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Why I Wrote With Friends like These
As women’s lives become animated by countless moving parts—jobs! husbands! kids!—why does maintaining friendships get harder? With Friends like These is my long answer to this short question. Sometimes, between friends, a pile of small offenses has started a slow burn. “You’re judgmental,” she snaps one day. “No, you’re judgmental!” you think. Or the obstacle is your men, who don’t see eye-to-eye over a round of golf. But it’s the giant game-changers that are the turf of With Friends like These, where four women devoted to one another see their happy skein of tightly wound yarn unspool. At the end of the story the yarn gets wound up again—repeat after me: growth experience—but the shape of their friendships forever changes, as do the women themselves.
The bond between two of the characters, Talia and Chloe, falters due to ambition gone awry. This is a booby trap I know all too well from the media world. Once upon a time, in a faraway land known as midtown Manhattan, in a life where I actually wore stilettos and blew my hair pin-straight every morning, I was an editor-in-chief of a few big magazines. Since a manager can’t be a buddy to her staff, you try to make friends at your own professional level. Still, no matter how many margaritas and rumors you share, competition cleaves you apart. Which is why professional women look for friends beyond the workplace. I did. Yet regrettably, it was with a pal whom I met through our children where the same nasty business happened to me as it did with a second set of buddies in With Friends like These, when real estate comes between the characters Jules and Quincy. Yes, ma’am, I was naïve enough to reveal to a good friend about a dreamy place I wanted to buy. Instead of simply wishing me Godspeed in landing this whale of an apartment, she told her boyfriend--who lived in that very building--about it. Before you can scream “Look out!” our friendship had careened into disaster.
For about a year this incident made me gnash my teeth. Eventually, though, my pal and I found our way back to friendship. I accepted her (tepid) apology because I missed her. This is a woman gifted with talent and energy. Being around her is like taking a vitamin pill; our conversations always make me want to sit down and write, which I value enormously. Perhaps another woman would have made a different choice, but that was mine. This experience of choosing a friendship with baggage rather than none at all became the inspiration for With Friends like These.
You may wonder why, if I wanted to write about a friendship faux pas, I didn’t scribble a memoir. It’s because I believe that fiction, while not technically true, is frequently more emotionally authentic than non-fiction. Not only does a novel’s author have perspective, she can often be more objective about or generous toward her characters than she might be to herself. And fiction doesn’t take sides. The reader gets to root for whichever character she wants.
I hope you’ll read With Friends like These and decide for yourself who, in the story, was right and who was wrong. Even better, I hope this novel is a jump-start for you to think about your own friendships. Loyalty, forgiveness and mutual support, I’ve learned the hard way, are even more important than who’s right and who’s wrong. Friends give and friends receive. Friends love and friends accept love. Friends find the good in one another. When I’m a little old lady in a rocker, I hope my husband and kids and future grandchildren are besides me—right next to a few very wise friends who get my jokes, crack some themselves and will tell me if a walker makes my butt look fat.
--Sally Koslow