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There were years when your relationship with your friend from early childhood, Tavia, consisted of a birthday card. In those years, did you feel distance as a threat? Or did you know you would come back together?
When you're young you’re wrapped up in your own life. You're moving, getting married, struggling to figure out what you want to do. You think you have all the time in the world. Then as you get older you start to realise that you don’t have all that time, and you want to pay attention to the people who are important to you.
The fact that Tavia and I had years where we only would exchange birthday cards didn't mean anything except that we were busy and we knew there would be an infinite amount of time. I had that with many people I went to high school or college with. I was a more negligent friend, in a way, because it felt like there was so much time.
The thing that changed everything for me, in terms of friendship, was when my friend Lucy died. Lucy was absolutely my heart. We were 39 when she died, and suddenly I realised I was never going to have that time with a new friend where we dyed our hair and did Jane Fonda workouts. We were poor, there was no internet, we had no place to go, we didn't have boyfriends; we lived together and danced in the kitchen and spent all our time together. And that luxury isn't ever going to come again (… maybe when I'm in the old folks home). So somehow that friendship is the dividing line. It made me appreciate the friends of my youth, because we had so much time to waste.
How did Lucy’s death change how you showed up for friends?
I’ve always shown up. What changed is that, before, if a friendship was falling apart I’d think, Oh well, things are falling apart. But now I think, No, I’m not going to let this fall apart.
When I was in my 40s a very important friendship became troubled. We lived in different places, we didn't see each other, our careers were not in balance, and it made things hard. I'd hurt her feelings without knowing it and she hadn't told me, and by the time she finally did it looked like we weren't going to make it. I thought, No way. I called this friend and said, ‘I don't care what I have to do. I don't know if I need to go into therapy with you or fly across the country to work this out, but I can’t lose you. I don't have anybody else who fills your place.’ It was so important to me to save it, and we did get through. We've had times where we’ve been closer and times when we've been more distant, but that really was a moment.
Thinking of career success – it’s difficult to be the friend who receives envy, and it’s difficult to be the one who is struggling. How do you navigate that with friends?
I feel very lucky to have old friends who are nothing but happy for me. It's the friends you came out of the gate with that are the hard ones, where you wanted the same thing and you put in the same hours at the same time, side by side. And then one of you goes a little further. On the other hand, I didn't have children, and that is a huge part of the equation. If I had a better career than someone, I also didn't have two or three kids, and that's a choice. That makes a difference. They have benefits in their lives that I didn't have; I have benefits in my life they didn't have. Some people have a career that's more commercial, some people have a career that's more literary. Nothing lines up perfectly evenly. There were definitely times that was hard, and some friendships got lost. But the people you make it through with, you're really happy for each other. I think the trick is asking, Do I want to say that to a friend? Oh my gosh, I got nominated for this and I'm so excited. Or, I got to have lunch with Reese Witherspoon this week, it was so fun… Is that an okay thing to say? Because I have some friends where that really is an okay thing to say, but maybe with other friends I’ll think, I don't want to rub anybody's nose in my life.
You wrote that life was about the ability to love. I found it interesting you used the word ‘ability’. Do you feel you learned that ability to love or you had it from a young age?
I had it, definitely, but before Lucy I had not been tested. I'm amazed when I meet people at this point in my life who haven't had a love that's been tested. They haven't had to take care of somebody who is sick, or go through a hard financial time, or see somebody through a divorce. This happened recently: I watched a story unfold in somebody's life, and I thought, Oh god, you don't know. You haven't been through this before.
I'd known Lucy since I was 17, we'd been best friends since we were 21, and from 21 to 39 we were in it. By ‘in it’ I mean suicide attempts, hospital stays, surgery, debt collectors, deepest depression, greatest joys and victories in the field that we longed to be in. So what I learned from Lucy is how to stand by somebody. Marriage vows – for better, for worse; for richer, for poorer; in sickness and in health, for as long as you both shall live – are good for friendship, too. Are you going to stand by somebody, no matter what?
Many people who read Truth and Beauty [Ann’s book about her friendship with Lucy] said to me, ‘Your relationship wasn't equal.’ And I’d think, How has your life been going for you so far that you think love is equal? That you think you put everything on a scale and if some day you’re giving more than you're getting, you get off your scale and go home? Do you really think that's what love is? That is not what Lucy set out to teach me, but that was what our relationship taught me in those years: if you love someone and that person is down, you help. And if you are the one who has to help 99 times out of 100, you feel damn lucky that you're not the one who having the surgery.
Did sticking around come naturally to you? Or did love give you the strength to do that?
I think it did come naturally. But also, I was young. Do you remember when you were 21 you would say, ‘My friends are my family. You're the person who calls me first on my birthday, you're the person I go on vacation with, you're the person that I'm going to give my favourite sweater to.’ I think that is youth for a lot of people. You've got time and energy, it's dramatic and romantic to stand by somebody who's sick. It's just not a question. The more interesting question is, at 57, do you do it? Because what I learned from Lucy is you can't save anybody. It’s like the first lesson of AA: you can't change another person's outcome, but you can bear witness. You can sit with them.
I remember a friend - not a close one - said after Lucy died, 'Do you feel like you enabled her?’ And I said, ‘My greatest sadness is that I didn't enable her every minute of her life.’ And I can barely even say this, but I wish I had been with her every time she shot up, because, how lonely must that have been? To be by yourself? I couldn't change her destiny, but I could have been there, even more than I was. I don't blame myself. I don't fault myself. But I wish I had been there with her for every minute of it, because those were the only minutes I was going to have.
You’ve written about clinging to miserable relationships when you were younger. What was different about your relationship with your husband Karl? That didn’t seem to be a tumultuous beginning.
That might be the angle I wrote about it from, because we were miserable at first, and so mismatched. I used to say, ‘He's not Mr. Right, He's Mr. Right now.' Sooner or later, I thought, I'm going to leave.
Everybody wanted to date him. He was nice, a doctor and so god awful handsome, like a movie star. At restaurants another woman would come to the table, sit next to him at the booth and start talking to him. And I would think, ‘I don't want to spend my life with you, go ahead!’ But we just kept coming back to each other. There’s a reason we didn't get married for 11 years: it really took us 11 years to grow into each other. We became indispensable to one another without ever setting out to do it. And now, we have a really great marriage. But we had a crummy courtship.
Do you think living apart for 11 years and not being completely sure in the beginning was good way to start a relationship?
Yes! Because if you live three blocks apart and you have a big fight, you don't have to figure anything out. You don't have to think, I've made a huge mistake, what does this mean? You can just say, ‘Okay I'm gonna go home.’
When we finally got married and moved in together, it was wonderful. It was strange, Karl loved me much more than he had. It was like he was always holding something back, because he didn't think I was going to stick around. Also, it was amazing to not talk about whether or not we were going to get married anymore, and for that not to be the question everyone asked us. It was done. So there was more love and more room to have a conversation about what we were going to have for dinner or whatever we wanted to talk about. It was like everything opened up.
One of my favourite moments in your writing is the line when you arrive at the hospital to see Karl, and he knew you would come, even though the staff said you wouldn’t be able to. Then he drifts off to sleep and you write, ‘Explain doubt to me, because at that moment I ceased to understand it’. What do you think was holding you back from committing to the relationship before that moment, was it the fear of divorce?
It was a fear of divorce. Karl and I were on the same page about this: we were not going to get divorced again. So you've got to enter into it at a point where you know that you're not going to get divorced again. And that is an insane thing: once you've been divorced, how can you possibly think it will never happen again? But we had to be there.
Another thing I realised when I was in the hospital, was part of what I had always been afraid of was a wedding. Then I realised, Oh, we could just get married. Taking that big pressure off the table was so helpful. But yes, I probably knew it before, but in that moment I knew it so clearly: there was no doubt. I would be with him no matter what. Like I was with Lucy, for better or worse, in sickness or health or whatever happened, I was going to be there. And I still feel that, absolutely. It doesn't matter, frankly, if we're happy. It doesn't matter if we're reaching magnificent heights of personal fulfilment every moment. We're in it. We're in this life, period. Together.
From the slow start to now, what have you learnt about sustaining love in your relationship?
It’s always work — and that’s surprising. The trap of it, I guess, is that we’re fine, we don’t fight, we have a beautiful life, and we give each other so much space and support. What that means is it’s easy to drift, because he’s doing his thing and I’m doing my thing and we’re both saying, ‘I want you to be happy, go do your thing!’ We have to remind ourselves that we have to do things together — that is something that takes effort, because we’re busy and we’re working and we’re doing a million things. There’s that balance between thinking, We’re so lucky that we have our own things and we’re going to be fine, and then reminding ourselves to pull that in, to show up and be present.
You wrote about the moments of joy we share with people we love as ‘the foundation upon which we build the house that will shelter us into our final years.’ Is writing a way for you to make sure you remember those moments in the future?
It definitely is, like pressing flowers in a book. You take the beautiful thing or the painful thing, and you say, ‘I'm going to save it’. Because everybody forgets. You can't hold on to absolutely all of it, all the time.
Two weeks ago Karl fell off a ladder onto a chair. I wasn't home and he was changing a light socket on the porch. And he didn't tell me for three days. I kept saying, ‘What did you do to your arm?’ And he replied, ‘Oh, I don't know.’ He was lying to me. When he finally told me I blew up and said, ‘How could you not tell me this?’ And he said, ‘Because I’m 16 years older than you and I don't want to remind you.’ I said, ‘You think I don't know that? It’s going to get worse, you're going to get older. Everything goes in one direction and I am all in, no matter what. So if you decide to deal with this by lying and not telling me what's going on, then it's not a great situation. I'm in. You have to be in. We’re in it.’
You say in the introduction to These Precious Days that you're always trying to figure out what matters most. What were you trying to say in this book about what matters most to you?
As much as is humanly possible, I want to stay awake. It’s so easy to get caught up in the rush of everything and to wish the days away. But this is what we have. The lesson is there again and again and again: this is what we have.
I have a friend who is dying right now. She and her husband are people I've known on the social periphery of my life for 25 years; we’ve never gone out to dinner. A couple of years ago, when I wrote that my father died of a rare neurological condition called Progressive Supranuclear Palsy in the New Yorker, [my friend's] husband called and said, 'This is what Kay is dying of. Will you come and talk to us?'
Now I read to her every week. And when I was there last week, which I am pretty certain will be the last time I will see her, she was very present. She can’t speak, but she’s totally there. I read her a Lily King story and she loved it. At the end I held her for a long time, and said, ‘I’m so sorry this has happened to you. And if it hadn’t happened I never would have known how much I loved you, I never would have known you, I never would have had this time with you. And it’s been so amazing to be with you and to hold you.’ I immediately put my hands on her, started rubbing her neck, holding her head up, and doing all the things I know my dad liked. I kissed her and told her I loved her. And I feel so lucky that I got to say that. That the terrible thing that had happened to her had brought me to her, and that it had been a great gift for me.
What I wrestle with in the book and in the writing again and again is that: can I show up? Every week when it was time to go to her house I would always have a moment of thinking, I don’t want to go today. Then I would get in the car and go and always have a fabulous time, because I was standing in that light of being present, of being awake.
Has seeing friends get sick made you love differently? Does it scare you loving so much, seeing up close the price we pay for loving?
It comes in waves. It’s not one thing. My sister and I had this conversation once, in regard to Covid. I said, ‘It’s like you’re walking along and suddenly you realise there’s nothing under you, there’s no ground.’ We don’t notice the gaping abyss underneath our feet all the time. To live is to forget. To live is to think that this is all going to work out and it’s going to be different for us and the people we love. And then these moments come on, almost like a wave of nausea, where you think, oh my god, I know how this is all going down for everyone, for all time. So what are you going to do with that knowledge? Are you going to make art? Are you going to love somebody? Are you going to answer your email?
What do you wish you’d known about love?
When I moved home at 25 after getting divorced, my mother said, ‘Every relationship you’re ever going to be in in your life will end; stop trying to make them last.’ And oh my god, I have thought about that. It has changed, grown, deepened. When she said it I was like, ‘Way to be supportive, mum! Thanks!’ But it’s so true. I die, or he dies, or everyone dies, or leaves, or changes. I think about the disease my dad had, or that Kay has, all these different endings – and you cannot prevent them. You can only live in the life that you have, in the moment that you have it. When I was young, I didn’t understand that. I thought things went on forever. And now, more and more, I understand that the fact that everything ends doesn't make anything worse. It makes it more precious.
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