What makes - and breaks - a friendship?
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Patti Miller uses some recurring devices - the Epic of Gilgamesh, brain science - to explore these and related questions in this memoir. It will strike a chord with anyone who's pondered the nature of their friendships and especially with those who have been left bereft and devastated when one of their friends decides, for unexplained reasons, to end the relationship.
One such painful experience is the through line of the memoir. Miller begins at the end, so to speak, opening with, "It's hard to know exactly when the friendship with Gina ended."
That line - and this book - will strike a chord with many of us who have had friendships cease and who have pondered the nature and meaning of our friendships.
Many fade away, sometimes by tacit agreement - through moves, changing interests, lack of a strong bond - but others are abruptly curtailed, often for selfish or crueller reasons. And if you've ever been on the receiving end of such treatment, especially if denied any kind of closure, it hurts.
The friendship of Miller, a writer and Gina, an actress and director, begins very happily. Gina had directed Miller's son in a play and liked one of her books so they arranged to meet in a cafe to discuss a potential stage adaptation.
That was the beginning, and something seemed to click.
Miller details the friendship's development, its richness and joy, its highs and lows, shared experiences in Australia and in France - including one temporary rift - and then the painful ending and messy aftermath that left her hurt and questioning.
Other friendships are also discussed, from those formed in a tiny country primary school to the delicate and painful negotiations in a mean-girls high school atmosphere to the ones that resulted from a post-school hippie period and beyond.
In Miller's friendships, while there are usually things in common - a shared political outlook, an interest in the arts - the circumstances and personalities can vary markedly.
Different cultural and social backgrounds can be overcome if there's enough in common; even the shared experience of motherhood can be the start of something.
Some friendships were left behind; others were damaged but survived, or were revived.
Miller's accounts of these relationships - sometimes funny, sometimes mortifying, sometimes poignant - are highlights, providing other insights into the nature of friendships - hers, and anybody's.
The author herself is no saint, and knows it. She can stew over things, be judgemental, oversensitive to criticism, and admits she ended friendships herself, especially when young, for her own, sometimes selfish, reasons.
Miller acknowledges her friends - including Gina - will have their own, equally valid, interpretations of their relationships with her, and her science-fed discussions of the way memory works provide another perspective.
There's little about her friendships with men: Miller puts these into a separate category, and doesn't count her relationship with her partner Anthony as a friendship. Maybe there's another book in all that?
While occasionally it was hard to keep up with the stream of people coming and going and sometimes returning, this was a moving and perceptive book that struck a chord.
- True Friends by Patti Miller. UQP, $32.99.