Elegiac Friendship: Notes on Loss

Abstract

Between 2001 and 2007 three women I loved died: Naomi Schor, Carolyn Heilbrun, and Diane Middlebrook. Although we were all well past middle age, I had failed to imagine ever losing any of them. Lose one’s parents, of course, and I had. However sad, the death of parents conforms to the order of things. Each time I lose a friend I am shocked beyond sadness. The world shrinks. So does my sense of what anchors me to it. Why do friends seem to matter so much, and not any random friend, of course, but the intimate friend, the best friend? How to tell the friendship stories that so often shape our lives in the form of a memoir? These questions are at the heart of my essay about relationships forged in seventies feminism, and that came to an end in the first decade of the twenty-first century.