Virginia Woolf & Other Friends of Mine
Sally’s power was amazing, her gift, her personality. There was her way with flowers, for instance. [. . .] Sally went out, picked hollyhocks, dahlias — all sorts of flowers that had never been seen together — cut their heads off, and made them swim on top of the water in bowls. The effect was extraordinary [. . .] Indeed she did shock people.
The strange thing, on looking back, was the purity, the integrity, of her feelings for Sally. [. . .] It had a quality which could only exist between women [. . .] sprang from a sense of being in league together [. . .] Absurd, she was — very absurd. But the charm was overpowering, to her at least [. . .]
— Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
I am encouraged to see more and more writing appearing in American work that celebrates and underscores the importance of friendship, the intimacy of friendships between women especially.
Before? I had Woolf’s description of her friend Sally Seton.
When I teach the text to teenagers (whoa alliteration!),
I sometimes play up the sexual tension between Sally and Clarissa
as a way of getting their attention (“Queer material?! From another century?!” — they are always surprised.)
I once had a student who argued adamantly that Clarissa
should have ended up with Sally instead of Richard.
She wasn’t wrong.
I’ve read Mrs. Dalloway countless times
(a new revelation, a new discovery every time I re-read this book)
and Richard, well, though I feel for the guy he’s not exactly
the most thrilling person nor is he even a great conversationalist,
at least, not with his wife Clarissa.
“Oh but Richard can’t say what he needs to say,”
students & literary critics will say.
“Richard is suffering, too.”
Richard bores me.
Every time I read that book, I want more Sally —
Sally who cuts the heads off of flowers and Sally who runs around naked and Sally who kisses Clarissa in the garden when they were teenage girls & then shows up later bragging about having given birth to many boys.
(sorry for the spoiler, but you’re never reading Dalloway
for the nail-biting plot — it’s just not that kind of book).
The end of the book “at last” (according to more bored students)
culminates in Clarissa’s party. Her friends are there.
People from her present and her past.
(If I’m being 100% honest, Septimus & Lucrezia, not in attendance at the party because they weren’t even invited & one is dead —
are the characters to study in Dalloway,
but I’ll just stay on track for once in my life
because I think I’m headed in the general direction
of some kind
of point.)
My life has been blessed with many wonderful friendships.
As I’ve grown up and become more of an extrovert than I ever imagined possible (and I’m not “loud,” but neither am I a shrinking Violet)
I have made many new friends here in Arizona.
I’ve always gravitated toward the Sally’s in my life:
wild, creative, outspoken, generally confident, unorthodox women who sometimes know their strength and sometimes are stronger than they know.
Most of my closest friends are other women.
Most of my doctors are women.
I live a life where I try to fill it with as many women as possible because, in my limited experience, women provide better company and solace to other women than have men. (Sorry fellas, but you just don’t have a great track record where true friendship with women is concerned. Unless you’re gay. Until I moved to Flagstaff, virtually all of my close male friends were gay men.)
I like the way women laugh.
I like the way women know how to be still
and when one must be wild.
I like that when I am in the company of my grown woman friends,
I don’t need to explain anything about the general details
of growing up girl/woman in this patriarchal world.
They already know because they’ve already been there.
In some ways, friendship between women is an agreement,
an understanding, a nod of respect from one woman to another:
that you fucking survived. Or as Woolf more precisely puts it in the above quoted “sprang from a sense of being in league together.”
When Woolf writes of Clarissa’s friend Sally,
she is dancing around some pretty taboo territory for the time,
particularly in that she repeatedly intimates that Clarissa has “confusing” feelings about Sally.
Intimate feelings, but not quite the way (straight) women feel about men.
The question of “Were Sally & Clarissa actually romantically involved/in love?” is one that interests me less as I get older.
Now, I’m just slack-jawed astonished that Woolf, without a feminist framework, without any female writers who did so before her,
perfectly captured the intensity of feeling that can exist
between women who are friends.
I can assure you, reader, even if you don’t know your Modernist Lit,
ain’t nobody was writing about the value and complexity of female friendships back then.
Even the way she understands Septimus’ friendship/loveship
with his late comrade— no one was plumbing those psycho-sexual depths
in literature until Woolf did it. If you can find me another example
of what I’m talking about that is as good as Woolf
and from the same time period or earlier, let me know.
I am always open to being wrong.
I have friendships with women I’ve known since we were both little girls.
I have friendships with women I’ve known since I was a freshman in undergrad, and friendships with women I first knew as colleagues in non-profits, colleges, and schools.
Some friendships/loveships (like the one with my wife Sarah)
came from my writing:
people who read my words and connected,
people who showed up to a reading,
people who asked . . .
(Teen Gruber is most impressed that a few people now know her only as a writer. Teen Gruber approves of this development in my life. Getting married, getting sober, and getting a “real job” — far less impressive to Teen Gruber.)
Yesterday, after meditation, writing, and attending one of my meetings for my booze issue (126 days sober, y’all),
I spent the remainder of the afternoon in the living room
of a new friend’s home here in Tucson.
We drank iced ginger tea & laughed & cried.
We talked about art. We talked about our families.
We talked about ourselves as individuals who have hopes and dreams and desires that have absolutely nothing to do with the role of daughter, mother, or wife.
Though we’ve only hung out maybe two or three times before,
I feel like I’ve known this person my whole life.
There’s an easiness between us.
We never seem to run out of things to say.
I have this with my sponsor, too.
We’ll start talking about my booze problem
and end up talking about gay strip clubs
which have nothing to do with anything
because I never had a “problem” with gay strip clubs.
My collection of friends is as eccentric as my tastes in music.
Among my regular rotation of friends, I have a little of everything.
There’s even a few men in there.
Mike for instance.
Mike is moving to Tucson soon & Mike is one of my very best friends.
Mike is the first straight male friend I’ve had who makes me laugh almost on sight. He and I have said that maybe, in another life, we were some duo — married or not. We banter. We are both artists, readers, writers — we go deep on matters of art & culture.
We once spent an entire 2nd period prep sitting in the front office at our school asking every poor soul who wandered in, the following question:
“Tom Waits?”
— we were testing a hypothesis that no one really actually enjoys
the music of Tom Waits, but just says they do to sound cool.
Our hypothesis held up, at least on the population of our school
in Northern Arizona.
It also so happened that Mike and I shared a prep space & prep hour during one of the most terrifying & challenging years of my life, and so he got to bear witness to all of my medical agonies & he did so with greater compassion (and humor) than most Actual Adults can muster when you tell them you’re dealing with “metastatic cancer.” (That statement clears a room, I tell you what.)
Mike will soon be here, and even on my hardest days, I can remember this fact and smile. The Dirty T has no idea what’s about to descend . . .
Last night, I couldn’t sleep, so I texted with my friend Megan.
We first met in 94 as college freshman at Carthage College in Wisconsin.* Beautiful campus, you should Google it. We bonded over good music, weed, and laughter & that girl can still get me laughing harder than any fucker on the planet. I love the absurd, and Megan will go there with me. We once had a conversation that started normally and ended with us discussing Civil War letters written in the style of Justin Bieber lyrics. Such conversations are why we have remained friends. Who else am I supposed to talk about Barry Gibb, Rose Kennedy, or Morrissey’s inexplicable morph from sad emo gay guy to embittered, sweaty, angry conservative Boomer. With who else am I to have these necessary conversations? & I was feeling a little sad, a little alone last night (Sarah crashed out early because she’s been working through the summer), and with a series of texts that straddled both the world of the “dead serious” and “dead funny,” Megan (whether she knew it or not) calmed me toward sleep.
*I once got an unsolicited calendar from my undergrad alma mater. Sarah LOVED IT because she said it was “beautiful and wholesome.” And I shit you not, but my wife who worked in marketing at a healthcare org, kept a Carthage College calendar in her cube not because she attended the school, but because the calendar made the school look like a place she’d like to be — so well done Carthage marketing on the 2015 -2016 calendar.
Then there’s Betsy.
Sometimes, I feel like Betsy & I have been to war together.
We are both busy, so we have taken to texting each other little audio files where we share our “thoughts du jour” and listen to them when we have a chance, then respond when we have a chance . . .
It’s sort of like letter writing, but with voices.
In October of 2019, we took some high schoolers to Los Angeles
to see this show specifically and exactly:
(I didn’t take this video, but we were there in the crowd — with teens. It was a fucking amazing show. As one of my Favorite Formers once said, bittersweetly, “That trip was the best part of my senior year.” Because not long after this trip, well we know what happened. That was the last concert where I stood body to body with strangers. Probably the last such concert of its kind. I had no idea then. None of us did.
Also, I think this was the exact face Betsy & I both made when our little scholars told us that some of Tempest’s work felt derivative and that the show was just “okay.”
But during that trip, in an AirBnb with a bunch of teenagers in LaMirada, CA, Betsy (who is herself a parent) showed me how to care for kids
outside of the classroom (they could not scramble eggs or quietly shut doors), & during that trip I think my body knew something was wrong with me
(I hadn’t yet been dx’d or found the “bump” for that matter) & I was having chronic panic attacks on the trip.
One night, walking the streets of downtown LA,
full blown anxiety attack in progress & trying to “fake it” for the kids,
I quietly told Betsy what was going on in my head & she said, with full attention and compassion, “Okay, what do you need?”
And I told her I needed to hold on to her purse strap for a moment
while we walked because sometimes
when I’m having a really bad anxiety attack
the only thing that brings me back is the ability to touch something
or someone & I wasn’t about to ask my colleague if I could hold her hand though I know she would have said “yes” if that’s what I had needed then.
Kristine would require pages, but Kristine is my bestie.
My ride or die.
Kristine is the friend I call first when shit really hits the fan
or truly wonderful news falls on my plate.
When I am lonely and think “Who do I wish was here?”
It’s often Kristine or my sister, Heather
— though sisters, siblings, are a different subject altogether.
I’m going to stick with friends today.
Kristine is the Thelma to my Louise,
and sometimes vice-a-versa.
We, too, met in college in Wisco
& bonded over music, literature, Feminism, and a shared ridiculous sense of humor.
We also were very productive little feminist activists
who always had our hands or minds in some social justice undertaking. Frankly, it was with Kristine that I started to learn that I — little ol me — could be a part of the change I wanted to see in my world or, in the 1990s, on my college campus.
I have been blessed with so many close friends — young & old — that I would bore you if I made a little blurb for every one.
Then of course there’s Sarah.
We were friends first, which I think is the best way for any marriage to begin: friends first. But if I’m being totally honest, I knew I was in love with my wife from the moment I first spoke to her on the phone.
My late grandmother, Terese, used to always say about marriage material “when you know, you know.”
She was right. She would appreciate my acknowledging this, because she so enjoyed being “right.”
. . . aaaand we’re back to Virginia Woolf.
When Clarissa finally sees Sally again, at the end of the book, she’s changed because, well, people change over the course of decades. They just do. Can’t be helped. Sometimes they change for the better, sometimes for the worse. Sometimes they change so much you don’t really like who they’ve become, and that’s okay, too. We, as humans, are allowed to change despite what our friends and family may think about this fact. Clarissa seems mildly disappointed to encounter an older Sally, not the free spirit she knew back in those halcyon days at Burton. But Sally, like Clarissa, has grown older. Her life looks different in adulthood than it did when she was nineteen.
My new friendships, lately, are being developed with sobriety at the core.
Or at least the search for sobriety at the core.
I am about 125 days sober, and I cannot be around people who are using alcohol at this juncture.
Someday, I will be able to be around drinkers & other drunks,
but not now. So I’m making new friends who understand that,
right now, I really, truly just cannot even.
I am not that person anymore.
I have had to let parts of my personality go because they were not serving me. I have had to let go of certain ways of thinking and being in the world, so that I can feel at peace, happy, safe. & so I can open the door to new friendships & be a good steward to the friendships I’ve already built.
Last week, Kristine’s daughter had a frightening health issue (she’s fine, and will be fine) & the night they took their daughter to the hospital,
Kristine called me, as she has called me (and I her) many times
over the last 25 years when situations have baffled or frightened us
or both.
And the best part, for me, about that phone call
was that I was dead ass sober on a Friday night
(I think it was Friday?) and could be present & clear for her call,
that I could be a part of the peace and security she was seeking
in a situation that makes every parent feel utterly out-of-control in the worst possible way, was a miracle. I could be the steady one? Shocking.
But that’s what sobriety has done for me.
My sobriety is everything to me right now.
I am getting past the point of “craving” the substance, and with each passing day I come to understand that my alcoholism, more than use of a particular substance, was about a way of thinking about the world, about myself, about my life & I think a lot about the world, about myself, about my life.
You know what really helps with shutting down unwanted thoughts?
Booze.
They don’t call drinking “drowning sorrows” for nothing.
But alcohol is such a stupid balm when there is art, music, literature,
friends, nature, DOGS.
Alcohol, for me, is such a lousy substitute for the feeling I had yesterday, relaxing on a chaise lounge across from my new friend,
drinking tea on a muggy monsoon afternoon in Tucson,
talking for hours about everything & nothing at all.
The fun part, for me, about meeting new friends or new students is when you get that glimmer of who they “really” are — beyond the persona, beyond the affectations, beyond the clothing, the house, the car . . .
I saw it yesterday in my new friend when I asked her a serious question & she smirked & rolled her bright eyes at me.
The eye roll, the smirk — that was my friend.
The story of her whole life in one set of subtle facial gestures.
In Tucson, many of my new friends are older than me.
Some by only a few years, & others are significantly older.
I have always enjoyed the company of people older than me.
My peers have often (& still sometimes, too) baffled me in their deeds,
words, & life choices.
Sobriety has awakened me to these subtleties that I used to notice but not spend much time considering nor ascribing significance to.
My friends are now my chosen teachers.
I can say, perhaps for the first time in my life,
virtually every close relationship I have now enhances me:
intellectually, creatively, spiritually.
Every close friendship/loveship I have now
keeps me healthy in body & mind. What a gift.
What a fucking gift.
May your day, reader, be full of friends who uplift you, who can teach you how to be a better — or at least more interesting, more cultured, more well read — human today than you were yesterday.
