thing can be sustained over time becomes the question.

The more hours you’ve put into this chaotic business of living, the more you crave a quieter, more nurturing third thing, I think. This needn’t mean dull. The friends I have now, who’ve come all this distance, who are part of my aging plan, include all kinds of joyous goofballs and originals. There’s loads of open country between enervation and intoxication. It’s just a matter of identifying where to pitch the tent. Finding that just-right patch of ground, you might even say, is half the trick to growing old.

This article appears in the March 2022 print edition with the headline “It’s Your Friends Who Break Your Heart.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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How to Cope When You’re Envious of a Friend

What to do when life gives you lemons and your friends lemonade..

Posted November 28, 2017 | Reviewed by Gary Drevitch

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When it comes to the majority of the challenges we experience in our friendships, there is an interpersonal dynamic at play– a betrayal, a conflict, an argument, a concern. That’s why feeling envious of a friend can be a fairly unique situation.

The difference is that it’s entirely possible to feel sad, upset, disappointed, or even angry with a friend when they technically have not actually said or done anything hurtful or wrong. Of course, there are those who make things more difficult by being boastful, competitive, or seemingly oblivious to our difficulties and dreams . But it’s also possible to struggle with envy when a friend has been nothing but kind, considerate, and supportive.

Feelings of envy can become particularly salient as we move through life. The older we get, the more likely our paths will diverge from those of our friends, and the more aware we can be of the things we long for – a lasting relationship, a family, financial security, professional success, the ability to travel, a clean bill of health. Social media certainly does not make it any easier. Every day, we are exposed to a carefully curated representation of our friends’ and acquaintances’ lives. It’s overwhelmingly positive and inescapable (not to mention unrealistic). It’s enough to make almost anyone feel twinges of envy from time to time.

The Problem with Envy

Although envy and jealousy are often used interchangeably, they represent distinct, albeit related, emotional experiences. At its core, envy is a cluster of feelings, thoughts, or behaviors that come about when someone else, including a friend, has something (or someone) we desire. Jealousy, in contrast, occurs when we feel as though someone we are close to is interested or invested in another person.

When we feel envious or jealous, it’s not uncommon for other difficult emotions to creep up, including sadness, anger , resentment, anxiety , and shame . And while it’s perfectly normal to compare ourselves to our friends from time to time, getting caught up in social comparisons can take a serious toll on our happiness , self-esteem , and overall satisfaction with life . The more preoccupied we become with a friend’s success or good fortune, the easier it is to question things like our self-worth or the fairness of the world we live in. When envy becomes more pervasive, it can make us act out in unexpected ways, like distancing ourselves from friends or being passive-aggressive . Not only can this create conflict, it also takes away the closeness we should feel in our most secure friendships.

Even though it can be uncomfortable (some might even say ugly), envy is an understandable, valid emotion . And it does not necessarily need to create problems in our friendships.

How to Cope with Friendship Envy

1. Practice self-compassion.

Unfortunately, many of us tend to judge ourselves harshly for experiencing what is simply part of the normal range of human emotions. Being self-critical, by telling yourself you are a “bad” friend or that you’re being overly sensitive or ungrateful, only makes the situation more difficult. It also creates room for other uncomfortable emotions, like anxiety and shame.

Instead of being hard on yourself, practice self-compassion for your feelings, as well as whatever it is you are struggling with. Engaging in positive self-talk —What would you say to a friend who was struggling with envy?— or finding an affirmation or self-care routine might sound like band-aid solutions, but they can bolster your self-esteem and ability to cope with hardship. It’s also important to normalize your experiences. It’s understandable to feel upset when the thing you want so badly is in someone else’s hands, especially when that person is a friend and someone with whom you identify so closely. And conflicting emotions are difficult but common: Just because you are sad for yourself does not mean you aren’t able to feel happy for or proud of your friend. Allow yourself to fully experience, accept, and even embrace this range of emotions without judgment.

2. Use envy as motivation .

It might seem like there is little value in feeling envious, but it can be a powerful force for change. When we’re in tune with and willing to accept the discomfort it brings, envy can point us toward our values and goals and motivate us to take action. If you have mixed emotions about a friend’s exciting new job, perhaps this is a sign that you should make the career change you’ve contemplated? Envious of a friend’s relationship status or social skills? Use it as motivation to engage more fully in dating or making friends . Channeled this way, envy is actually kind of adaptive; it’s a compass that can keep us on track, as long as we are willing to listen.

3. Interrupt envy with gratitude .

When we're upset with our circumstances, it can be more difficult to practice gratitude. The reality, however, is that these are the moments when we need it the most. Gratitude is not about ignoring what we desire, but choosing to focus on the things we do have that bring us value or joy. Focusing on your appreciation for knowing the value of a dollar or your work ethic when you're envious of a friend's financial situation can make conversations much less triggering. Instead of feeling envious of a friend’s appearance, focus on the things you like about yourself, or the fact that you have a body that allows you to exercise. It might seem simple, but finding a sustainable way to practice gratitude can increase your satisfaction with life as well as your relationships.

It also helps to appreciate the moments when you feel that your friend is being sensitive to your situation or feelings. These can be easy to overlook when we're struggling. Not only is this a good exercise in gratitude, it will also help you feel supported and connected and keep feelings of envy from coming between you.

4. Use envy as an opportunity for connection.

We tend to keep feelings of envy a secret (especially from those we are envious of). Although discussing these experiences can be difficult, not to mention awkward, holding them in can make us feel increasingly distressed and disconnected. Sharing feelings of envy might be done in an effort to explain why you've been distant or even irritable. It can also be a way to propose small changes that might make things feel less triggering or upsetting (e.g., avoiding certain topics or suggesting less expensive activities). Whatever the reason, when approached carefully, being open can help you process your feelings of envy or resentment, find new ways to cope, and even bring you closer together.

That said, the decision whether and how to discuss feelings of envy is personal and polarizing. For some it feels necessary, for others inappropriate. As much as possible, broach the conversation at a time when you can speak privately and not feel rushed. Refrain from blaming your friend, and be open to their take on things. Hearing that someone is envious of us can feel particularly awkward or uncomfortable, regardless of whether it's something we have control over. But saying something like: "I know I've been a little distant lately and I wanted you to know that it's because I've been struggling with..." or "I want you to know that I'm really happy for you. It's just hard for me because..." can be the starting point for a meaningful conversation that will ultimately strengthen your friendship.

5. Create boundaries .

In some cases, it might be necessary to establish certain boundaries to protect yourself, as well as your friendship. Are there topics, settings, or activities that invariably lead to feelings of envy? It's perfectly appropriate to take some time for yourself or to focus your interactions on the things that bring you closer together, instead of those that drive you apart. Doing so might actually be the thing that saves your friendship. It also helps to remember that boundaries or limits like these can be fluid. With time and the changes that life inevitably brings, you might surprise yourself with your willingness to connect over things that previously made you feel envious or resentful.

6. Shift your perspective.

When few things work, adjusting our perspective can be helpful, not to mention necessary. Part of the reason why envy can be so destructive is because of the unrealistic ideas we hold. That's why it helps to aim for a more realistic understanding of, and approach to, envy itself. Online, and even in the context of our closest relationships, there is little discussion of life’s difficult and darker moments — breakups, fertility problems, illnesses, and mental health struggles. We tend to showcase and discuss the highlights of our lives, while omitting the low or even mundane points. Gently remind yourself that, although not always distributed evenly, everyone faces struggles and hardship. And there might be aspects of your own life that your friends envy greatly.

It also helps to see envy as an opportunity for growth, which can absolutely be a tough pill to swallow (especially when we feel as though the idea is being forced on us). However, doing so can open your eyes to silver linings, moments, and opportunities that might not have been obvious initially, like the chance to learn more about yourself or to connect with your friend over something deeply personal and meaningful.

Ford, B. Q., Lam, P., John, O. P., & Mauss, I. B. (2017). The Psychological Health Benefits of Accepting Negative Emotions and Thoughts: Laboratory, Diary, and Longitudinal Evidence. Journal of personality and social psychology.

Haferkamp, N., & Kramer, N.C. (2011) Social Comparison 2.0: Examining the Effects of Online Profiles on Social-Networking Sites. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 14, 309–314.

Krasnova, H., Wenninger, H., Widjaja, T., & Buxmann, P. (2013). Envy on Facebook: A hidden threat to users’ life satisfaction?.

Lambert, N. M., Fincham, F. D., Stillman, T. F., & Dean, L. R. (2009). More gratitude, less materialism: The mediating role of life satisfaction. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 4(1), 32-42.

Vogel, E.A., Rose, J.P, Roberts, L.R., & Eckles, K. (2014). Social Comparison, Social Media, and Self-Esteem. Psychology of Popular Media Culture, 3, 206-222.

Miriam Kirmayer, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist and friendship researcher. She studies the science of connection to help others build meaningful relationships and fulfilling lives.

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The Trouble with Friends

An illustration of different scenes from friendship.

On a daily basis, I teach kids. By kids, I mean teens to college-age, sometimes mid-twenties. When I started teaching, I was still a kid myself, so I was careful to refer to my students as students, but now I feel a distinct gap. Kids talk a lot about their friends. For any length of time that you allow them, they will bring up this friend and that friend and a birthday party they went to, a concert, a sleepover, a study sesh, another party, the mall, a Starbucks run, the movies, a two-week trip across Asia which they’re planning to take or have taken with friends. Kids don’t usually talk about their families. Sometimes I’m taken completely by surprise when, months into our knowing each other, a student mentions having a twin. I suppose hearing the constant chatter about friends has made me consider my own, and how hard it can be to maintain these bonds as an adult. Mostly, what I notice is attrition: I lose more friends than I make.

An obvious reason for that attrition is marriage. Friends get married and their spouses become their closest friends. My husband is now the person I spend the most time with. Face to face and over text. I tell him everything and anything, because I’m a chronic oversharer and I trust him with my thoughts, however stupid they may be. I used to be the same way with friends, but more and more I check myself. My ten-second rule: write the text but wait ten seconds before sending it; evaluate whether it’s truly vital to pass on this piece of information. When I tell friends something now, I must accept the possibility that they will tell their spouses, with whom I’m friendly but not friends. A friendship is truly strained when you don’t like the spouse. Here is my person, your friend proclaims, flag in the sand, and you must tread carefully. Sometimes this new person is so far removed from what you imagined for your friend that you wonder if you knew your friend at all.

After marriage, any walls that already existed between two friends invariably thicken. A friend who used to discuss things with you simply to work through them stops doing so, and updates you only on definitive good news, never the bad, the ugly, or the in-progress. All of that, you suspect, she saves for her partner. In other words, you’re no longer included in the problem-solving. Of course, some matters belong first to the marriage: the stuff of intimacy, finance, family. To have or not have children. To want children but not be able to have them. Increasingly, my friends leave me out of these big conversations, and vice versa, but when an outcome is certain or a plan set, we do update one another, which reminds us that we’re still, in fact, friends, but also boils the friendship down to a PowerPoint.

If I don’t have kids, I will lose more friends. This is not a hypothesis. It has already started to happen. Friends, during pregnancy, assure you that nothing will change. You contribute to the diaper fund, attend the baby shower, and, once the child arrives, you try to see them, plan for dinner at 2 p.m. , between nap times, but, somehow, something always comes up. Next time, yeah, next time, let’s hang out soon, yeah, soon—but no one proposes a new time, and months go by, years. You never see them again, you never meet the child, and that begs the question of how close you really were. You consider the possibilities. Perhaps you said or did something irrevocably wrong. To avoid ever saying anything about a child that could be misconstrued, I overcompensate. I never bring up the child or ask after it, or, if I do, I make the mistake I just made, and refer to the child as an “it.” A likely scenario is that my friends, as new parents, went down their friend list and crossed people out. Having friends without kids is harder for them to justify. What is our baby going to do at their non-baby-proofed place? And remember that time they referred to our child as an it? An it! But I could be overthinking. Doing what writers do, adding nuances to interactions that aren’t there. A simpler reality is that my former friends just don’t have time for me. Parenting is hard enough without their having to worry about my feelings.

I do greatly appreciate the rare friends who stay with me after kids. We meet, as we used to, at restaurants, bars, shows, or, when child care gets hard to schedule, we meet at their apartment, the office now a nursery, now a toddlers’ room, now a girls’ room, and, throughout dinner, the girls (twins), who are supposed to be in bed, come out, one at a time, sometimes together, to tell us that they would like to be read to, they would like to drink an entire glass of water, they would like to go to the bathroom, they would like new pajamas, they would like chicken nuggets, they would like to have their hair combed, they would like a specific teddy, they would like a hug, a better hug, they would like to see a rainbow, they would like to go to the bathroom again, they would like more water, they would like to know if it’s tomorrow. For the short duration of an evening, I greatly appreciate being part of this.

There’s a Grace Paley story that I think of when I think about how friendships end. A woman named Cassie asks her friend Faith, a writer, why she has written about their other friends but never about her: “You let them in all the time; it’s really strange, why have you left me out of everybody’s life?” Faith doesn’t have a good answer and asks to be forgiven.

Forgive you? [Cassie] laughed. . . . With her hand she turned my face to her so my eyes would look into her eyes. You are my friend, I know that, Faith, but I promise you, I won’t forgive you, she said. From now on, I’ll watch you like a hawk. I do not forgive you.

That final line, which is also the last line of Paley’s “Collected Stories,” strikes me as brutally honest and true. When I have trouble forgiving a friend, my husband says it’s because I go all in. I pour everything into a new friendship, the honeymoon period, the getting to know each other. I have an incurable habit of sending pop-up holiday cards. I’m a big fan of digressive group chats. Here are my deepest, most authentic feelings, friend. Please kindly tell me yours . But when that gesture is not reciprocated, when I sense the wall coming up, I’m so mad at myself for having revealed so much that I withdraw.

Sometimes I ask my students to write about a time when they were blindsided, or an incident that made them take stock. More often than not, they turn in stories about a friend betrayal. In one class, a student mentioned that their parents didn’t have any friends. Around the table, everyone nodded. It seemed that no one’s parents had friends, and my students couldn’t fathom this, couldn’t fathom it when I admitted (foolishly) to having fewer friends in my thirties than I’d had in my twenties. Horror. Pity. I tried to defend myself. More horror. More pity. How could this happen to a person? How could a person let it happen? No, it would not happen to them.

The wonder, and the curse, of friendship is choice. You can’t choose your family, but you can choose your friends. For me, common qualities and habits help. Female. About my age. Sense of humor. I would not choose a friend who went out dancing all night on Ecstasy. No offense to dancing or Ecstasy, but in comparison with those things I would be a total bore. I would not choose a friend who had a second home somewhere like the Hamptons or Lake Como or Austria. Of course, it is superficially nice to be invited to garden parties or SoHo lofts, but I don’t want to be the lone Asian woman in that garden wearing a cotton dress and sensible shoes, my only topics of conversation being work, the grind, and not that new art gallery down the street. In other words, the supposed freedom of friend selection goes only so far, and, given how deeply my choices are informed by my background, family, and upbringing, I wonder if they are choices at all.

I’m the only child of immigrants who are not only children but whose siblings and parents stayed in China. I have no cousins here. No aunts, uncles, or grandparents. As a kid, I was distressingly lonely, and, like my students, my younger self placed grave significance on having not just friends but the ability to make them. To befriend was to assimilate and to speak English. To have a friend was to have an ally. I still fear the time when I am alone. Statistics predict that I will outlive my husband, and then what? I get through my last decade texting my friends? Having kids is a solution. I could spend the last decade texting them, or their kids, and getting wrapped up in all that. But I don’t see myself having kids.

I live in a building where the parents are friends because their kids are friends. Hard to say if they would have been friends without the kids, and that makes me wonder if friendship is genuine if the choice to stay connected and on good terms is not entirely a solo one. My husband and I have friends in our building because our dogs are friends. We have a group chat, named after our dogs, with this other couple, and we pet-sit for one another. Our friendship is so rooted in our dogs that, when we ate out together for the first time, dogless, more than a year after we’d started looking after each other’s fur babies, we all felt that it was kind of weird. But then we did it again, and it wasn’t so weird. I used to think that our friendship with this couple was one of convenience, but I don’t think that anymore. Sometimes you have close friends because they are close by and have compatible dogs.

If a friendship is meant to be a give-and-take, an ideal friend should, in theory, give as much as she takes. But this, then, opens the door for the frustratingly fair friend. She weighs every gesture and transaction, splits every bill down to the cent. She remembers every favor, every imbalance of favors. She looks up the price of your birthday gift to her, in order to give you an item of commensurate value. In Chinese, chi kui means “to eat a loss.” This friend will never chi kui , yet is shrewd enough never to seem like she’s taking advantage. Technically, the fair friend is not in the wrong, and if I’m noticing her behavior, then I, too, am guilty of keeping score.

But do I accept the friend who takes more than she gives? The taking is not always tangible. There’s the friend who keeps forgetting her wallet, and then the friend who expects you to be there for her at whatever cost. Inconvenient as it may be for you to step out of class, mute the Zoom screen, get off the subway, this friend is having a crisis and she would like your opinion, even though it’s not an opinion she’ll take; she would still like you to hear and validate her crisis. I’ve never known a crisis friend to have just one crisis, and, before you know it, you’ve read and replied to thousands of texts about her problems, which are all interrelated and endemic, and soon, mired in another emergency that you’re coaching her through, she throws up her hands and announces, “I’ve had it. No one in the world cares about me. I can’t rely on anyone anymore, except myself.” She sighs with profound feeling. You blink, balk. You think, What the fuck have I been doing? What the fuckity fuck has every conversation we’ve ever had been for? Then you realize that what your friend wanted from you is a mother, and, when you couldn’t measure up, you, too, became part of the cold, unfeeling world.

Inverting the dynamic completely is the friend who wants to be your mother. She demands to be relied on, to be your “go-to.” She remembers your birthday, your pets’ birthdays, your wedding anniversary, when you moved to the city, when you plan to go upstate—“about that time, isn’t it?” She knows you. Or thinks she does. She’s the first to like your photos, your tweets, the first to give you the name of a C.P.A., a dentist, a real-estate agent, a doctor (her C.P.A., her dentist, her real-estate agent, her doctor), and for a very long time this feels supportive, until it feels intrusive and like surveillance and not nurturing at all but a show of control. When you seek out your mothering friend in your low moments, you feed her ego. She wants to help, but above all she wants credit for helping you, and she relishes the flex. Whenever you ask after her well-being, she pronounces herself emphatically “great.” You try to poke around more, you sense that she isn’t as well as she claims, and, without fail, she adds, “No, really, I’m great, super, but how about you? You seem stressed. Anything I can do?” How to handle such a question? Do you say, “Yes, please deliver the chicken soup” (which she would gladly do), or do you feel bad for always being the broken one?

I already have a mother, with whom I have a complex, routinely difficult, and uniquely volatile bond that would take over this essay and any story I ever write, should I let it. I don’t need another mother. So I learn to interact with these friends less. I offer up less of my life. I’m great, too, super, never better. I recognize that to question the motives behind a friend’s support is both paranoid and ungrateful. But I worry that if my vulnerability fuels her vanity, then an inherent rivalry exists between us—one that I want no part in—over who is the better friend. I am certainly not the better friend. I can’t remember everyone’s important dates and be there for everything and like every comment within thirty seconds of its existence, and I definitely don’t want to be my friend’s mother. So, if I’m not the better friend, then I’m the worse friend. I’m the one who takes more than I can give.

All this to say that friends grow apart. Commonalities change. Common habits diverge. Qualities that you didn’t much like in a friend amplify, and your own traits, priorities, shift. A friendship is not stagnant, and growing together is usually not the norm. It’s nice to have writer friends, but then all you talk about is writing and how insane you have to be to do it. Nice to have friends with other jobs, but then all you hear about is their work, which you might not understand or care about. Work colleagues can never be true friends, and neither can one’s students. A fake friend is easy to spot, and even easier is the friend or acquaintance who, after a long period of no contact, emerges from literally nowhere with the message Hey! Just saw you published a book! Here’s a picture of that book in a bookstore. Let’s grab coffee and catch up .

Platitudes: A true friend is someone you can be your true self with. A true friend calls you out on your bullshit. A true friend sticks with you through thick and thin. But is any of that really possible or fair? How well do I tolerate being called out on my bullshit, and how comfortable am I now at calling other people out on theirs? Can a true friend stay with you forever, or, a better question, can a friend stay true to you forever? Is Cassie a true friend to Faith?

What my students say: Friendship is a gift, a sacrifice. Friendship is all about timing and who you are at that moment and what you need. My students are always living for the moment, and they have strong opinions about what it means to be a good, true friend. When I was in college, my friend circle was wide and healthy. Thanks to clubs, class, lab, and Harvard’s housing system—“the blocking group,” wherein, at the end of freshman year, you choose up to seven people you are close to, your “block-mates,” and are then sorted into a house with them and live with them for the next three years. To entangle matters even more, your blocking group can link with another group to sort into the same house, and those in the latter group become your “link-mates.” Should you not have a group and have to sort on your own, you’re called a “floater.” These terms were fun to use at the time but are now glaring reminders of how successful my alma mater is at institutionalized friendship. Institutionalized to then build a strong alumni network, which donates large sums back to the nest where the camaraderie began. By the end of senior year, my blocking group, a collection of misfits, had toppled. There was so much politics in my lab, given the constant pressure to publish, and my friends in clubs were already moving on to bigger, better things, like med school, law school, or jobs in the real world. I don’t think my experience was unique. You have friends for the period that you have them for, and that period ends.

I know that a friendship has cooled when I find myself asking, Would we be friends if we met today? I used to think “cooled” meant “over.” In the words of that pop icon my students are obsessed with, we are never, ever getting back together. But “cooled” does not necessarily mean “severed.” Though friends are not family and are not obligated to stay with me, they have accompanied me for part of the journey, and for that I owe them, I owe us, the chance, at some future point, to fortify the bond again.

According to the sociology of group dynamics, a triad is more stable than a dyad because one member can act as a mediator. An example is a doctor, a patient, and a cultural liaison. But I have never found a triad of friends to work as well as, say, a tetrad, and especially a tetrad made up of two couples. In a triad, two people are always closer and risk icing out the third. The exclusion is not usually intentional, but the ousted person always feels that it is, somehow. And what if no one wants to mediate, or the person who mediates also likes power, likes games? I’ve had triads of friends begin, then fail, and, when the final calamity hits, I think of the dumping of water into a nuclear reactor and then of Yeats’s “widening gyre”: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” My preference for tetrads makes sense only because of my husband. He has been, for me, an ally, a cheerleader, and my first reader, and we have, thus far, a happy marriage. Along the way, we’ve made couple friends as a couple, and I’ve discovered that the tetrad works only when every possible combination of two members does.

There are only a few couples with whom this holds true for us, and there is only one tetrad that we have tested through long periods together and international travel. I evoke my closest childhood friend here, a girl I’ve known since fifth grade. Let’s call her Diana. We have not always been so close. In middle school, she moved away, then my family moved to the city she had moved to, but although we went to the same high school, our social circles rarely overlapped. Still, from middle school on, Diana and I were part of a triad. I was extremely close with the third girl, as we were both immigrant children, from China, and lived in similarly shabby apartment complexes across the street from each other in the rural Midwestern town where the three of us met. The third girl and I often iced out Diana. Together, we were mean. A few years out of college, that girl and I had a huge fight by text on my birthday. (Lesson learned: when friends decide to burn it all down, they don’t care if it’s your birthday because they’ve stopped caring about you.) A litany of grievances was aired and contested, and no one was generous enough to get on the phone. We haven’t spoken since.

By chance, Diana went to college and grad school in the same city as I did. As the triad imploded—she tried to mediate, negotiations failed—I vented to her about it, and, eventually, I stopped venting and she and I became close. She met my husband when he was still my boyfriend. I saw her through her breakup with her high-school sweetheart, a boy who was also a friend of mine, with whom I have since fallen out of touch. By the end of grad school, Diana had found a new boyfriend, who would later become her husband, in a wedding that was delayed three years by the pandemic. Her husband and I get along. My husband and Diana get along. Our husbands have inside jokes with each other, and we buy them matching backpacks to wear when we go on trips. I think the fact that Diana and I are both married has actually made our friendship stronger. That we make a point of travelling together, as a tetrad, at least once a year has taught me that a long friendship has to be maintained. So does family, but, unlike family, a friendship can be deprioritized. My mother will always be my mother, and I will always have space for her, but that’s not how it works with friends. I can choose to take my heart away.

Diana and I and our husbands have now travelled to Europe a few times. No fights, no drama, except the comedic kind. In Paris, Diana was tricked, by her husband and mine, into knocking back a wineglass that had a dead fly in it. In London, at the Harry Potter Warner Bros. Studios, in the Great Hall decked out for the Yule Ball (Diana is a Harry Potter fanatic), her husband—still her boyfriend then—was set to propose, but we couldn’t figure out how to open the “snitch” ring box and we couldn’t get the ring out. In Europe, trains have four seats facing one another. When Diana and her husband and my husband have fallen asleep, and I’m the only one awake guarding our stuff and checking the stops, I think, Why is it always me who stays awake? I also think, I never want this to change.

I chose the name Diana for my friend in tribute to Diana Barry, the best friend of the “Anne of Green Gables” books, by Lucy Maud Montgomery—a series that had an enormous impact on me. They were the first novels I read from beginning to end in English, and I distinctly remember having to look up the term “kindred spirits.” Anne is an orphan who then finds great friends and thrives. A lot of children’s books have this trajectory. See also: Harry Potter.

A final anecdote: the building that I live in houses both faculty and students. Often, I smell weed in the stairwells. Every weekend of the school year, students, never dressed for the weather, are just leaving to go out as my husband and I are coming back in. Sometimes I can’t even move through the lobby, because, when there’s a party in the building, every student is trying to sign in three others. Faculty and students share the common spaces, the laundry room, the elevators. It is very awkward to bump into familiar students while you are removing your underwear from the dryer or while they are removing theirs. A terrible arrangement, I tell people. Mixing students and teachers. But here is something that happened the other day while I was writing this essay. From the lobby, I entered the elevator with my dog. A pair of summer students came in, too, with their suitcases and totes, and my dog and I were pushed into a corner. I was annoyed that summer students were already moving in, less than two weeks after the regular ones had left. I imagined more weed, more parties, full washers and dryers, rank trash drips in the hallways for workers to clean up. Then the two students started talking about their afternoon plans. Today, they were going to go to Central Park, sit on a blanket, make friendship bracelets, and braid each other’s hair. They were earnest. I heard no sarcasm. An interloper to this casual, wholesome moment, I was reminded that, though most friendships are temporary, they are very beautiful in bloom. The friends left the elevator laughing, tote bag to tote bag. All my annoyance went away. ♦

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Friendship and Its Importance in Our Life

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Friendship and Friend’s Support Essay

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Friendship is one of the most necessary and valuable things in life. After all, no person in the world can live a whole life alone. All people need communication, both for personal and spiritual growth. Without friendship, people begin to feel lonely and suffer from misunderstanding. Although there are many different people around, real friends are very hard to find and harder to keep.

Friendship is the ability to give mental warmth and provide support. It is the ability to find the right words for a friend, help in a difficult moment, and find a way out together. People around Gene understood it and expected it when his best friend needed support. It is illustrated by Dr. Stanpole’s words: “He needs that from you. He wanted especially to see you. You were the one person he asked for” (Knowles 64). Phineas himself expected support from his best friend: “He needed me. I was the least trustworthy person he had ever met. I knew that; he knew or should know that too” (Knowles, 108). However, it happens that the one you consider your friend fails and betrays in the most challenging moment. There is no desire to have anything in common, and there can be no question of further friendship after this.

Envy and suspicion have devastating consequences, even for the strongest friendship. Envy usually generates anger and resentment, unfounded claims, and objections. From all this, a wall of misunderstanding grows, and former friends are gradually separated from each other. Finney was capable of friendship, but the main character is not: “He had never been jealous of me for a second. Now I knew that never was and never could have been any rivalry between us. I was not of the same quality as the” (Knowles, 59). A wrong choice of a friend had fatal consequences for Phineas.

People have a lot of difficulties during their life path. Real friends should share both the best times and the worst. Moreover, it is necessary not only to have a friend but also to be one. Anything can happen, but a close and tested person around, can calm anybody and make feel better. No bad experiences, adversity, and other difficulties will break a person – because he or she will always have a reliable friend’s support.

Works Cited

Knowles, John. A Separate Peace. Simon and Schuster, 2014.

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Essay on Friendship for Students and Children

500+ words essay on friendship.

Friendship is one of the greatest bonds anyone can ever wish for. Lucky are those who have friends they can trust. Friendship is a devoted relationship between two individuals. They both feel immense care and love for each other. Usually, a friendship is shared by two people who have similar interests and feelings.

You meet many along the way of life but only some stay with you forever. Those are your real friends who stay by your side through thick and thin. Friendship is the most beautiful gift you can present to anyone. It is one which stays with a person forever.

True Friendship

A person is acquainted with many persons in their life. However, the closest ones become our friends. You may have a large friend circle in school or college , but you know you can only count on one or two people with whom you share true friendship.

There are essentially two types of friends, one is good friends the other are true friends or best friends. They’re the ones with whom we have a special bond of love and affection. In other words, having a true friend makes our lives easier and full of happiness.

Most importantly, true friendship stands for a relationship free of any judgments. In a true friendship, a person can be themselves completely without the fear of being judged. It makes you feel loved and accepted. This kind of freedom is what every human strives to have in their lives.

In short, true friendship is what gives us reason to stay strong in life. Having a loving family and all is okay but you also need true friendship to be completely happy. Some people don’t even have families but they have friends who’re like their family only. Thus, we see having true friends means a lot to everyone.

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Importance of Friendship

Friendship is important in life because it teaches us a great deal about life. We learn so many lessons from friendship which we won’t find anywhere else. You learn to love someone other than your family. You know how to be yourself in front of friends.

Friendship never leaves us in bad times. You learn how to understand people and trust others. Your real friends will always motivate you and cheer for you. They will take you on the right path and save you from any evil.

Similarly, friendship also teaches you a lot about loyalty. It helps us to become loyal and get loyalty in return. There is no greater feeling in the world than having a friend who is loyal to you.

Moreover, friendship makes us stronger. It tests us and helps us grow. For instance, we see how we fight with our friends yet come back together after setting aside our differences. This is what makes us strong and teaches us patience.

Therefore, there is no doubt that best friends help us in our difficulties and bad times of life. They always try to save us in our dangers as well as offer timely advice. True friends are like the best assets of our life because they share our sorrow, sooth our pain and make us feel happy.

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Theology That Bites Back

Envy, Malice, Bitterness, & the Moscow Mood. And the Jews

Introduction.

I believe that a number of people, if asked about the Moscow Mood, would describe it as a devil-may-care attitude, coupled with a satiric bite. I think this is accurate, so far as it goes, but I want to begin by distinguishing two different kinds of devil-may-care attitudes. Not only should they be distinguished, they really need to be distinguished sharply .

One is the attitude of Narnians in Tashban.

“And instead of being grave and mysterious like most Calormenes, they walked with a swing and let their arms and shoulders go free, and chatted and laughed. One was whistling. You could see that they were ready to be friends with anyone who was friendly, and didn’t give a fig for anyone who wasn’t. Shasta thought he had never seen anything so lovely in his life.”

The Horse and His Boy

This is a method for resisting the Calormene way without turning yourself into the Calormene way. It is also enormously attractive to people like Shasta.

But the other devil-may-care approach is surly and bitter, filled with rancor, and has a catalog of grievances under each arm. When engaged in the give and take of a comment thread, this is the kind of guy who writes like a cornered honey badger with a bad headache.

So the actual bedrock of the Moscow Mood is found in the small book pictured above, How to be Free from Bitterness , written by my father—who was a prince among men. That is the practical attitudinal foundation we are seeking to build on in all our engagements. Love God. Keep short accounts. Worship together with your people. Love your neighbor. Fight for the truth. Fill your mouth with psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, and not with cursing and bitterness. Live not by lies. Devote yourself to one woman, and to the children God gives you through her. Raise a weekly toast at sabbath dinner to the day that the Lord has made. Rejoice and be glad in it. Keep the gravy hot.

A martial spirit can fall upon a merry heart, and so “merry warrior” is not an oxymoron. But a merry warrior is defending something he loves, not hunting for something he lacks . Neither is he looking for a channel in which he might vent his hatred and bitterness. What is being established when that happens is the seed bed of war crimes.

A common expression in these troubled times is that it is important for us to know what time it is. This is quite true, and men who know what time it is are the kind of men who know how to fight with a holy abandon—fighting as men who have been fully forgiven by the Father. And speaking of the Father . . .

Friend of the Fatherless

Shall we speak frankly, you and I?

As I survey the teeming mobs on the progressive left, I see an army of fatherless girls, augmented by a feminized entourage of capons and beta males, whose only real hope of getting laid is to throw a half brick at some hapless Columbia bureaucrat. Feminist chicks really dig guys who can yell, “From the river to the sea!” Some of these guys even know how to put up the numerous tents that appeared so promptly and mysteriously. Surly feminists and fatherless effeminate men are the cannon fodder of the progressive left.

But then as I look at the swelling ranks of the red-pilled on the right, I see an army of boy soldiers, twelve-year-old orphans, straight out of Somalia, and captained by fourteen-year-olds. This group is actually masculine, and therefore actually dangerous. But however dangerous, they are still fatherless. Their fathers either flaked on them, or just simply left, or ignored their boys for the sake of a job that consumed them, or created the generational gulf through platitudinous middle-class bromides offered in a way that made Polonius look like a sage.

The end result of this is a high and unresolved tension that is deep in the hearts of these hordes of abandoned young men. The tension is created by a desperate need for fatherly direction coupled together with a visceral distrust of anyone who looks like he might want to provide some fatherly direction.

And what might be the cultural consequences of such father hunger, such fatherlessness? The result of such an epidemic of fatherlessness is that the land will be struck with a curse. And so, just look around at the moonscape that our covenant cluelessness has created.

“And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.” Malachi 4:6 (KJV)

The only remedy for this destructive cultural sink hole is the gospel. And when I say “gospel,” I mean the gospel of the kingdom , and not a cheat-code-gospel you need to use to get sorry rear end into Heaven when you die. When the gospel is preached in its fullness, it is a message that bids fair to restore families, villages, towns, cultures, nations, and empires. But used in the more common and truncated way, it sets us up for allowing the kind of trash world we see around us on every hand.

Which brings us to the present.

Out of Season

Paul instructs Timothy to preach the word in season and out of season (2 Tim. 4:2). This means that he needs to say what is true whether or not anybody is prepared to receive it. There are times when people want to hear from you and there are times when they really don’t, but if it is “a word fitly spoken” you should go right ahead to speak it regardless.

In times of tumult and uproar—and don’t look now, but our day fits that description—it can be a jumbled mix of both. Within the last few years, I have noticed a great increase in the number of conservative believers who are now willing to weigh and consider the basic principles we have been urging for a few decades now. But at the same time, not being blind, I have also noticed a significant uptick in the number of my fellow Christians who don’t want to hear from anybody who likes the Jews, or who voted for Ronald Reagan, twice . This cannot be accounted for through FBI bots alone . . . there is a real angst out there.

Now despite that real angst out there, I am going to act like a father or grandfather anyhow. And one of the central roles of a father is to be willing to say, “ No . Don’t go there. No. Don’t even think about it. Trust me on this.”

If I Were the Devil

As I am counseling people, one of my central tools for analysis is to look at the situation and ask, “What would I do with this tangle if I were the devil?” Then I do whatever I can to counter that .

When I look at our mess of an era, I see that whiteness has been demonized. I see that masculinity has been written off as toxic by definition. I see self-righteous envy instantiated in our tax code. I see people who work with their hands written off as deplorables. I see porn, pot, and opioids handed out as a soporific to those whose lives have been rendered useless by the new order. I see millions of Americans who are more than willing to vote for a communist. I see egalitarian assumptions dominating all the various relationships between the sexes. I see seething contempt for Western civilization. And underneath it all, driving absolutely all of it, I see hatred for God, contempt for His gospel, rage at His holy Word, and malice toward his ministers.

What would I do with a mess like this if I were the devil? I would find a scapegoat, that’s what.

It’s all in Girard, man.

“What If It’s Not Envy?” Is Not an Argument

“Everybody blames the Jews for killing Christ, and then the Jews try to pass it off on the Romans. I’m one of the few people that believe it was the blacks.”

Sarah Silverman

Identity politics is basically Marxist. You divide the world into two classes, oppressor and oppressed, and then make all your evaluations accordingly. Another way to describe this ideology would basically be “commie-thot.” And as for me and my house, we will have nothing to do with commie-thot.

This gives you just two variables, and life is simple. True, those who get sucked into this way of thinking, and who are a bit better at math, can go in for intersectionality—where they layer different oppressor/oppressed categories onto one person. You know, lesbian and a person of color. But most people just play this game by trying to get into just one oppressed class.

Get into an oppressed class, you say? Who does that? As Jeremy Carl points out in his timely new book, The Unprotected Class , in the years between 2010 and 2020, our Native American population exploded . . . from 5.3 million to 9.7 million. Now that is either a baby boom that puts all other baby booms in the shade, or . . . people are adjusting to life under the great scramble for victim status.

Now pointing this oppression metric out is not to deny that true oppression exists in the world. It does, and it is also true that a current form of it is a virulent anti-white racism that is running around loose, and it really is evil. Conservatives must therefore learn how to fight that kind of wickedness while at same time refusing to adopt the simplistic commie-thot approach that applies an oppressor/oppressed rubric to everything.

It has been wisely said that in an ethnic war, you don’t have to choose sides. The other side does that for you. So on the one hand, we must recognize what is going on—whites as whites are being deliberately targeted. But at the same time, we have to recognize the dangers of trying to fight back by simply flipping the script, and arguing that we get to “be the oppressed now.”

So the worrisome thing to me is that this commie-thot way of thinking, and this way of arguing your case, has suddenly been picked up by a bunch of people on the right. Let me illustrate what I mean, and prove to you how problematic it is. And when I say “prove,” I am using the word in the sense of creating a moral obligation .

Suppose I have posted something about Jews and antisemitism, and in the comment thread below that post there are multiple displays of manifest vitriol. The thread gets high-jacked by an aching fatherlessness, crackling envy, simmering resentments, and more. If a pastor cannot see the kind of problems I am talking about, then we are dealing with a pastor who cannot see sin, which is not what we want in a pastor.

Now suppose that I follow up with a comment that points to the gaudiness of the envy on display. When I do that I am talking about what is right there in front of all of us.

Now suppose that a well-intentioned and reasonable guy comes in and says—as Andrew Isker did in our discussion—”what if it’s not envy?” In the first place, this is a hypothetical and not an argument. What if it is? But in the second place, it is a hypothetical that blurs and smudges what we are talking about, and it all comes down to the actual referent of “it’s” in “what if it’s not . . .” What is that pointing to? What does it signify? Who are we talking about?

When I say that something is venomous, I am talking about the guy I saw being venomous. You know, the kind of guy who makes it necessary for me to log in to my dashboard as an admin, and remove his comments because they were starting to stink up my home library. But then suppose a well-meaning believer comes along and chastises me for my comment, saying that he personally knows a critic of Netanyahu’s war strategy against Gaza who is not venomous—”what about that ?”—and I confess that it leaves me entirely nonplussed.

It is as though I said that I saw Murphy steal a car, and someone pipes up to say that he knows for a fact that Smith didn’t do it.

This only makes sense if there is an assumption running in the background that there is some sort of class solidarity between Murphy and Smith, such that any accusation against Murphy is a smear on Smith, and any virtues of Smith can be imputed to Murphy.

Now the reason all this is happening is because of commie-thot. In this Marxist world, mere membership in the oppressor class is guilt enough. The Jews who died on October 7 were members of an oppressor class, and consequently had it coming. When Eric Erickson said it was time to carpet bomb Rafah and just get it over with, he was giving way to the same kind of impulse. (To his credit, he deleted that sentiment and walked it back.)

But in this world, membership in the oppressed class, whatever that class is, grants a counterfeit justification. It is always vindication enough. You can see these classes start to take shape when justifications are offered for the most outrageous behavior, or even when the justifications are used to surreptitiously rope in the offenders at the margins.

I know it can be challenging and difficult because wars tend toward the binary. You generally don’t find yourself on the battlefield with 17 different factions, and with each one of them fighting with a different combo of opposing factions—where this group fights those 7, and not the other 9, and the second group is fighting with just 2, and not with 14, and so on. Like I said, that doesn’t usually happen. It almost always comes down to “two sides,” and some of the people on your “side” can be pretty unsavory.

Can’t be helped, I suppose, but at least we should be clear about it, and about where we stand. And so let me explain what we are trying to do about all of this in the meantime.

Joy in the Fight

I have noticed that when I emphasize such things, a common response is to charge us with waffling, shrinking back, or somehow telegraphing an unwillingness to engage with the foe. No, it is just the reverse actually.

The joy of the Lord is our strength (Neh. 8:10), and the thing about bitterness is that it robs us of our joy. In a believer’s life, this kind of complaining spirit is an enervating sin (Ps. 73). We are maintaining the truth of the gospel, and remember that it is the gospel of the kingdom . And what can we say about the kingdom? “For the kingdom of God is not meat and drink; but righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost” (Romans 14:17).

So the Moscow Mood is not trying to cultivate a “naughty Christian” vibe. We fully intend to continue taking a stand for righteousness, and if this means offending some of the sanctimonious traditions of men, so be it. We are willing to tweak the traditions of men, the bigotries of men, the petty jealousies of men, and the turf battles of men. But we do nevertheless want to be approved by God (2 Tim. 2:15) . . . we don’t want to fight in His battles, or even die fighting in His battles, only to be found at the end to be castaways (1 Cor. 9:27).

So the fight is inevitable, and the first order of business is that, when it arrives, to make sure we fight like Christians . This apparently makes some people think that we are using piety as a cloak for pusillanimity. Let them think that. But it was the Lord Jesus who told us to love our enemies (Luke 6:27). And I think that if we are loving our enemies, there ought to be some indication of it.

Theoreticians of just war distinguish between two different questions— jus ad bellum and jus in bello . The first has to do with the justice of getting into the conflict in the first place. The second has to do with our conduct in the war once it has started. When it comes to this spiritual conflict we are in, we cannot use our loyalty to Christ as the reason for being in the war, and then blithely disregard His marching orders for us regarding our conduct in the war. If Nick Fuentes thinks that Christ is king, he really ought to pay closer attention to what the king has commanded all of His followers to do.

So as we take to the field of battle, we fully expect the smoke of battle to swirl around us. That’s as may be. Just make sure that this acrid smoke of battle isn’t floating around in your brain, or soul, or heart.

Here in the panhandle of Idaho, we have long called our enclave Sherwood Forest. But there is another piece to it. If you really want to join us as we fight with the commies of Nottingham, while hunting the king’s deer on the side, you are most welcome. Come, join us. But you need to be merry, not sullen, not bitter, not sour. This is a band of merry men, and we intend to keep it like that.

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Why did women vote for Hitler? Long-forgotten essays hold some answers

The rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party in the 1930s came on the back of votes from millions of ordinary Germans – both men and women.

But aside from a few high-profile figures, such as concentration camp guard Irma Grese and “concentration camp murderess” Ilse Koch , little is known about the everyday women who embraced the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, known more commonly as the Nazi Party. What little data we do have on ordinary Nazi women has been largely underused, forgotten or ignored. It has left us with a half-formed understanding of the rise of the Nazi movement, one that is almost exclusively focused on male party members.

And yet more than 30 essays on the subject “Why I became a Nazi” written by German women in 1934 have been lying fallow in the archives of the Hoover Institution in Palo Alto for decades. These essays were only unearthed three years ago when three Florida State University professors arranged to have them transcribed and translated. They have since been made available digitally , but have not received widespread attention.

Not all Cabaret

As scholars of Holocaust studies , crimes against humanity and political behavior , we believe the accounts of these women give an insight into the role of women in the rise of the Nazi party. They also point to the extent to which women’s attitudes on feminism differed after the Great War – a time when women were making gains in independence, education, economic opportunity and sexual freedom.

The German women’s movement had been among the most powerful and significant in the world for half a century before the Nazis came to power in 1933. Top-quality high schools for girls had existed since the 1870s, and German universities were opened to women at the beginning of the 20th century. Many German women became teachers, lawyers, doctors, journalists and novelists. In 1919, German women got the vote . By 1933, women, of whom there were millions more than men – Berlin had 1,116 women for every 1,000 men – voted in roughly the same percentages as men for Hitler and National Socialist candidates.

‘Everyone was everyone’s enemy’

The essays unearthed at the Hoover Institution give an insight as to why some of them did.

Dissatisfaction with the attitudes of the Weimar era, the period between the end of World War I and Hitler’s rise to power, is clear in the women’s writing. Most of the essay writers express distaste with some aspect of the political system. One calls women’s voting rights “a disadvantage for Germany,” while another describes the political climate as “haywire,” and “everyone was everyone’s enemy.” Margarethe Schrimpff, a 54-year-old woman living just outside of Berlin, describes her experience:

“I attended the meetings of all … parties, from the communists to the nationalists; at one of the democratic meetings in Friedenau [Berlin], where the former Colonial Minister, a Jew by the name of Dernburg, was speaking, I experienced the following: this Jew had the audacity to say, among other things: ‘What are the Germans actually capable of; maybe breeding rabbits.’ "Dear readers, do not think that the heavily represented stronger sex jumped up and told this Jew where to go. Far from it. Not one man made a sound, they stayed dead quiet. However, a miserable, frail little woman from the so-called ‘weaker sex’ raised her hand and forcefully rejected the Jew’s brazen remarks; he had in the meantime allegedly disappeared to attend another meeting.”

These essays were originally collected by an assistant professor at Columbia University, Theodore Abel, who organized an essay contest with generous prizes with the cooperation of the Nazi Propaganda Ministry. Of nearly 650 essays, roughly 30 were written by women, and Abel set them aside, explaining in a footnote that he intended to examine them separately. But he never did. The men’s essays formed the basis for his book, “ Why Hitler Came To Power ,” published in 1938, which remains an important source in the global discourse about the Nazi rise to power.

Summarizing Abel’s findings, historian Ian Kershaw wrote in his book on Hitler’s rise to power that they showed that the “appeal of Hitler and his movement was not based on any distinctive doctrine.” He concluded that almost a third of the men were attracted by the indivisible “national community” – Volksgemeinschaft – ideology of the Nazis, and a similar proportion were swayed by nationalist, super-patriotic and German-romantic notions. In only about an eighth of the cases was anti-Semitism the prime ideological concern, although two-thirds of the essays revealed some form of dislike of Jews. Almost a fifth were motivated by the Hitler cult alone, attracted by the man himself, but the essays reveal differences between men and women in the reason for the enthrallment with the Nazi leader.

The cult of Hitler

For men, the cult of personality appears to center around Hitler as a strong leader charging toward a Germany which defined itself by those it excluded. It’s not surprising that women, on the cusp of exclusion themselves, were less captivated by this component of Nazism. Rather, the women’s essays tend to refer to religious imagery and sentiment conflating piety with the Hitler cult. The women appear to be moved more by Nazism’s proposed solutions to problems such as poverty rather than the supposed grandeur of Nazi ideology in the abstract.

In her essay, Helene Radtke, a 38-year-old wife of a German soldier, describes her “divine duty to forget about all my household chores and to perform my service to my homeland.”

[ Insight, in your inbox each day. You can get it with The Conversation’s email newsletter .]

Agnes Molster-Surm, a housewife and private tutor, calls Hitler her “God-given Führer and savior, Adolf Hitler, for Germany’s honor, Germany’s fortune and Germany’s freedom!”

Another woman replaced the star on her Christmas tree with a photograph of Hitler surrounded by a halo of candles. These men and women shared the message of National Socialism as if it was gospel and refer to new party members as “converts.” One such woman describes early efforts to “convert” her family to Nazism as falling “on stony soil and not even the slightest little green sapling of understanding sprouted.” She was later “converted” through conversations with her mailman.

The essays do not only serve as historical curios, but as a warning as to how ordinary people can be attracted to extremist ideology at a time of social distress. Similar language has been used to describe the current political climate in the United States and other countries. Perhaps, as some do today , these women believed all their society’s ills could be solved by the restoration of their nation to a perceived state of former glory, no matter the cost.

This article is republished from The Conversation , a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Sarah R. Warren , Florida State University ; Daniel Maier-Katkin , Florida State University , and Nathan Stoltzfus , Florida State University

How women wage war – a short history of IS brides, Nazi guards and FARC insurgents

Hitler at home: How the Nazi PR machine remade the Führer’s domestic image and duped the world

Auschwitz: Women used different survival and sabotage strategies than men at Nazi death camp

Sarah R. Warren received funding for a portion of this work from the Florida State University Center for Undergraduate Research and Academic Engagement.

Daniel Maier-Katkin receives funding from National Science Fondation, U.S. Department of Justice, U.S. Department of State

Nathan Stoltzfus does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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The London Review of Substacks

Big game, small world

Is globalization intensifying, or ebbing? Neither? Both? The political scientist Daniel Drezner spotlights two recent pieces in the Financial Times and Vox that appear to argue opposite cases but which, Drezner argues, cohere around the notion that the global economy has somehow overcome a seemingly unending series of geopolitical shocks — for now. “Great power governments and violent non-state actors have done their darnedest to push the world towards economic segmentation, and it just ain’t happening ,” Drezner writes.

“In many ways the current period might resemble the global political economy of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century,” he continues. “Even as countries were raising tariffs, improvements in technology and infrastructure swamped those effects, causing globalization to continue to grow.” Drezner acknowledges one possible cloud on the horizon, however: “Of course, that era ended with the First World War.”

Joke’s on you

When a graphic artist in 1987 depicted Augusto Pinochet as Louis XIV on the cover of a magazine, the Chilean dictator responded by confiscating every copy of the publication, and jailing the magazine’s editors for extremism: Such is the power humor can have over dictators, “Authoritarians succeed when their extremism and exceptionalism… is normalized,” the scholar of fascism Ruth Ben-Ghiat wrote in her newsletter, Lucid. “ Humor that calls this out can be deeply validating .”

Autocrats and their opponents all use humor — in differing ways, and to differing ends. The former seek to humiliate critics and allies alike, in an effort to showcase their strength. The latter group try to use jokes and satire to undermine the seemingly all-powerful dictator. One trend she notes: “As strongmen consolidate their power, they become more insecure and thus less tolerant of criticism, even if that criticism is made in jest.”

A friend in deed

Technology and the internet are changing society in ways we are only beginning to grasp. Take, for example, friendship. Pre-internet, people were largely limited to maintaining friendships in their immediate geography, and a relative lack of mobility meant those connections were fairly stable. Those factors are gradually eroding, and the impacts are not being felt equally: Those with higher levels of education are more likely to report having close friends than those with less education.

That doesn’t, however, mean that friendship is in inexorable decline. “The new social landscape requires a more purposeful and attentive approach to developing and sustaining social relationships,” Kelsey Eyre Hammond writes in American Storylines, reviewing a new book about the changing nature of friendship. One conclusion: “If [friendships] seem more difficult to manage and maintain it’s because they are .”

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Fact-checking warnings from Democrats about Project 2025 and Donald Trump

This fact check originally appeared on PolitiFact .

Project 2025 has a starring role in this week’s Democratic National Convention.

And it was front and center on Night 1.

WATCH: Hauling large copy of Project 2025, Michigan state Sen. McMorrow speaks at 2024 DNC

“This is Project 2025,” Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, D-Royal Oak, said as she laid a hardbound copy of the 900-page document on the lectern. “Over the next four nights, you are going to hear a lot about what is in this 900-page document. Why? Because this is the Republican blueprint for a second Trump term.”

Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, has warned Americans about “Trump’s Project 2025” agenda — even though former President Donald Trump doesn’t claim the conservative presidential transition document.

“Donald Trump wants to take our country backward,” Harris said July 23 in Milwaukee. “He and his extreme Project 2025 agenda will weaken the middle class. Like, we know we got to take this seriously, and can you believe they put that thing in writing?”

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Harris’ running mate, has joined in on the talking point.

“Don’t believe (Trump) when he’s playing dumb about this Project 2025. He knows exactly what it’ll do,” Walz said Aug. 9 in Glendale, Arizona.

Trump’s campaign has worked to build distance from the project, which the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, led with contributions from dozens of conservative groups.

Much of the plan calls for extensive executive-branch overhauls and draws on both long-standing conservative principles, such as tax cuts, and more recent culture war issues. It lays out recommendations for disbanding the Commerce and Education departments, eliminating certain climate protections and consolidating more power to the president.

Project 2025 offers a sweeping vision for a Republican-led executive branch, and some of its policies mirror Trump’s 2024 agenda, But Harris and her presidential campaign have at times gone too far in describing what the project calls for and how closely the plans overlap with Trump’s campaign.

PolitiFact researched Harris’ warnings about how the plan would affect reproductive rights, federal entitlement programs and education, just as we did for President Joe Biden’s Project 2025 rhetoric. Here’s what the project does and doesn’t call for, and how it squares with Trump’s positions.

Are Trump and Project 2025 connected?

To distance himself from Project 2025 amid the Democratic attacks, Trump wrote on Truth Social that he “knows nothing” about it and has “no idea” who is in charge of it. (CNN identified at least 140 former advisers from the Trump administration who have been involved.)

The Heritage Foundation sought contributions from more than 100 conservative organizations for its policy vision for the next Republican presidency, which was published in 2023.

Project 2025 is now winding down some of its policy operations, and director Paul Dans, a former Trump administration official, is stepping down, The Washington Post reported July 30. Trump campaign managers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita denounced the document.

WATCH: A look at the Project 2025 plan to reshape government and Trump’s links to its authors

However, Project 2025 contributors include a number of high-ranking officials from Trump’s first administration, including former White House adviser Peter Navarro and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson.

A recently released recording of Russell Vought, a Project 2025 author and the former director of Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, showed Vought saying Trump’s “very supportive of what we do.” He said Trump was only distancing himself because Democrats were making a bogeyman out of the document.

Project 2025 wouldn’t ban abortion outright, but would curtail access

The Harris campaign shared a graphic on X that claimed “Trump’s Project 2025 plan for workers” would “go after birth control and ban abortion nationwide.”

The plan doesn’t call to ban abortion nationwide, though its recommendations could curtail some contraceptives and limit abortion access.

What’s known about Trump’s abortion agenda neither lines up with Harris’ description nor Project 2025’s wish list.

Project 2025 says the Department of Health and Human Services Department should “return to being known as the Department of Life by explicitly rejecting the notion that abortion is health care.”

It recommends that the Food and Drug Administration reverse its 2000 approval of mifepristone, the first pill taken in a two-drug regimen for a medication abortion. Medication is the most common form of abortion in the U.S. — accounting for around 63 percent in 2023.

If mifepristone were to remain approved, Project 2025 recommends new rules, such as cutting its use from 10 weeks into pregnancy to seven. It would have to be provided to patients in person — part of the group’s efforts to limit access to the drug by mail. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a legal challenge to mifepristone’s FDA approval over procedural grounds.

WATCH: Trump’s plans for health care and reproductive rights if he returns to White House The manual also calls for the Justice Department to enforce the 1873 Comstock Act on mifepristone, which bans the mailing of “obscene” materials. Abortion access supporters fear that a strict interpretation of the law could go further to ban mailing the materials used in procedural abortions, such as surgical instruments and equipment.

The plan proposes withholding federal money from states that don’t report to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention how many abortions take place within their borders. The plan also would prohibit abortion providers, such as Planned Parenthood, from receiving Medicaid funds. It also calls for the Department of Health and Human Services to ensure that the training of medical professionals, including doctors and nurses, omits abortion training.

The document says some forms of emergency contraception — particularly Ella, a pill that can be taken within five days of unprotected sex to prevent pregnancy — should be excluded from no-cost coverage. The Affordable Care Act requires most private health insurers to cover recommended preventive services, which involves a range of birth control methods, including emergency contraception.

Trump has recently said states should decide abortion regulations and that he wouldn’t block access to contraceptives. Trump said during his June 27 debate with Biden that he wouldn’t ban mifepristone after the Supreme Court “approved” it. But the court rejected the lawsuit based on standing, not the case’s merits. He has not weighed in on the Comstock Act or said whether he supports it being used to block abortion medication, or other kinds of abortions.

Project 2025 doesn’t call for cutting Social Security, but proposes some changes to Medicare

“When you read (Project 2025),” Harris told a crowd July 23 in Wisconsin, “you will see, Donald Trump intends to cut Social Security and Medicare.”

The Project 2025 document does not call for Social Security cuts. None of its 10 references to Social Security addresses plans for cutting the program.

Harris also misleads about Trump’s Social Security views.

In his earlier campaigns and before he was a politician, Trump said about a half-dozen times that he’s open to major overhauls of Social Security, including cuts and privatization. More recently, in a March 2024 CNBC interview, Trump said of entitlement programs such as Social Security, “There’s a lot you can do in terms of entitlements, in terms of cutting.” However, he quickly walked that statement back, and his CNBC comment stands at odds with essentially everything else Trump has said during the 2024 presidential campaign.

Trump’s campaign website says that not “a single penny” should be cut from Social Security. We rated Harris’ claim that Trump intends to cut Social Security Mostly False.

Project 2025 does propose changes to Medicare, including making Medicare Advantage, the private insurance offering in Medicare, the “default” enrollment option. Unlike Original Medicare, Medicare Advantage plans have provider networks and can also require prior authorization, meaning that the plan can approve or deny certain services. Original Medicare plans don’t have prior authorization requirements.

The manual also calls for repealing health policies enacted under Biden, such as the Inflation Reduction Act. The law enabled Medicare to negotiate with drugmakers for the first time in history, and recently resulted in an agreement with drug companies to lower the prices of 10 expensive prescriptions for Medicare enrollees.

Trump, however, has said repeatedly during the 2024 presidential campaign that he will not cut Medicare.

Project 2025 would eliminate the Education Department, which Trump supports

The Harris campaign said Project 2025 would “eliminate the U.S. Department of Education” — and that’s accurate. Project 2025 says federal education policy “should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated.” The plan scales back the federal government’s role in education policy and devolves the functions that remain to other agencies.

Aside from eliminating the department, the project also proposes scrapping the Biden administration’s Title IX revision, which prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. It also would let states opt out of federal education programs and calls for passing a federal parents’ bill of rights similar to ones passed in some Republican-led state legislatures.

Republicans, including Trump, have pledged to close the department, which gained its status in 1979 within Democratic President Jimmy Carter’s presidential Cabinet.

In one of his Agenda 47 policy videos, Trump promised to close the department and “to send all education work and needs back to the states.” Eliminating the department would have to go through Congress.

What Project 2025, Trump would do on overtime pay

In the graphic, the Harris campaign says Project 2025 allows “employers to stop paying workers for overtime work.”

The plan doesn’t call for banning overtime wages. It recommends changes to some Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, regulations and to overtime rules. Some changes, if enacted, could result in some people losing overtime protections, experts told us.

The document proposes that the Labor Department maintain an overtime threshold “that does not punish businesses in lower-cost regions (e.g., the southeast United States).” This threshold is the amount of money executive, administrative or professional employees need to make for an employer to exempt them from overtime pay under the Fair Labor Standards Act.

In 2019, the Trump’s administration finalized a rule that expanded overtime pay eligibility to most salaried workers earning less than about $35,568, which it said made about 1.3 million more workers eligible for overtime pay. The Trump-era threshold is high enough to cover most line workers in lower-cost regions, Project 2025 said.

The Biden administration raised that threshold to $43,888 beginning July 1, and that will rise to $58,656 on Jan. 1, 2025. That would grant overtime eligibility to about 4 million workers, the Labor Department said.

It’s unclear how many workers Project 2025’s proposal to return to the Trump-era overtime threshold in some parts of the country would affect, but experts said some would presumably lose the right to overtime wages.

Other overtime proposals in Project 2025’s plan include allowing some workers to choose to accumulate paid time off instead of overtime pay, or to work more hours in one week and fewer in the next, rather than receive overtime.

Trump’s past with overtime pay is complicated. In 2016, the Obama administration said it would raise the overtime to salaried workers earning less than $47,476 a year, about double the exemption level set in 2004 of $23,660 a year.

But when a judge blocked the Obama rule, the Trump administration didn’t challenge the court ruling. Instead it set its own overtime threshold, which raised the amount, but by less than Obama.

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Corpus ID: 151157986

The Development of Peoples' Friendship University in Moscow.

Published 1973

6 Citations

Des cadres pour une afrique socialiste, the lumumba university in moscow: higher education for a soviet–third world alliance, 1960–91, west-central asia: a comparative analysis of students’ trajectories in russia (moscow) from the 1980s and china (yiwu) from the 2000s, ‘socialising’ primary care the soviet union, who and the 1978 alma-ata conference, education for social transformation: soviet university education aid in the cold war capitalist world-system, building a socialist elite — khrushchev’s soviet union and elite formation in india, related papers.

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‘I Like It Here’: Aging Wistfully in the Hudson Valley

Looking back at the lives he and his friends led, the documentarian Ralph Arlyck delivers a memoir, an essay on mortality and a portrait of his community.

In a movie scene, a grinning Elisabeth Cardonne-Arlyck is shown in close-up in a black-and-white image.

By Alissa Wilkinson

“I got taxied into the world in the middle of the last century,” a man’s voice says at the start of “ I Like It Here ” (at the Firehouse theater in New York). We’re gliding slowly across a green rural landscape. “This is where I live now,” he continues. “I’m 78.”

The voice is Ralph Arlyck’s, and the movie is his, too. Arlyck is a veteran documentarian , and “I Like It Here” is part memoir, part personal essay on aging and mortality, part portrait of his community and home in the Hudson Valley. There’s no plot, per se. But I’ve seen the movie twice, and both times I found myself moved near tears.

“I Like It Here” feels like a cousin to Agnès Varda’s documentaries, particularly the curiosity and humor of “ Daguerréotypes ” (1975, Criterion Channel ), in which she records the daily lives of her neighbors on the Rue Daguerre. Arlyck also introduces us to several of his friends, most of whom he’s known for decades. They’ve grown old alongside one another, sharing lives that intersect and diverge. Most have started to recognize they’re the age their parents and grandparents were when they thought of them as “old.” It’s a realization that’s equal parts unsettling and amusing.

Arlyck’s recollections of his own family history, his marriage and his career as a filmmaker are part of the film. But they’re woven into the present narrative perfectly, without seeming at all self-indulgent. Instead, he’s doing precisely what great memoirists do: invite us into their stories as a way of making space for us to reflect on our own.

“I Like It Here” is loaded with gentle humor as a counterbalance to the pathos inherent in any reflection on mortality by a man who knows most of his life is behind him. Near the beginning of the film, we see hands pull a box of 36 new pencils from a desk drawer. In voice-over, Arlyck notes that he doesn’t go through pencils very fast, and it occurs to him that this is probably the last box of pencils he’ll ever purchase. It’s almost a morbid thought, but it’s also kind of funny, and he treats it as such. Pencils: they mean nothing, and everything.

The “here” of the title — Arlyck likes it here — opens up in complexity as the film progresses. It’s that green landscape from the beginning, where the neighbors and horses and Arlyck and his family live. But it’s also the planet, and an ineffable moment in time that he’s been lucky enough to inhabit. He and his friends talk about being aware that the end is coming, and have mostly gotten used to the idea. But late in the movie, he expresses a wistfulness that there’s nobody he can bargain with to stay longer than his time. “I’m having fun,” he says, while we see his grandchildren playing. “I’d actually rather not leave just yet.”

Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005. More about Alissa Wilkinson

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Numéro Cinq

1. “When Writers Hate”

2. The Envy Map

3. The Art of Anxiety

4. Schadenfreunds

5. “Poor Character and the Fear of Desertion”

6. Envy Gets Experienced

7. Envy for Sale

8. Crimes of Envy

9. The Anxiety of Envy

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Envy, Malice, Bitterness, & the Moscow Mood. And the Jews

Friend of the Fatherless

Out of Season

If I Were the Devil

“What If It’s Not Envy?” Is Not an Argument

Joy in the Fight

Entertainment

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Why did women vote for Hitler? Long-forgotten essays hold some answers

Not all Cabaret

‘Everyone was everyone’s enemy’

The cult of Hitler

The London Review of Substacks

Fact-checking warnings from Democrats about Project 2025 and Donald Trump

Are Trump and Project 2025 connected?

Project 2025 wouldn’t ban abortion outright, but would curtail access

Project 2025 doesn’t call for cutting Social Security, but proposes some changes to Medicare

Project 2025 would eliminate the Education Department, which Trump supports

What Project 2025, Trump would do on overtime pay

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The Development of Peoples' Friendship University in Moscow.

6 Citations

‘I Like It Here’: Aging Wistfully in the Hudson Valley

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