The Ferocity of Female Friendships: A Reading List
My first friend, I think, was a hospital nurse.
Born two months early, I spent my first few weeks of life in the NICU. My mother keeps the Polaroids in her purse — me, lilliputian, with a shock of dark hair, cradled in an incubator, staring out with sloe eyes at a world of flashing lights and shuffled steps. She and my father were there every day, waiting for the chance to take this tiny alien home. But before I was released, it was nurses who took care of me, looked out for me, encouraged me to get out and into the world.
And isn’t that what friends are for?
Female friendships, in particular, are dazzling in their intensity. There is something exchanged between two women platonically that can’t even be replicated in romantic relationships. Perhaps it’s born out of necessity, a weapon against the patriarchy; maybe it’s an ancient connection that can only exist between potential life-givers. But it’s raw, and it’s vivid, and it has powered friendships as visible as Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield, Oprah and Gayle, Lucy and Ethel, and as quiet as the two older women who walk down your street every morning hand-in-hand.
I used to think I was a good friend. I took the role very seriously. As a child, I had several close friends, a core group whose names I rattled off in one…
